Ad earnings way down since migrating to Invision Community :(

[David N.]

I migrated my forum from phpBB to Invision Community 20 days ago.

My forum is my full-time job. The income from Ads is how I make a living. I have 130k topics, 800k topics, 400k monthly pageviews.

While I absolutely love the Invision software, I am very upset that since the migration, my ad earnings are down by 30%. I am looking for help to pinpoint the issue or issues at play. Here are some symptoms I've noticed since the migration:

1. Google search impressions (and clicks) are down.
2. Number of page views is down.
3. Ad RPM and RPS are slightly down.
4. User engagement is down (less new topics/day, less new replies/day).
5. The pages are slower to load.

That is the exact opposite of what I was expecting when spending time and money resources on migrating my community to Invision.

I suppose that #2 may be due to the use of AJAX when users post. Where in phpBB, a user would reload the page, now in Invision the user does it all from the same page. My guess was that in exchange for the diminished page views, the RPM would go up (the user now stays longer on that same page).

I don't understand #1, #3 and #4 at all. They're a mystery to me. I would have thought the snazzy software and gamification would entice users to post more. 

#5 could be due to some conflict between the Invision javascript and the javascript from the ads? I noticed that with the ads turned on the text editor takes forever to open while the ads load. The ads are loading much slower than they were in phpBB.

I need to figure this out and get my earnings at least back up to where they were before the switch. If any of you have migrated to Invision from another forum software I'd love to hear your experience and advice.

[Dll]

It can take Google search results several weeks, if not into months to settle down when you redirect to be URLs etc. It's a waiting game I'm afraid.

[Matt]

Hello and welcome to Invision Community!

I've had a quick look at your site and have a few observations. It may be that it is because I am not logged in, but have you created a topic with some FAQ/help on how to use the new forum? Likewise, do you have a topic to act as support for people who are a bit confused? Did you communicate much about the migration in advance?

Have you also double checked to ensure that the permissions are correct so that members have access to all the areas they should?

In terms of the raw data, there will be a period where Google needs to essentially recalibrate via crawling your site. Tens of thousands of URLs and their content just changed. There's no way around that unfortunately.

I checked Pagespeed and Core Web Vitals. As you have a lot of ads, it's loading a lot of JS (I think close to 1mb for the ad delivery code) so you're never going to score highly for that but without removing the ads, there's not a lot you can do.

It claims Core Web Vitals have failed, so it's worth checking your Google Search Console to check that and also check Index > Coverage to ensure that you don't have a high number of crawl errors. Feel free to DM me screenshots if you want a second opinion.

[David N.]

1 hour ago, Matt said:

have you created a topic with some FAQ/help on how to use the new forum? Likewise, do you have a topic to act as support for people who are a bit confused? Did you communicate much about the migration in advance?

That's a good idea. We had a topic about the new site, new features etc... but maybe I need to make a more official support topic with an alert at the top of the site for everyone to see clearly. Great idea. 

1 hour ago, Matt said:

Have you also double checked to ensure that the permissions are correct so that members have access to all the areas they should?

Yes I believe they're correct, basically all members have read/write access to all forum, fairly simple. 

1 hour ago, Matt said:

In terms of the raw data, there will be a period where Google needs to essentially recalibrate via crawling your site. Tens of thousands of URLs and their content just changed. There's no way around that unfortunately.

Ok, if it's temporary, and only a matter of time before it recovers, I don't mind being patient. It's just the fear that these symptoms may be a definitive consequence of using a different software that is stressful.

Core Web vitals seem to be improving over time, Coverage started showing 800 errors per day - mostly 5xx server errors - since the migration (vs about 15 per day before). That's odd. I'm sending you screenshots. Thanks a lot for offering to help!

 

[Matt]

Happy to help 🙂 

[Matt]

I would also consider using a Topic Feed widget to showcase the last 5 or 10 latest posts in the sidebar below the adverts to give people an easier way into the content.

[David N.]

3 minutes ago, Matt said:

I would also consider using a Topic Feed widget to showcase the last 5 or 10 latest posts in the sidebar below the adverts to give people an easier way into the content.

Unfortunately I'm not sure how I can add widgets below the ads. The ads are inserted via javascript by the ad publisher. Right now the ads appear below the widgets. Maybe that's something I should ask them to change? 

[Marc Stridgen]

You would need to speak to the ad publisher if you are not using our ad placement locations, yes

[Matt]

56 minutes ago, Jamynee said:

Unfortunately I'm not sure how I can add widgets below the ads. The ads are inserted via javascript by the ad publisher. Right now the ads appear below the widgets. Maybe that's something I should ask them to change? 

I wouldn't change too much right now. You can add a "Latest topics" block at the top above the forum listing, or above the adverts but that may change the conversion rate.

[MeMaBlue]

hello,  I have purchased some plugins for the ads,  by @newbie LAC  ads after posts, topics etc....  they are excellent. 

 when i migrated, 2016, i never experienced any change in revenue.

My forum has 800.000 monthly pageviews at least. 

so... 

I think you need to work the placements out and check out via incognito browsers if the ads are appearing at the right places, visually. 

if you dont have ads appearing at all the places then you will get lesser revenue , ofcourse. 

your issues sounds like an administrative issue that has to do with the links. 

try to find documentation of the software you used to use before, 

 what to do when migrating from x to y.  you might need to do specific changes for that! 

 
I remember back then my server admin did such work to ensure exactly that and it worked

 dont lose ANY time !  Do not just wait!  =>

on another license of mine with 400.000k,   in another occasion, a different server admin made a irreparable mistake, with the robot.txt which was only unnoticed for 10 days and cost 60% of pageviews for 4 years !!!!   

 

Edited May 19, 2022 by MeMaBlue

[David N.]

24 minutes ago, MeMaBlue said:

I think you need to work the placements out and check out via incognito browsers if the ads are appearing at the right places, visually. 

if you dont have ads appearing at all the places then you will get lesser revenue , ofcourse. 

your issues sounds like an administrative issue that has to do with the links. 

try to find documentation of the software you used to use before, 

 what to do when migrating from x to y.  you might need to do specific changes for that! 

 
I remember back then my server admin did such work to ensure exactly that and it worked

 dont lose ANY time !  Do not just wait!  =>

on another license of mine with 400.000k,   in another occasion, a different server admin made a irreparable mistake, with the robot.txt which was only unnoticed for 10 days and cost 60% of pageviews for 4 years !!!!   

 

Thank you for your feedback and for sharing your experience, it's very useful to me. I have worked hard to customize the ad placement with my ad publisher so that the ads appear pretty much the same way they did before migration. 

I'm not sure what you mean by administrative issue that has to do with links? I didn't find information about specific things to do before migrating from phpBB to Invision. 

Here's what my robots.txt file looks like: 

# Rules for Invision Community (https://invisioncommunity.com)
User-Agent: *
# Block pages with no unique content
Disallow: /forum/startTopic/
Disallow: /forum/discover/unread/
Disallow: /forum/markallread/
Disallow: /forum/staff/
Disallow: /forum/online/
Disallow: /forum/discover/
Disallow: /forum/leaderboard/
Disallow: /forum/search/
Disallow: /forum/*?advancedSearchForm=
Disallow: /forum/register/
Disallow: /forum/lostpassword/
Disallow: /forum/login/

# Block faceted pages and 301 redirect pages
Disallow: /forum/*?sortby=
Disallow: /forum/*?filter=
Disallow: /forum/*?tab=
Disallow: /forum/*?do=
Disallow: /forum/*ref=

# Block profile pages as these have little unique value, consume a lot of crawl time and contain hundreds of 301 links
Disallow: /forum/profile/

[marklcfc]

Try turning off ajax pagination