Banner ads and banner exchanges

You've probably seen a lot of them everywhere - those flashing images at the top of your screen that make surfing at worst a nightmare. If you've been on the Net for a couple of months or more, you've reached the point where you rarely click them if at all. Is it really useful to promote a site by using banners?

These days the CTR (ClickThrough Ratio) for banners is pretty low - about 0.5-3% of people who see a banner actually click it. Of course this depends on what the banner looks like - banners having a beautiful female with a hint of sex usually produce better results than banners advertising for example kitchen knifes. Banner promotions can pay off, but only if visitors to your site produce you enough (and more!) revenues to cover the expenses. This usually happens only if you're selling something, otherwise you'll probably end up losing money.

There are two main types of banner advertising. One is to charge depending on the amount of times the banner is shown, the other by the times it's clicked. If you're planning to advertise a site by using banners, I'd recommend using the pay-per-click model. That way it's easier to figure out whether the promotion will be profitable, because you don't have to worry about how many people will click your banner - you'll only need to figure out how much is one visitor worth to you.

However, if you decide to pay per impression, remember the clickthrough ratio: If your purchase 10,000 impressions (this means that your banner will be shown 10,000 times), you're going to get around 50-300 visitors. Usually this kind of advertising is expensive compared to the results it brings, so unless your visitors produce large sums of money to you, forget this model.

Then there are the banner exchanges, such as Linkexchange. They'll rotate your banner ads in other sites for free, but you'll need to place banners on your site in return. Most banner exchanges require you to show two or three banners in exchange for showing one of yours in another site - so if your site gets 10000 visitors per day, and everyone of them is showed one banner, you'll get 3000-5000 impressions in other sites, and you'll wind up getting 15-150 clickthroughs. Appalling, isn't it? Besides, you'll probably end up losing visitors by using a banner exchange, because some people will leave your site by clicking on the banner, and others will get frustrated to wait the banner(s) to load and go somewhere else. If you're going to use a banner on your site, use one that pays you for keeping it there!

In conclusion, it's a good idea to advertise a site by using banners if the site sells products and produces a high amount of revenue per visitor. If the site only has affiliate links or not even them, banner ads probably won't pay off. Banner exchanges are really not a good promotion method for anyone.