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If you had a big dream of making a mint with AdSense on your very popular forum, you were probably weeping after looking at the actual bottom line once you did so.

The fact is, AdSense doesn’t work so well on forums. In fact, none of the AdSense Case Studies are about forums.

Why do forums do so badly to Adsense? There are 3 main reasons.

Visitors in the Wrong Frame of Mind

If someone is doing research for a particular product or service, and they land on your article regarding that product or service, they are likely buy minded. They are actually looking to buy.

With forums, however, most people are interaction minded. They’re not looking to buy something. Rather, they are looking to discuss something.

Those two frames of mind are very different. In the first case the visitor may click on an AdSense ad because they are shopping around and want to explore the options. In the second case the visitor isn’t paying attention to anything on the page but what people are saying. They might follow a recommended product link posted by a user, but they are far less likely to click on an AdSense ad.

Repeat Visitors Make For Low CTR

Another reason why CTR on forums is low is because most of the visitors to a forum have been there dozens of times before. They’ve either already seen and visited the ads they were interested in, or they’re so used to seeing them that they start to ignore the Adsense ad. (read: “ad blindness”).

Besides, you may show 500,000 page views on a forum for the month, but if the average repeat visitor views 10 pages a day reading threads, then your actually number of visitors is far lower. So your stats themselves may be deceiving.

Ad-Targeting is Tough on Forums

Finally, it’s tough to target Adsense ads on forums, because discussions tend to wander around and around, touching on this and that as the main topic is discussed. Any human could tell you the basic topic of a discussion like that, but it’s a lot harder for computers to figure out–even if it is Google’s computers.

So you often get mis-targeted Adsense ads on forums, and that, too, brings down your click-through rate.

What Can Be Done?

Google offers a number of forum optimization techniques for AdSense on their Adsense blog. They will help, but don’t expect miracles.

Also, AdSense guru Joel Comm’s AdSense Secrets ebook has an outstanding chapter on how to make AdSense work with forums and Internet communities. If you haven’t read his ebook yet, I recommend you do so.

Here’s another method you may want to try. Remember that your forum visitors are usually very interested in the subject matter–interested enough to go through the registration process for your forum and discuss it!

What you can do is leverage those visitors by adding a place to your site for articles and product reviews related to the forum subject. When you post a new article or review, let the forum members know about it: post a thread requesting feedback on the article, or better yet, email your member list requesting that they read and review the article.

This accomplishes two things:

1) It reminds people who haven’t been to your forum in a while that it exists (see this related post about email list building). It’s easy to register for a forum and forget about it. But a friendly request for an article review can reactivate some inactive members, which creates more content on your forum when they post and can generate more revenue from clicks.

2) It gets your members out of “interaction” mode by pulling them away from a discussion and into an article, which increases the likelihood that they will click on the related Adsense ads.

Summing it all Up

There’s no reasons why forums can’t be profitable with AdSense, though their click-through rates almost never achieve the double-digits. Most forum owners would be happy to have a low single-digit CTR. But following the techniques above can help you improve that bottom line and find new ways of leveraging your user-base.

Remember, too, that all of the forum content is created for you for free by your members, so it’s really all free money anyway.

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