I was reading on my usual message board today and some one was asking about ads and banners. They asked if people made their own or used the ones sponsors provided.
First and foremost, the biggest point people miss when trying to run their own online business is testing and tracking. I am amazed at how many people do NOT test and track their ads. So before you even decide on what ads to use, you need to have a system in place to track those ads.
After all, how are you going to know which is better? Just because some one tells you on a board which is best, doesn’t mean they are right or you will even get the same results with your traffic.
If you don’t, your losing money!
Think about this for a moment. If you double you ad clicks, how many surfers click your ads, in reality you double your traffic to your sponsors and should double your sales. I guarantee many folks would be surprised how badly their ads are doing if they had the numbers. The old time 480×80 or so ads, 9 times out of 10, do not pull crap for clicks, your probably lucky to get 1-2%. Last time I re-did my ads I got the overall rate of over 10%. See the difference?
Who doesn’t want to double their income? You’d be surprised.
Sure every one wants more money, but very few do the work.
Here’s a free and powerful solution for tracking your ads: Open X, which use to be Open Ads, phpAdsNew before that and originally started life as phpAds.
I have a much older version, but I know how my ads are doing. Maybe some day I’ll upgrade..:)
So, what have we learned today? An easy way to at least double your income. Why wouldn’t you want to get every dollar you could?
It’s no wonder so many people complain about not making money, it’s because they don’t do ALL the work. Hopefully it’s only because they did not know any better.
22 Apr 08 3:06 pm
I couldn’t agree more. People have got to keep tracking and testing their impressions and clicks to their advertisers. Open X is very easy to set up (a lot of hosting companies offer it as an automatic install via cPanel), so there’s no excuse really for people not tracking their banner (and even text) advertising.
From my mainstream work, banner-wise, I can say that the bigger the banner, the better the click-through it will receive. Of course, ad sizes can get obnoxious sometimes. I don’t see enough adult affiliate banners in the popular 728×90 sizes and 120×600 sizes. There are some, but I’m still amazed how many programs only have 468x60s. Ugh.
22 Apr 08 3:56 pm
Don’t get me started on sponsors and their ads. I’ve doing this since 1998 and sadly, probably 90% of sponsors, little has changed in that time.
It shouldn’t be that way though, why wouldn’t a sponsor want to help affiliates get as much traffic to the program as possible? I think it’s mainly being lazy. Funny how they can crank out FHG’s by the ton, but can’t put together some good ads.
16 May 08 1:23 pm
amen — I am so sick of the lack of banners — some sponsors dont even have 728x? or 120×600 — so in my openx I have very few banners in those sizes
it drives me crazy — which has forced me to either use larger text under my banners or only use banners as artwork and focus on making colorful text links instead
I am still upset about the lack of fpad’s — alot of my sponsors dont have those at all — in fact, a few of them pulled their old ones all together — I am looking at you nastydollar
my newest pet peeve is the lack of pics — not movies — pics — I can get a ton of movies but I cannot get a good set of 30-60 pics to use
lol — i just realized that i am ranting — lol
16 May 08 2:44 pm
Thanks Blacula. Rant away..:)
Funny how so many sponsors are so eager for business, with all the competition these days, maybe they could spend some of that money and energy on ads?