Any adsense experts on this forum? Ad placement help needed.

336 sized text ad on top of, or to the left of the content in the very first post of every thread on the forum?

I do this exact same thing with a smaller text ad already.
You say the bigger one will yield better results huh?

You probably are nearing the max out point. Forums are a hard
nut to crack. The only way may be to just get more and
more daily visitors. The more new ones you have, the better.
Old hats get adsense blindness on forums pretty quick.

I might start offering some OTO's after someone logs in.

Paul

First off, let me say that I've never monetized a forum. I'm into niche websites that are product or information specific. In that world, the name of the game is above the fold ads that blend in with the layout of the site and become a seamless part of it.

With that said, here goes...

1) Your really valuable screen real estate (the 400-600 pixels from the top of the web browser) is entirely devoted to site branding and site information. If you can condense your site branding to the header area, and move your ads up, it will elevate their relative importance and should increase your CTR. By how much, I'm not sure, but I'd certainly think it would be substantial.

So, this is my #1 recommendation overall. Condense your site logo so that it fits on the left side of the header, and move all of the text that's currently sitting below that, up and to the right of the logo. Your header should take up no more than 100 pixels of height at the top of the forum.

Now, you can place your ads directly under that. This allows you to leverage and monetize the critical "above the fold" area that's currently wasted space in terms of selling.

2) The lone 300x250 adsense ad that's directly under your "Featured Member Ads" appears to be out of place and isolated. When ads dont seem to "fit" with the overall site layout, as this one does, it diminishes their effectiveness by a great deal. I'd guess that your CTR on that ad is very low. I think you'd do better here to run two 728x90 horizontal text link units or nothing at all here.

3) I like your placement of the horizontal text ads (728x90) within the body of your forum threads. However, there are three things you can do to these to significantly increase CTR.

- Left justify the ads so that they flow on the same left margin with your threads.
- Reduce the font size to match your forum thread font and make the colors identical (the google text black looks a bit darker than your forum thread author text. Its a subtle difference that can have a huge impact on CTR.
- Now that you've gotten rid of the 300x250 ads (if you choose to take my advice in that regard), you can use more 728x90's to blend in with your forum look and feel. If you decide to keep them, opt out of image ads and specify that only text ads get served. CTR on image ads are abysmal.

4) I'm not sure I would be too over the top with using the language about banishment of the Google ads as leverage to get people to sign up for the membership. It can have the reverse effect of what you are trying to achieve, both from memberships and for marginalizing the value of the ads. I'd sell from the positive rather than the negative at every oppty and let the ad banishment be a footnote during the signup process. People expect not to see ads with a paid membership, so it should be a given.

Hope that helps. Let me know if you have any specific questions about my recommendations.

Finally, congratulations on the forum. Your daily $225 is nothing to sneeze at and puts you in the top 10% of all Adsense publishers overall. That in itself is impressive and you've got a valuable asset there that you can certainly improve upon in terms of monetization IMHO.