Banner Advertising - Is It Dead?
Recently I’ve been having a decent crack at some good old fashioned banner advertising. I’d snapped up a WSO on the Warrior Forum which promised to show how to nab penny clicks. Of course, I expected it to be some sort of twisted stint on normal adwords ads, which it was, but for $7 I wasn’t going to quibble because it at least reminded me I hadn’t done any of this for a while. The WSO really was crap, by the way… it essentially taught the basics to Adwords ‘image’ ads and how to make some pretty ordinary looking ads using a ripped off copy of Photoshop. Anyway, I figured I’d give some image ads a shot for gits and shiggles.
I’ve been promoting three products, two of which are affiliate products and one of which is my own. The results have been interesting.
This dodgy WSO I grabbed recommended doing banner ads of every dimension and having a keyword list numbering in the thousands to get maximum exposure. Since this was about the only genuinely helpful advice that was buried beneath pages of piffle, I duly applied it (even though it failed to mention the keyword limit per banner ad of 2,000, which meant multiple copies of the same banner with different keywords).
Anyway, I’m a huge fan of graphics so I set about creating some marginally interesting ads which I thought would be attention grabbers. Traffic wise the results have been pretty good. I mean, it’s not huge traffic by any stretch of the imagination, but getting to throw an extra couple of thousand visitors a week at any site can’t hurt.
If you’re wondering, you create a banner ad in Adwords pretty much the same way you do a text ad, you just click on the image ad link instead of typing in your ad and url in the ad variation section of your campaign. I’d suggest setting up a new campaign for your banner ads though.
The first site was in the relationships niche and I’ve been getting several hundred clicks per day. The second was in a money making niche (my own), and the third mental health. The mental health fared the poorest in terms of click volume but it’s a fairly specific niche.
The conversion rates have been freaken horrible (under a tenth of a percent) but at 1c per click the ROI has been pretty sweet. I mean, I can have a conversion rate of 0.00025% and still be in front given the CPC. Opt in’s to those ads directing to a squeeze page have been ok (bolstered by some PLR free report material) at around 50 - 60% but confirmations for the relationship niche were surprisingly low (under 40% for those that originally opted in). Maybe they were so focused on getting laid they forgot to confirm…I dunno.
I already know this but my conversion rate for my own product has been low. I need to redo the copy to be more general public friendly, but I’ve been busy (and a little too lazy) to do it yet. Pity, because the response has been excellent so far (no refunds…yay!) with plenty of positive feedback.
Anyway, on the whole it hasn’t been a massively profitable test run in the sense that sales volumes haven’t been off the scales, but it’s certainly been easy sales. As I said above, I enjoy knocking together some graphics for a banner ad, so to me it was a lot more enjoyable than banging out half a dozen articles. It’s pretty small time but I for one don’t mind making any sort of sales.
On the whole, I’m sure if I apply myself I can yield some better volume returns, so I’ll keep you updated. I might post some sample ads later. Hey, you’re already ahead since I’ve reminded you to give this a crack instead of having to purchase some bastardized WSO which reminds you what you’d forgotten you should be doing 
