I received an email today from a marketer who claims that he only uses Banner advertising through Google's content network, and claims that "banners drive around 85% of ALL paid traffic, crushing Google, Yahoo and MSN combined... and the traffic is dirt cheap, massively abundant and high converting" I thought banner advertising was merely a passive form of generating traffic and not really a main method. I might be wrong. What's your opinion?
What you probably don't realize is that Google AdWords is one of the biggest Banner ad sites on the Internet and using the AdWords Content Network, you can make a lot of money and drive a lot of traffic to your site. How To Use Google's Content Network. Realize that the Content Network is for real and it is not some experiment that Google is doing. I get thousands of visitors from the Content Network and that traffic converts to buyers all the time. The reason is that Google has gotten really good at making sure your ad gets placed on the right sites that are related to your market. Realize that most of your competition is not using the Content Network. Most site owners are scared of this traffic source because they are worried that they will get massive amounts of clicks and no sales. They are also worried about click fraud and all kinds of other things. Well let them worry about all that & you focus on getting the traffic that actually does make money and convert to buyers. You can get traffic way cheaper on the Content Network then you can on the Search Network at Google. The reason is, there is less competition for reasons I have stated above & the quality score is not as bad as the Search Network. I have found that I can get clicks for a cost of 75% less then on the Search Network & the traffic will often convert better... Cheers,
Banner advertising is far from dead. Especially for advertisers. Publishers can make a very good income if they have enough traffic to join a network that pays $2 or $3 per CPM.
What other forms do you guys make money from - the links? I always have run banner advertising. Have I been going about this wrong?!
All of my websites run google adsense alongside a separate cpm network where applicable (some places make you remove adsense). If you have serious traffic (15k impressions a day) you could easily be making $45 a day from banner ads alone at $3 per CPM. Add in an average 2% CTR on adsense clicks at $.30 per click (again, an average) and your looking at an additional $90 per day. That's a total of $135 a day if you can get those kinds of numbers. You can also sell articles with links on your site. Or you can sell blog roll links. Additionally promoting products related to your niche are also helpful.
Banner ads, like regular PPC or CPM, takes an investment in testing. You have to spend some money to find what works, then scale it for additional profit.