Traffic Exchanges: Fit for Purpose?
This article is based on work I have been doing recently in connection with our own businesses. While most of our use of traffic exchanges has been in the core process of exchanging page views, other aspects have become especially important to two of our business ventures:
* Banner advertising, and * Geographically focused promotion.
This has led me to evaluate a number of exchanges with respect to our specific requirements.
Most exchanges provide for banner advertising, but some provide better and more flexible arrangements than others. Without attempting to write a major dissertation on banner advertising, here are some of the main lessons highlighted by this recent work.
* I particularly warm toward those which have a simple, straightforward method of converting exchange credits into banner credits. However, watch out for the conversion ratio; it can vary by as much as five times between different exchanges, from 1:10 to 1:50. (I still have not worked out the rationale for such major differences).
* Look carefully at the positioning of the banner displays. One small exchange I found had what at first seemed a very good arrangement of placing banners directly over where the cheat-proofing surf bar is about to appear, so while you're waiting to click your attention tends to focus right on that very spot. The downside, however, is that the moment the cheat-proof bar appears the banner is gone. Possibly this type of arrangement may prove better for brand awareness raising than for attracting immediate sales, but I'm still planning on using it.
* Another thing to watch is the colour scheme. I've noticed blue banners being displayed against blue backgrounds, and very pale-coloured banners against white. They're almost invisible. Don't just dump your banners indisciminately in any and all exchanges. Check which will suit each specific exchange and so produce unmissable displays. Personally I find the colour scheme of TrafficPro-X to be highly banner-amenable but have not tested this scientifically.
* Another lesson has been to browse each exchange in order to discover what else is being promoted there at present. If you're promoting a particular affiliate programme and there are already five other people pushing the same thing you might be well advised to use a different exchange for a while and come back later. However, if all that promotion activity is in page displays and you see no banners, why not put some up there and capture the parallel space.
* Returning to the question of flexibility, make a note of the exchanges which make it easy for you to move banner credits around. If you've loaded up 25,000 credits for a particular programme and after 10,000 you've had a click-through-rate of only 0.01 on some exchanges down to just over 70% on others. On certain exchanges more than one in four people who see our home page (and in that particular case we're not using a splash or squeeze page) click on one of its links and progress to other pages in the site. Indeed, as far as we can tell from the rather basic site statistics we put in place for that test, around one in ten visitors arriving from certain exchanges viewed between four and six pages before leaving. That is worthwhile traffic!
The lesson? Test, test and test again, not only your banners and pages displayed to see what gives the best responses but also comparative results from different exchanges. You'll eventually find a formula that works for you. It is hard work. Promoting through hit exchanges will not generate immense riches from working 15 minutes a day, but keep at it in a systematic manner and I'm confident that the investment of time on the exchanges will not disappoint you.
David Murray is a semi-retired international management consultant now enjoying the development of several web-based businesses including www.brunlea-web.com
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