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Want to monetize forum, only 0.04% CTR!

by Delphinophile
10 replies
Hi! I am the owner of a forum with about 1500 members, several hundred of which are regularly posting. The site is two years old, and gets much higher traffic during weekends, as it seems to attract mostly teenage males who are out of school. Traffic varies by day, but we usually get 300-400 uniques per day, with some days spiking into the several thousands.

Here are last month's state, they are pretty typical (This is for January):

Unique Visitors: 13,767
Visits: 18,401
Pages: 3,423,192
Hits: 4,216,156

We earn $35 to $40 a month off of adsense, with only several clicks a day. Thing is... We only get a few clicks per day, and our CTR is a dismal 0.04%. Does anyone have any ideas that could improve revenue off the site? I am not sure how I can get more clicks without getting banned, but it seems a pity for a site with decently valued ads and high traffic to get such low return.

I cannot post a link to my forum, as I am too new, but if you google "ModRetro Forums", I am the first result.

Thank you very much for any help you can give! I have been lurking on this site for a while, there is a lot of great info, but I figured that y'all would know better than me what the best course of action would be.
#004% #adsense #ctr #forum #monetize
  • Profile picture of the author Bacchus
    Er... have a look at what other forums do, but, basically at the moment I am not surprised that you have no advertising revenues. Because, I looked at your forum, and there are barely any adverts on the thing.

    Adverts... help... if you want to make money
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  • Profile picture of the author apoorv.parijat
    For the most part, monetizing a forum is a pretty tough task. I'm not saying that to discourage you, in fact, your statistics are extremely good. They are certainly on the better side.

    You may want to sell direct ads to other webmasters in that niche. They may be interested provided your website is targeted to a specific niche and not a general, everything goes type of a website.

    Warrior Forum is very unique in the way its monetized too. You can take some ideas from this forum along with a couple of other forums. Maybe a premium membership with access to more privileged sections, etc? There are quite a few ways if you think out of the box but Adsense, unfortunately, hasn't quite worked for me as far as forums go.
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  • Profile picture of the author Delphinophile
    We do have ads, and quite a few, but they only appear in actual threads. Adsense TOS says you cannot put ads on pages with no content, and from what I have heard, the index and thread list pages fall under that category. If you actually go into a thread, ads should show up.

    Right now, I have them near the footer, so as to not affect page loading time. Do you have suggestions for better placement? Near the top or even between posts would work, but it seems like that would alienate users on 56k.

    EDIT: And thanks the encouragement, Apoorv! I have been thinking about trying to push our members to use our Amazon affiliate link, which I have not marketed at all, but it looks like California law might change soon and kill that.
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  • Profile picture of the author Mike McAleer
    I think you need more adds. If you look at digital point they have ads in nearly every post if not every post.
    You could also see what Warrior Forum is doing and model off of that.
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  • Profile picture of the author Bacchus
    I did look in the threads. I guess it was just the placement. I don't look any further than the end of the thread.

    What I have seen is different adverts depending on whether you are logged in or not. If you log in, you get rid of most of the adverts, if you are not logged in, have blatant adverts along with a helpful message saying they go away if you log in for free. At the minimum an advert between the first and second post in every thread.

    As a rule, the people who log in aren't clickers. So, give them less adsense adverts.

    You have a difficult niche to advertise to, because they are technical types who are almost blind to adsense anyway... have you considered monetizing it through products or affiliates?
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  • Profile picture of the author tonio79
    Tried CPA offers too?
    Mostly young males you said.....so cheap email / zip codes submits might prove
    quite beneficial to you...even at a $1 per lead you might be able to convert 100 a week if you get the offer right....and some even pay more than that.

    Good luck with it

    Tonio
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  • Profile picture of the author iAmNameLess
    Wow, you have 1,500 members and can't figure out a way to market to them? You have 1,500 emails! Affiliate marketing!

    Another thing you can do, is sell banner ads in the forum. You'll get some buyers.

    In 2003-2005, I have 15,000 member forum making about 3 grand a month with little to no effort.
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    • Profile picture of the author Delphinophile
      I would sell banner ads, but how would I do that? Get directly in touch with companies that might be interested?

      One thing I am thinking about, like Nameless said, is leveraging the fact that I have 1,500 members. Maybe try to get them to shop through my Amazon refer link?
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      • Profile picture of the author jbo
        You can always try amazon or clickbank and advertise products that your members would be interested in.
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  • Profile picture of the author Sparhawke
    Originally Posted by Delphinophile View Post

    We do have ads, and quite a few, but they only appear in actual threads. Adsense TOS says you cannot put ads on pages with no content, and from what I have heard, the index and thread list pages fall under that category. If you actually go into a thread, ads should show up.
    When I go in a thread I see nothing but the buttersafe advert.

    Originally Posted by Delphinophile View Post

    Right now, I have them near the footer, so as to not affect page loading time. Do you have suggestions for better placement? Near the top or even between posts would work, but it seems like that would alienate users on 56k.
    I see one advert for buttersafe (?) at the bottom of the forum where no one ever looks because they have no reason to...THAT is the reason for your dismally low ctr

    Try placing it at the top of the forum and then sitting back for a month to watch what happens.

    Originally Posted by Delphinophile View Post

    EDIT: And thanks the encouragement, Apoorv! I have been thinking about trying to push our members to use our Amazon affiliate link, which I have not marketed at all, but it looks like California law might change soon and kill that.
    From what I gather you have a collection of people interested in electronics, so why not shove a big banner link at the top of the forum redirecting them to a page full of the crap that they could use like wires and soldering irons and resistors and whatever else might be used?

    I do not know you niche, but I certainly would not have 1500 people sitting there that need items to do what you are suggesting and let them wander off without even seeing an Amazon link of what they really desire and instead be forced to use someone elses lol

    If everyone on the WF here needed a certain book to do marketing and absolutely could not do it without said book, due to some law or something do you really think the owner of the forum wouldn't have a big ass link at the top of the page directing everyone through his affiliate link? lol
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