Hi guys -
The idea is essentially to integrate the forum and the non-forum parts of the site. If you look on the site, we've started to integrate related forum posts and top/most popular forum threads.
In terms of integrating the site to the forum, we've used the Don't Miss feature. Exactly 95% of the links that are shown are pages on the site (we have one external link to the Contour USB offer). The Don't Miss only shows after the first post - and that's how we intend to keep it - i.e. we're not about to put ads between every forum post!
With everything we do, we're trialling this; for 7 days. We added it today and are monitoring how it effects posts/bounce rates closely. If it doesn't work, we'll take it off! However, we're also intending to make it more targeted - so, if you come in on a medication thread, it'll show you medication-related content from the site. That's taking some time, but we're showing 2 items of text rather than 3 as we don't intend this to be interpreted as adverts. This is genuinely to try and make the forum and content-side of the site come together.
As with anything new, it'll take time to adapt to... having said that, we do genuinely believe this can be a useful addition to the forum. If 2 text items seem to much, we can try 1. We did start with 3, but we thought that it was too much and made it stand out too much.
We don't want to put loads of ads everywhere (and to be honest, we don't think we are) - with the similar topics feature at the bottom of forum threads and the Don't Miss text items, we're hoping to make each forum thread even more targeted and related to the topic discussed.
