vBulletin LTS

Alan, that´s nice to hear and I have similar numbers. GCS and this mod are both implemented for 6 days now, I started using GCS with this mod. My forums have about 25.000 PI/d and a CTR at about 1,5%.

I was worried that this GCS-Link-Placement in the first post stands in direct competition with the placements Leaderboard_top and in_first_post, which are generating about 65% of the overall revenue.
In fact this mod has an impact on both placements in terms of clicks.

The following 3 screenshots should give an overview, how my site performs regarding display ad-units. Implementation of this GCS-Mod was July, 14th. (Monday):

Revenue (by placement violet: first_post, brown: leaderboard_top):



Clicks (by placement violet: first_post, brown: leaderboard_top):



AdRequests (by placement violet: first_post, brown: leaderboard_top):



So, as you can see, there is an untypical drop at the end of this week. No wonder, the weather in my site-reach area has changed from rainy and cloudy to super sunny. Like always, this has an impact on visitor numbers. Therefor I make the most of my income by Ads, I pray for arctic temperatures and cats n dogs for all of em, while sitting in my beach chair at the bahamas resorts, enjoying my 5th caipirinha. You know what I´m talking about - guess we all share the same dream, somehow
But back to topic.

Google Custom Search - CPC



Google Custom Search - Clicks (orange colour)


The generated clicks indeed are concurrent to my main ad-placements. In total the GCS clicks are stealing 25% of the Ad-clicks from both other concurrent placements.
That´s a large number and I wasn't expecting this.

In total this Mod is deflecting only 4% of all AI's to the GCS-page - generating a CTR of 9,59% there. That sounds pretty darn good, but you have to take in account, that GCS-Ads are paid with only up to 1/3rd of the concurrent placements. On my site GCS has just been implemented and as you can tell by the graphs, CPC seems to raise as a result of gaining more adviters using the GCS placements on my site during the last days via GoogleAdWords.

At the moment I can see a decreasing overall revenue of 15%. This is a result mainly due the unwelcomed good weather (estimated on empiric stats: ~ -10%). So there is a 5% off left, that is related directly to the GCS on my site. Depending on how the CPC evolves in the upcoming weeks, I´ld expect an increasing overall revenue, but at least at the same level as before GCS started on my site.

At one glance:
This mod has the potential to increase your revenue, even if you can´t expect it to be significant from the start. You have to weight between the facts of another Ad-Placement that visitors don´t feel happy with and a potential revenue increase. But especially for sites not using display ads like leaderboard_top or in_first_post, this should be an unintrusive way to make some money out of your foums.

I will keep this mod on my site and watch closely, how things evolve. Hopefully I can give you a feedback in the near future, that shows more significant stats. I´m very positive, that this mod in fact helps increasing your revenue and I say "Thanks, tpearl!" for this mod. Keep up the good work

Now is one month since I installed this mod, and I'd like to share my experience with it.

I don't have a big forum, at the moment I have about 5,500 pageviews a day, so you could have some idea about impact of this mod for your sites.

Anyway, the moment I installed it, the mod raised GCS pageviews. Before I had maybe 1, up to 10 GCS pageviews per day. Now I have abot 200 GCS pageviews per day.

Also, this means much bigger impact on clicks on ads there. In average I have about 10% clicks per pageviews, which is excellent. But you need to know, at least for my site, clicks in GCS are worth much less money. Anyway, I make about 20% of my income through GCS right now.

As Google shows both clicks (for content and for search) together, it looks like I have much more clicks with much less money for each click, but in total, I make more money.

Of course, I couldn't guarantee that same statistics would apply for your site too, but I think you certainly should see increase in your income, number of clicks (and probably, because of worth of search clicks, less money per click).

All in all, great mod, I voted for it as a mod of the month and it leads at the moment quite deservingly.