Hey Big Boards whats the best ad locations+features you offer?

[surfsup]

With the likes of digitalpoints (shawn) plugin, it has done a great job but as our uniques+post count is growing so fast I would like to look into better ad positions, features etc. and would love to hear your opinions?

Here is my big board with over 500k+ posts since 2008: Carpet Cleaning Forum

Advice on:

• Text links (seem to really annoy members?)
• Background wraps like www.ign.com ? good/bad? btw I hate their popups and site drop ads but love the bg from time to time
  
• Banners like www.avforums.com seem to be right on point without annoying members.
• Etc?

Any recommendations?

 

[dutchbb]

Here's our AdSense ranking for locations/ads so far this month



Leaderboard > smaller banner but it's reserved for sponsors only not AdSense. Ads generally work best if they are
- 100% relevant to the page content
- close to hot locations: content, buttons, popular hyperlinks, middle of page
- integrated with the site design
- draw attention

You can annoy guests more than members, guests provide a lot of clicks. We show quality sponsor ads and paid stickies to members without really annoying them too much (not included in the ranking above).

Experiment and see what works best for your site.

 

[digitalpoint]

Your site and user demographic is going to react different to various placements vs. other sites... so what works for one might not necessarily work for you (and vice versa). For *us* the best banner ad placement has been in the post the user is reading (mostly we only do this to guests, with a few exceptions based on certain forums the user is in).

We have inline text-link ads, but we don't use a provider like Infolinks or any of those... we sell them direct and let the advertisers just bid on cost per click for the keyword. That gives us more control (for example we never allow more than 1 per post), we give it a unique CSS style so user's know and they really don't seem to mind.

Get creative and think outside the box. Often something totally unique will be work really well simply because it's unique (for example, we also let people bid on inserting a banner ad into normal XenForo generated emails that go out anyway... things like reply notices or user registration activation emails).

 

[surfsup]

Your site and user demographic is going to react different to various placements vs. other sites... so what works for one might not necessarily work for you (and vice versa). For *us* the best banner ad placement has been in the post the user is reading (mostly we only do this to guests, with a few exceptions based on certain forums the user is in).

We have inline text-link ads, but we don't use a provider like Infolinks or any of those... we sell them direct and let the advertisers just bid on cost per click for the keyword. That gives us more control (for example we never allow more than 1 per post), we give it a unique CSS style so user's know and they really don't seem to mind.

Get creative and think outside the box. Often something totally unique will be work really well simply because it's unique (for example, we also let people bid on inserting a banner ad into normal XenForo generated emails that go out anyway... things like reply notices or user registration activation emails).

Wow that is a genius idea on banner ads in those generated emails.... - but my main concern is how to track the impressions/clicks of those being sent out :/

We use mail chimp for our e-newsletters and thats about it so far.

 

[surfsup]

Here's our AdSense ranking for locations/ads so far this month

View attachment 48974

Leaderboard > smaller banner but it's reserved for sponsors only not AdSense. Ads generally work best if they are
- 100% relevant to the page content
- close to hot locations: content, buttons, popular hyperlinks, middle of page
- integrated with the site design
- draw attention

You can annoy guests more than members, guests provide a lot of clicks. We show quality sponsor ads and paid stickies to members without really annoying them too much (not included in the ranking above).

Experiment and see what works best for your site.

What is your forum url? Also regarding your 234x60 small banner, where is that exactly located?

thx