I've rolled out banner ads, and some inline text links across two of my forums, but the clickthru rate is .08%...any ideas on how I can improve this?

The clickthrough rate for forums is usually low.
Can you perhaps post links to your forums, because I am not sure what to suggest at this point.

Try to optain advertisers on your own. Then you can charge CPM because in general forums have high pageviews. You could also try running Adsense images on your site. This can sometimes increase your revenue because I have found that usually image ads seem to be CPM. (But not always)

adsense image ads, i'll have a look...

the forums are:
www.itsallpolitics.com
www.top25web.com/bbs/

Yeah, just wanted to emphasize that forums are extremely hard to monetize in their early stages. I've never managed to make more than $10 from ads on any of my forums

X.x

Place the images above your ads on your forum like such: http://www.mustangevolution.com/forum/

The CTR is amazing

BamaStangGuy,

What are you using to display the random pics? Script?

I have a random image php script I got from a lesson on SitePoint, which I use for that purpose on my site too.... though it's a bit buggy and inflexible (i.e. images don't refresh well in Firefox on mine for some reason). So if you're willing to share, I'd love to know about your script as well

Originally Posted by BamaStangGuy

Place the images above your ads on your forum like such: http://www.mustangevolution.com/forum/

The CTR is amazing

That's a hell of a tip Bama. Thanks a ton.

If this is a vbulleting forum, just got to vbulletin.org or vbseo.com and search for "deep adsense integration". There is a very nice tutorial listed there that may help you. I am experimenting with it currently, using part of it along with my own specific tweaks, while leaving some of the tutorial stuff out.

Originally Posted by BamaStangGuy

Place the images above your ads on your forum like such: http://www.mustangevolution.com/forum/

The CTR is amazing

are the images part of the Google ad? They aren't clickable. I went into adsense, and tried Adsense Text w/Images, but only saw text ads.

When I choose "images ads only", I got banners.

No, they're not part of the ad. This is a pretty popular technique which got a lot more publicity after Critters at DigitalPoint forums started a popular discussion about it about a year ago. Check it out here:
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=17104
(be sure to read later in the thread, since Critters does update the original method to better comply with Google's TOS as more info became available with time).

A lot of people have emailed Google to see if this is ok, and their usual response is that it is indeed ok, so long as the images do not draw undue attention to the ads (i.e. images that appear directly related to the products in the ads, or images such as arrows), and are preferably separated from the ads with a border and sufficient space. As you may have heard lately, Google is also experimenting now with adding their own images next to text ads (which you may see in certain ad formats such as leaderboard or skyscraper, when text & image ads are turned on in your account). It's best to always send Google a sample of your AdSense implementation before making it live though, just to be sure.

i remember reading that quite some time ago...I didn't get why random pictures above the ads helped...but i guess it does.

To me, it made the links look like navigational sections to the site. I halfway wanted to click them just looking at them. So appealing.

Potentially though, I could imagine losing CTR through that over time, as it'd be easy to fool anyone new, but the regulars would get wise over time. I guess that's a good reasoning for constant influx of traffic.

Ideally the goal with it is not to trick anyone, but to overcome the visitor's ad blindness and get them to even look for a second at the ads and give them a sporting chance Since the ads are targetted (usually/hopefully) the visitor should get what it is they're interested in if they do click an ad.