First off, I run a forum/message board style website. It has a good deal of traffic in spite of being fairly new. I get some 30,000 page impressions a day, and during the right time of the month/year I can break 100,000 page impressions. Right now, it targets a highly specific geographic location, which means 2 major things; one is that the majority of those page impressions are not unique, it comes from loyal users, the second is that in theory this site could be expanded to other regions and multiply the size of the site by 100.

Right now I use google adsense, and the revenue has been weak at best. Most days I get eCPM of around 8-10 cents. This is primarily due to a very low CTR, around .05%. I am relatively new to making websites with ads on them, so I assumed this was normal at first. But several of my colleagues lead me to believe that even for a forum style website, even with low numbers of unique visitors per day, these numbers are ludicrously low.

I'll try adding a few other pieces of possibly relevant information. Right now the ad is a single banner at the top of the page. I've considered moving it to the middle of posts and changing the colors, but I can't believe that would make such a significant difference. A good deal of ads seem irrelevant to the site, but the majority are at least mostly relevant. This also might contribute, but it might be unavoidable, since the topics of conversation on the board are hard to advertise too.

Any advice?