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Overcoming Low CTR With Forum Websites

Most online marketers will experiment with trying to start a forum website because it can be a great sense of achievement when you create an active community. The problem with forum websites is that most of the visitors are there to chat and not to click on ads, so if you are wanting to monetize the website it makes it more difficult, but not impossible. Whatever the reason is, it's just harder to monetize forums. Don't get me wrong though, they can still make a lot of money.

You are required to get the ad placement right when monetizing a forum website. If you are aggressive and bold with ad placement, your visitors will start using another forum because the bold ads will become an annoyance pretty quickly. On the flipside, if you are not aggressive enough with ad placement, then nobody will be clicking on the ads, and so the forum website will be making next to nothing, if anything at all! Hey, even if you originally started the website because it’s a passion of yours, there isn't anything wrong with trying to make some money with the website to pay for expenses like web hosting and maintenance.

It is fairly common knowledge in the webmaster world that monetizing a forum website can be difficult as they usually attract very low click through rates with Adsense, YPN and other PPC companies. This makes sense as most of your forum visitors would be regulars who visit the site daily and become ad blind as they are there to discuss stuff instead of wanting to buy something.

So what can you do to overcome the problem of low CTR and revenues?

Instead of sacraficing the user experience of my forum visitors, this led me to thinking outside the box a little bit as I didn’t want the ads to be too in your face and give the members a bad experience.

One thing which has really performed well on my forums since I implemented it was adding adsense to the forum archives. I am typically experiencing much higher CTR levels on my archives as opposed to on the forum. I think this just comes down to being able to be a bit more aggressive with showing advertisements on the archive as it is not the main part of the forum. On the main forum I typically only use two of the normal adsense blocks on any one forum page, however with the archives I am a little more aggressive and show the full 3 adsense units. The archive pages are also very plain so the ads are very in your face, which probably has something to do with the higher click throughs as well. Anyway, instead of me trying to make sense of why the archive pages experience better CTR, who really cares, they do and that’s all that matters

The other change which has also worked really well for me was adding a photo gallery to the forum. Again, this has allowed me to be a bit more aggressive with ad placement. Another reason why I feel this has a positive effect on CTR is because the gallery pages tend to be comprise of only a few images on each page, so there is very little up and down page scrolling, so in most cases all of the ad blocks are above the fold.

I am sure that if you applied one or both of these suggestions you should hopefully see a positive effect on CTR and PPC revenues. The main thing to keep in mind though is the experience of your forum visitors. I guess the same thing can be said about any type of website.