Getting the Best from Your Banners

Getting the Best from Your Banners

by Brian Alt

That banner ads are the source of millions of dollars in revenue each year is undeniable. A less clear question is whether the "free" services provided by banner exchanges can aid the smaller sized business that might not be able to afford thousands of dollars worth of banner displays on Yahoo every month. Are those banners you're displaying at the top of your pages worth it, or are they drawing away potential sales?

This article will address the question of whether or not a banner exchange program is right for you and your website, and will examine in detail two such programs.

I recently had a conversation with a colleague about this. He said, "Say my banner from my banner exchange draws in 5 surfers a day. But if I lose 10-20 folks who click on the banners I have to display, that's not exactly a fair trade." This seems clear, but before you run off and remove all those banners from your pages, let's take a closer look.

The question that my colleague raised seems to me to be a question of audience. That is, just who are you trying to attract to your site and why? Granted, if you just maintain a personal home page, losing a few visitors to the exchanges is no big deal. But most of us are trying to make an income with a website, and every lost visitor is perhaps a little less "bread on the table." The real question becomes then not one of losing visitors, but of losing customers.

One thing I've noticed about my site stats is that the number of unique visitors to my main page and the number of new subscribers to my newsletter are essentially the same. I have the newsletter subscription form in a very prominent place on the page, and hope that most of my visitors will fork over their email addresses (if not their cash). This means that even if I do lose them to a banner (they have to eventually go somewhere, don't they?), I know that I might be able to bring them back to the site. And I wouldn't have had many of those subscribers in the first place if not for the banner exchange that I use.

This brings us back to the question of audience. Perhaps the most important variable of all resides in what kind of product or service you are selling. If you are dealing with impulse products, it would probably be a bad idea to show your visitor lots of snazzy banners that could distract him and take him and his unstable money elsewhere. But what if we're talking about non-impulse items? Does anyone hire a web designer, or decide to go with one web hosting company, without first checking out the others? Perhaps, but I would imagine not often. If you've got a potential customer who is "ready to buy," you can always decrease the chance of his leaving by filtering out the banners of your direct competition (and the good exchanges let you do this - more on this below).

Thus, the main factor which you should use to determine whether or not to use a banner exchange on your site's pages is your audience. Are you targeting impulse buyers? If so, then maybe now IS the time to run off and remove those ads from your pages. If, on the other hand, you are selling a product or service that encourages your customers to shop around anyway, then showing a few 468x60 graphics at the top of your pages isn't going to hurt. In fact, it can generate a significant amount of extra traffic, which may in turn transform into extra sales!

We turn then to the actual programs. I will focus on two of them, LinkExchange (the "old standby") and LinkBuddies (a fairly recent addition to cyberspace), although the criteria presented will apply to any, and should help you select a winner.

If I were to play psychologist and ask you, "What is the first word you think of when I say the words banner exchange," I'd be willing to bet that the great majority of you would immediately think of our friends at LinkExchange. Why? Well, they've been around a long time, and their banners are everywhere (further evidence that everyone thinks of them first). But does that necessarily mean they're the best? Should you surf on over to http://www.linkexchange.com and open a free account with them? Not so fast!

Let's first take a look at what LinkExchange offers: "Free banner advertising on over 250,000 web sites." Sounds good! "Support for over 3,000 geographic regions and subject categories and over 30 languages." Even better! "Reports and statistics about the people who visit your site." Keep it coming! "Free listing on the Surf Point directory." Really?

Let's take a closer look. Last things first, I've submitted several sites to LinkExchange in the past and not one of them has EVER made it into Surf Point. Surf Point IS a very nicely organized, Yahoo-style directory. But like Yahoo, it's a real pain to get listed. And getting listed is supposed to be one of the benifits of membership. You on guard yet?

The next question you should ask of a banner exchange program is "What is the display ratio?" In other words, how many banners do I have to display on my site to earn a display of my own banner on another site? For LinkExchange the answer is 2. For every two exposures of banners on my site, I get one in return. That means LE is keeping 50% of all exposures for themselves (and advertising they sell, etc.).

Already you may see that you might not be getting the best deal from LinkExchange. Let's turn for a moment to one of their competitors: LinkBuddies http://www.linkbuddies.com

Linkbuddies offers a 4:3 ratio if you display their banners at the top of the screen. You get 3 exposures for every four you provide. PLUS, you get 500 free exposures just for joining. PLUS, you get 7 free exposures each and every day. For my site, this has worked out so that I've actually received only a few less exposures than I've given!

You get the same kind of statistics with LinkBuddies that you do with LinkExhange: a measure of the impressions. This can be useful, but it is in no way a good measurement of actual visitors to your site (but that's a whole other article).

While LinkBuddies is already far ahead in my book, they really win the prize in this next issue. What is the most important aspect of ANY kind of advertising? Targeting. LE's targeting is virtually nonexistent. (You can decide what "rating" of sites you want your banner displayed on, but this is mainly for protecting children from "mature" topics, not for increasing click-thrus.) LinkBuddies on the other hand has hundreds of categories of sites on which you can display your banner. By default, all of these are selected, but you can choose as few as you like. Thus, for a web site which has jazz CD reviews, you can have your banner displayed on sites in categories as specific as "Music - Jazz", "Music - Reviews", and "Music -Instruments".

Can this targeting really make a difference? Ask any marketing guru you know. On LinkExchange a certain banner I use received a CTR (click-thru ratio) of 200:1 or worse. That means my banner was displayed 200 times for every one time someone actually clicked it! The EXACT SAME banner on LinkBuddies had a CTR of 25:1 or better. Did people suddenly like my banner design a whole lot better and decide to click it more often? Of course not. My banner just showed up on sites which had visitors who were often interested in what I had to offer.

All LinkExchange banners have that little bar accross the bottom that links to the LE site. LinkBuddies gives you the option of whether or not you want to include something like this. You can just display the 468x60 banner if you like. If you DO choose to link to LinkBuddies, you receive a 10% "commission" on anyone who signs up through your link. Thus, if all the people who have signed up through me earn a total of 10,000 credits in a given week, I receive an additional 1000 credits that week for referring them to the program. Quite nice!

LinkBuddies also allows you to exclude your direct competition's banners from displaying on your pages. Any good exchange program should have this feature.

I have focused here on two specific banner exchanges, but the criteria presented, especially targeting, should apply to any banner exchange program that you are considering. If anyone from LE happens to be reading this article, my apologies if I have hurt your feelings, but perhaps you should take this as criticism on how to make your service better. (In defense of LE, they DO have several great services, and I've been a loyal reader of the LE Digest for months.) I should also say that I am in no way affiliated with LinkBuddies. I am merely a very satisfied customer.

If anyone has had a different experience with either of these two services, I welcome your feedback. Email me, or better yet, stop by the Design/Pro Forum and leave a post about your experiences for everyone to read: http://www.firstsolve.com/wwwboard/

My advice to you at the end of this article? If your site isn't one that relies on impulse buyers who could be distracted by snazzy banners at the top of your pages, then design yourself a nice banner and surf on over to LinkBuddies to sign up. If you're really feeling generous, and would like to sign up through me, head to: http://www.firstsolve.com/bannerexchange.html

Thanks!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Brian Alt is the publisher of the EzineSeek Informer, a free biweekly ezine for ezine publishers. Subscribe at http://www.ezineseek.com or mailto:join-ezineseek@ezineseek.com. He also publishes the daily Ezine-Tips (http://Ezine-Tips.com) ezine.

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