Change of Adverts

Tim

Tim

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Hi all,

The ads at the bottom of the forum aren't really working - I haven't worked it out exactly but we're only covering about a month of our running costs each year. I haven't worried too much about adverts because the main site sells adverts and these currently cover our running costs as well.

The trouble is, as the forum grows, the database grows and the 'memory' grows which we have to pay for and I can't increase the cost of banners on the main site year on year unless the performance is also increasing for the advertisers.

I don't want to bore you to death, or moan about 'the bills' but Google Adsense seems to be on most sites these days (even eBay and Amazon) so I thought I'd test it out to see how it looks / performs instead, get some feedback from you guys and from our moderators who are busy on the forum every day.

I don't want to be advertising 'dating' or 'weight loss' for example and have tried to set it up in a way that it will advertise what is relevant to the page (so hopefully will contain the right ads) but we may find this includes eating chicken or something else poultry related!!

I hope this might just work. If it gives inappropriate content, I can dig down and deselect that category but as you can imagine, there are thousands of categories so I might not get it right first time.

Please let me know here if there are topics coming up that are inappropriate and I will do my best to suppress these.

I hope this will work at generating enough income for the forum to contribute a little more towards our growing running costs. Ideally, I would have no adverts at all but I have to try to generate some income to offset running costs.

I look forward to reading your views ;-)

Tim

PS This message will be a Global Announcement for 7 days and then revert to the General Chatter section.
 
Hi Tim - I am no expert on this but I have noticed that the search engines take note of what I have recently been searching for then flash up adverts for related topics, so most of the adverts I see on any of the sites I visit will be for poultry and smallholder related items, groceries, books etc, then should I have looked for a new fridge say, I will have household goods come up

Soooo....... if anyone is getting ads for "naughty" things appearing on their page...... Well I leave you to draw your own conclusions :lol:

I first noticed this when I was researching using lawn mowings on the veg. garden, and got an ad from ebay saying there was a good selection of "used or new lawn mowings" available. :lol:

I think you do a terrific job with the site, and many thanks for all your work :-)17
 
"New & used lawn mowings". Now there's something for Marigold to give to her husband for his next birthday :lol:
 
Sounds like a great idea Tim!
Waterfowl forum seems quite quiet atm... are the others quite quiet too?
zo
x
 
Yes I agree with DDO, as long as they are relevant and not obtrusive(so far so good! ;) then they are a good idea, plus generates income in a positive way to help maintain the website. :-)17
 
I thankfully haven't had any problems here, but have had some awkward moments in work when hotmail insists on displaying lacy underwear adverts just because I search for some shoes for my wedding in August. :oops:
 
Phew, seems to be OK. I have tweaked it a little.

We've been making some money anyway - between 38p and £1.89 per day which is great! If we averaged around £1 per day, that will cover 2/3 of the running costs each month so I'm happy :-)

I was shocked at how much per click you get - it varies according to lots of things (not quite figured it out yet) but seems to be between 19p and about 30p per click which is far more than I imagined. I thought it would be 3 to 5p or so.

Zo > The forum is always quieter at this time of year. It's a slow decline of visitors to the New year, then it's a gradual increase to the Spring and stays fairly constant until Autumn.

I think it's something to do with poultry keepers going to bed earlier in the winter - something to do with daylight hours or is that egg laying ;-)
 
Yes it pays on a click. But.... It is against the terms and conditions for me to ask people to click and I would encourage everyone only to do so if something interests them.

If I was a paying customer of Adwords I would be pretty miffed if it was being done somewhere.

Also, I read that they have some pretty smart software that works out if someone is regularly clicking but never following through with a sale.

I also read that there is a factor that is used which effects the cost per click ...so if we sent lots of visitors to these sites but they rarely turned into a sale, the value of our clicks is reduced more and more.
 
I'm somewhat confused (it doesn't take much!!) but I don't understand the reference to "adverts at the bottom of the forum. Maybe our firewall or whatever is blocking something, but all I have are the links to the website and the Amazon shop. Are these the adverts or am I (quite literally) missing something??
 
Sorry for the late reply, I have been travelling with work a lot and have had quite a few things to catch up with.

There should be (under the links to the website and Amazon shop in a grey bar) a heading saying Advertisements and then below that with bright blue links, google ads that change according to what is on the page, your browsing history and location etc.

I was in Nijmegen last week (the Netherlands) and I logged in to the forum to see ads in Dutch... So I guess wherever you are in the World, it will adapt to your location and hopefully what is most relevant to you.
 
Thanks for your reply Tim.

I have nothing below the links to the website, Amazon shop, the team and delete all board cookies. Because this is a steam driven laptop I've had to reduce the display size - might this be the cause of missing stuff?

I'm feeling a bit miffed actually that I can't see them - who knows what interesting things I'm missing!
 
Sorry Margaid, I missed your reply...

I have tried reducing my forum size too but the ads still appear. It may be because there is some software blocking them on your computer.

The ads seem to be working...
I hope the image below comes out clear enough (I had to shrink it quite a lot) but basically it shows the last month's earnings which came to nearly £15. This is great, it is working and is enough to help pay its way to the server costs :-)

Forum-adsense-month.jpg

For anyone that's interested, on the left is the amount - So the peak is about £1.20 in a day and the date is along the bottom.

CPC means Cost per click - this is the approximate amount we've been getting for a click.
Ad Requests are the number of times an Ad has been viewed and Clicks is pretty obvious!
CTR means Click through Ratio - so 0.18% of ads displayed are clicked on.
I'm not sure what coverage means!

Anyway, thanks again to everyone for their support having these ads. It means we should be 'sustainable' on the forum going forward.
 
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