It is widely known that monetizing a forum is difficult because, although your forum may be popular and receive lots of traffic, the majority of this traffic is repeat visitors and the click through rates (CTR) are relatively low for forum communities.

A number of options are available to forum owners for monetization and one of these includes placing Google AdSense advertising on the forum. I shall experiment the placement of Google AdSense on a celebrity image forum and analyse the earnings for the forum community which has over 14,000 members and receives thousands of visitors weekly.

The AWStats display the traffic to the forum site which is around 30,000 uniques per month consistently with about twice as many visits to the site which shows the forum has many repeat visitors. I would like to reiterate that this is a celebrity image forum and results on your forum in a different niche will vary and no guarantees are made that these trends and results will be identical for your site.

Prior to the placement of Google AdSense advertising, research was done to find information on the optimal placement of the advertising blocks on forums for the highest click-throughs and ultimately highest earnings. The AdSense Blog contains a post containing Six AdSense optimization tips for forums which is useful in your choice for AdSense placement.

The AdSense advertising was placed on the index page as well as the forum itself and the placement of the advertising blocks is outlined in the diagrams below:

The diagram shows the AdSense placement on the Index page of the site which consists of:

• 200×90 Link Unit below the Menu
• 468×60 Banner in the centre
• 160×600 Wide Skyscraper on the right 

The diagram shows the AdSense placement on the Forum page of the site which consists of:

• 728×90 Leaderboard below the header
• 728×90 Leaderboard below the content

The content of the AdSense advertising was well targeted on the Index page and, although less relevant on the forum pages, overall the advertising was quite related to the subject matter of the site.  

Results

The AdSense earnings for the three blocks on the Index page are displayed with the relevant information removed to comply with the Google AdSense terms and conditions. The right column displays the earnings and the column beside this displays the impressions. Overall the 468×60 banner was the most successful with regards to earnings although the Click Through Rates (CTR) were pretty poor overall and AdSense seemed to underperform in general as the results were poor. The average Earnings Per Click (EPC) was low as expected in the site niche. With a little optimisation and advertising placement changes it is possible to increase the number of clicks but despite this the

The AdSense earnings for the 728×90 Leaderboard on the Forum pages are displayed again with the relevant information removed to comply with the Google AdSense terms and conditions. The impressions are considerably higher than that of the Index page as expected but the earnings are very poor considering the number of impressions with only a handful of clicks over the course of experiment. Combining the low CTR with the low EPC made for an overall poor experience of placing Google AdSense on this forum. The spike in earnings on Tuesday October 21st 2008 is strange as the number of clicks weren’t very different to previous trends.

Conclusion

Despite predictions that the earnings via AdSense on a forum would be low, especially in the category experimented, it was not possible to predict that a site generating this many visitors daily would produce such low daily earnings. Although the AdSense block placement could have been changed and optimised, the overall experience with Google AdSense on the forum itself was a poor one with low Earnings Per Click (EPC) which were not helped by the very low Click Through Rate (CTR) and eCPM.