Ad placement can be a very picky thing. We spend multiple hours a day trying to pick the best ad positions for our forum and sometimes it still fails us and we have to go back and spend more time on this matter. Putting ads in your forum is a very debatable subject. Some people say it destroys traffic, some people say it’s fine. My opinion is if you place your ad correctly it will not destroy the professional look of your forum. In this Blog post I am going to give you my tips and what worked for me on ad placement.
Below The Nav Bar
The first place I recommend and which gave me good click through rates is just beneath the navigation bar. When the user loads your homepage (or any page) for the first time this is what the user will see straight away. That’s good. If the user sees the ad that will increase the chances of it being clicked therefore putting money in your pocket. I can’t stress enough though that you blend your ads into the back ground. There is nothing worse than a distracting ad and the matter of the fact is it will hamper your traffic.
Put Ads In between Posts In Threads
Another place that worked for me was the ads inlined with threads. For example displaying an ad after a certain amount of posts in a thread. I experimented with this a lot and found no real difference between what posts you put the ads after but my results showed me that after the first post and tenth post produced the most income. The differences were very little. So I don’t think it matters where you place them when they are inlined as long as there is one ad after the first post.
Don’t Put Ads In Thread Starter Posts
I have seen a lot of forums do this. It’s method I don’t recommend as it’s very ugly looking. It makes your forum look unprofessional and one could only imagine what it would do to your traffic. Let’s have a little think. If you have ads in your thread started posts on your forum and you are competing with a forum of similar niche and rank where do you think the visitors will go to? Yeah, the forum that does not have ads in the started thread posts.
Rapping It Up
The key to successfully positioning ads is to make your forum look professional. Don’t stick them in places where they look out of place, make them fit in nicely with their surrounding.
Do you have different ad tips? Do you use ads at all? Come and tell us, we love to hear from you.
Picture by Stephen Edgar – Netweb
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