I've been trying to analyze the clickthroughs I'm getting from a popular banner exchange site. I want to see if the clicks I'm bringing in are leading to anything.
My banner brings people to a search page where they can search for hockey players. The banner is designed to look like a search box, so I suppose it's a little misleading because it's not a rich-media form, it's simply a link to my search page.
When I analyzed the traffic coming in from the exchange, I found that most of the clickthroughs simply loaded the page and left. Some of them didn't even load the graphics on the page. I would say that about 5-10% of the clickthroughs actually performed a search.
Which leads me to believe that either there are a lot of site owners clicking on their own banners, or that people who click banners don't really care what is on the other side.
I've gone so far as to set up cookies so that when someone clicks through from the banner exchange, I will be able to see if they ever come back to my site. I want to be able to see if the clickthroughs are just a waste of my time.
The exchange I'm using is not linkexchange -- however, I used linkexchange last year and found the same thing, that the clickthroughs were not doing anything except clicking through to the site.
Any thoughts?
Ralph
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http://www.hockeydb.com
Jaiem posted this at 13:18 — 30th May 2000.
They have: 1,192 posts
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Banner exchanges look great but are notoriously poor traffic generators.
Use them but don't put too much reliance upon them.
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fairhousing posted this at 02:19 — 31st May 2000.
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they can be good if their stats r accurate and the exchange is targeted.
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Ralph Slate posted this at 12:41 — 31st May 2000.
They have: 32 posts
Joined: Mar 2000
I think you're right -- untargetted banner ads are essentially worthless for clickthrus.
I just analyzed each of the 40+ clicks I got from the banner exchange. None of the clicks did anything except view the page that they clicked to. Since it's a search page, this leads me to believe that people were just clicking to click, not clicking because they were interested.
I also discovered a site cheating the exchange -- of the 9 clicks they sent to me (1/4 of my clicks), each of the clicks loaded only the page and not the surrounding graphics. This exchange member runs a site there supposedly you get ads sent to you on ICQ and you get paid to click them. It seems as though they have some kind of system that generates phony clicks -- it's unlikely that 9 different people, all from the same referrer, would be surfing with their graphics turned off, which is the only explanation I can think of for the non-loading of graphics.
I would say that the only good purpose of untargetted banner exchanges is that it gives you someplace to put your defaults when your ad network can't serve you a paying ad.
Ralph
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http://www.hockeydb.com
http://www.hockeydb.com
chris posted this at 01:12 — 6th June 2000.
They have: 76 posts
Joined: May 1999
I use Link Exchange and since August 1999 I have shown their banner 216,000 times, had mine shown 108,000 times and only had 290 clicks (.3%). I would hardly say displaying another banner on our site 216,000 times is worth less than 300 visitors.
We are redoing our site and are going to stop using banner exchanges when we relaunch.
Hope this helps!
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echoweb posted this at 04:53 — 6th June 2000.
They have: 52 posts
Joined: Nov 1999
Hey,
You might be interested in reading the following article on banner exchanges: http://www.echodev.com/articles/be/ (Are Banner Exchanges Worth It?)...
Also, you might want to try to spend that banner space on exchanging links with similar sites one one one. You'll get more targetted visitors and your search % will increase.
Also, try using a button exchange. They can be as an effective but take up MUCH less space. Here are a couple of examples: http://echodev.com/services/exchange/ http://worldbe.com/ http://easy-swap.com/
Boris
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KLWong posted this at 21:47 — 19th June 2000.
They have: 135 posts
Joined: Apr 2000
Resurrecting this old thread...
Ralph,
Apparently you're using LinkBuddies. I was testing some new functionality on my own site just now, and your banner showed up. I clicked on it to help your CTR stats and exchange rate
.
Kristen
who just drove through your hometown three weeks ago on the way home from MHC...
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[This message has been edited by KLWong (edited 19 June 2000).]
Kristen
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