|
There's only one way to say this and that's to tell it to you straight, Banner Exchanges have had their day - Don't Waste your Time with them !
Well that's it for Banner Exchanges.
What ? I hear you say, OK here's the story ( and why ). Back in 1996 and 1997 Banner Exchanges were, for a short time, a very effective medium for advertising. Like all successful things everybody jumped on and soon there were banners everywhere. However like everything that gets overdone, the public become wise and then just ignore the feature. But web masters liked them, they were ( and still are ) easy to set-up and operate and so they continue. But unfortunately today the click through rate is so low ( typically less than 0.5% and falling ) that it's simply not worth the effort, especially since there are so many better activities to be involved with. Banner exchanges work like this, for every 2 banners you display on your site you will receive one banner impression on another site ( actually many programs now do 3 for 2 ). As you can see the banner companies build up an excess ( you display 100 ads you receive 50 ads somewhere else - which leaves an excess of 50 ads ). The banner company will then either sell this excess or display their own ad for those 50 impressions. You could buy that ad space. But before you do, work out the numbers, with a 0.5% (at best ) response rate, are you really going to make a profit ? Another thing that should start the alarm bells ringing is the ever growing number of "Banner Special Offers" ( 100,000 impressions for $100 ). Another consideration is that any quality site is no longer displaying banners ( actually they stopped a long time ago ) and therefor your ad is only going to be displayed on second rate sites, not really the sort of places where your potential customers will be hanging out. Let's just go back to those numbers again, 100,000 ads for $100. Sounds good. Let's assume you have the best banner, one of those that look like a selection box, designed to fool people into clicking, your click through rate is going to be 0.5%. This means out of 100,000 ads you will receive 500 visitors at best. Now remember these are 500 browsing visitors ( not visitors searching for a solution to a problem ), they have clicked your banner because for an instant it caught their eye. So how many out of those 500 are going to buy ? Well at best this will be at the same rate as your average visitor to sale ratio ( if you don't know this then you need to be monitoring your visitors with Trafficfile.com ). Let's assume you make 1 sale for every 250 visitors ( which is actually quite high ). This means to break even on the banner advert campaign you need to be making a profit of $50 on every sale. Remember theses figures are at best and you haven't actually come out with a profit yet. If from these figures you are tempted ( i.e.. You have a high value product on which you make a large profit ) then run through this calculation again cutting the Click Through Rate by a third. If it still looks good to you then by all means give it a try. Warning
In the past we used to use Banner Exchanges, this was back when you could make a profit with them. We found that our own visitor statistics didn't quite match those that some of the banner programs were telling us. Oddly the banner exchange always told us we were getting more visitors than our own systems were telling us, never was it the other way round. One particular banner program ( no longer in operation ) claimed they sent us 5 times the number of visitors than we actually received ! Basically if you are going to give the banner exchanges a try ( and I really recommend that you don't ) then at least make sure you have an independent method by which to measure the visitors they send you. You've guessed it, the TrafficFile.com Gold Service is ideal for this - It won't lie to you ! | 
