Hi, I have heard some good things about arcade banner exchanges. Some people get around 3-5% CTR with some of the banner exchanges. I am just wondering how much of this traffic is real as I want to take part in some of these banner exchanges to increase my sites traffic. But I also have good paid advertisers on the site which include ValueClick and Casale and Tribal Fusion. I don't want to end up getting banned from these because I find that I am getting false robot traffic to my site from these exchanges as these are my main sources of revenue. So are they really worth using if you have valueclick and things on your site or is there nothing to worry about and I should just enjoy the extra quality traffic and earnings.
That's a good question. The answer is that the quality of traffic depends greatly on the exchange and how well it's managed. On my exchange, I utilize a combination of automated software quality control, plus detailed human statistics review to ensure that it maintains the highest quality traffic possible.
Great question. I also wonder if Google AdSense would approve or not approve of such sites generating traffic?
High-quality arcade banner exchanges are 100% compatible with AdSense, YPN, or any other monitization system that you use. It's no different from traffic from links or any other type of ad. From there it's just a matter of how well the traffic converts for you.
I don't think it should be any problem unless the traffic is not real. If it is real then the traffic is just as good as any other traffic that you get on the web or offline. This is because it is just a banner exchange where your banner is shown on other sites and if their visitors want to click on the banner then you will receive the traffic. But how much of the traffic is real, I don't know. If there are cheaters see, I am not sure. I would imagin there would be, but would my site actually see this cheater traffic or does the traffic exchanges actually filter it out so I will not see any of it. I don't see the point in ruin my business over a little extra traffic, but if it is nothing to worry about and it is all proper traffic then it will help also help my business alot in the growing part of it.
I have just gone and glanced over ValueClicks Publisher guidelines / TOS and it didn't mention anything about traffic exchange sites as far as I could see. These are CPM banner exchanges I am joining and not CPC banner exchanges which is also a totally different thing. ValueClicks did mention about "Pay to Surf" sites though, but that is totally different. I will still like to know about the quality though. How can we trust them or am I just getting a little worried for nothing here.
As mentioned, the final word on the quality of any traffic source is how well it converts to revenue on your sites. One way to measure this yourself, is to purchase a given amount of traffic from different sources and then send that traffic to a site that has little other traffic. For example, on Day 1 send traffic from source A, on Day 2 send traffic from source B, etc. Then you can look at your daily earnings and see if any of the sources are particularly better or worse than the others.
One thing that every banner exchange should provide and that is the ratio. How do we know how many impressions we get back for the amount we send. It is no where to be seen on your site. It is a banner exchange, this information is vital.
I am not really on about Adsense or YPN, I am on about Valueclick and Casale which are CPM programs. If robot trafficy clicks come from these traffic exchanges then it is just robot traffic going to these CPM programs and it may look like we are using robot traffic to cheat the system. Anyway, I have seen many other sites over that last 10 minutes using these exchanges and also having CPM ads on their site so I guess it must be alright aslongs as I keep a close eye on the traffic quality.
john269, I've been running banners exchanges for many years, and I have found that using "ratios" is not the best way to provide a fair and balanced exchange. There are two ways that "ratios" can be used with impressions or clicks. Let's take these two cases one at a time and I will explain their flaws: Impression based Ratio (members earn impressions for impressions sent) This is the classic banner exchange setup, but the problem is that it tempts some members into generating large amounts of fake impressions in order to get more benefits. If you search on "rezgames" here at DP, you may find the story of a kid who managed to game some of the big exchanges (but not mine) using this method. Basically he gave nothing, but got a lot of traffic in return. This type of system also encourages poor banner placements since clicks don't matter. Click based Ratio (members earn clicks for clicks sent) This system is a little bit better than the impression-based ratio because it click-oriented. Clicks are harder to fake than impressions, and this system encourages better banner placements which is good for all the participants. The problem with this system is that since users are rewarded with gauranteed clicks, there is no impetus to use high-CTR banners. If you think about it, what this ultimately means is that the banners that get shown the most are the banners that nobody wants to click on, because the system is required to keep showing a member's banner until it gets the earned number of clicks. When the system gets clogged-up with low-CTR banners, this makes it harder to earn clicks for all members, which drives the CTR down and hurts the effectiveness of the exchange. Results based Reward (members earn impresions for clicks sent) I don't use a standard ratio, because I don't think it's a good system. Instead my exchange rewards clicks with impressions. This means that the system is both action-oriented (reward for clicks) and also rewards the best banners since members want to make the most of their earn impressions by using high-CTR banners. This tends to drive CTR up instead of down, meaning that all members get more out of their participation because the system rewards results, good banner placements, and good banners. That is why I'm proud to display detailed statistics on my exchange... http://www.funklicks.com/info.php In fact, at this moment, FunKlicks is the largest arcade banner exchange on the planet that provides public statistics. I believe that we've reached this level due to our unique reward system and attention to the quality of our traffic.
Thanks for the long review of what yours is about. I see so many that use ratio's that I thought yours may have been the same. I guess I was wrong. I have not really seen yours used before unless I am behind on all this stuff. lol
I use funklicks and my 125x125 ads recieve close to 4% CTR I would recommend at least giving them a try.
I had given 3 banner exchanges a try, and have now decided to pull them of my site. They were giving me around 3 - 4% CTR, which is good, but the downside is that every banner is around 30 - 40kb's in size, which makes my webpages take about 2 - 3 times as long to load with 3 banners per page. That is rather alot longer and will end up loosing me alot of traffic rather than gaining me it due to the slowness of the loading pages. I have made sure that all of my site is optimized so much that it loads as fast as possible, and putting banners on it goes against that.
I can vouch for FunKlicks being an excellent source of traffic. I recently started using them on my game site and received nearly 1000 visitors to my site for 20,000 impressions. My other one's do good as well and I can't complain about any of them. Thermit, is it possible to purchase impressions on your exchange because I can't seem to find anywhere on the site once I'm logged in. -Alex www.rezgames.com