I bought 3 banners (ad spaces) on 3 forums for $170

Lately, I've been looking for new places to advertise one of my websites, and I thought to give a try on buying banner ads.

I myself am blind to ads and banners, so I didn't have high hopes about them, but I thought I'd give it a try, since my product is about SEO, and I had the opportunity to buy ad spaces on 3 forums about SEO and online marketing.

On May 6 I launched ads (banners 728x90) on all 3 websites.

I spent $170,10 on 3 ads. They'll be shown for a month, 10K impressions each. That's 30K impressions TOTAL.

The month is almost up. I've got 28743 impressions so far and the results are... TERRIBLE!
I probably could improve the banner design and all, but for $170 and 30'000 impressions, the click count is just ridiculous.

Here are the stats:


From 28,7K impressions, I received only 52 clicks!!! Which is only 0,18% CTR.

The results from each website vary. The best CTR is 0,27% and the worst is 0,11%.

This has been one of the worst investments I've ever made. But if I wouldn't risk it, I wouldn't ever know.

Maybe my banner ad looks like shit (I don't think it does), and maybe the CTR would have been better by testing different designs.

I did, however, make a huge mistake by not adding my own affiliate tag so I could track sales. So I have no idea if I made any sales from these 52 clicks. Next time I won't make such a mistake.

If I had seen a similar case study before buying these ads, I wouldn't have even bothered. I hope this helps some of you who have thought about buying ad space on websites.

 

A long time ago I worked for an advertising firm. As to banner ads we always highlighted that you needed to use gobs of color...the more colorful the better the results, and we had the stats to back it up. Are your ads colorful?

 

Well, they weren't bland that's for sure. Bright Yellow text on a blue background. Both contrast very well together.

 

Did you think of trying it again with the advertising firm to see the difference?

 

Test different banners.

 

Nope. Seems, like a waste of money.

 

hmm interesting, could you post the banners as well? I would like to see how they looked, maybe there was no clear CTA? Or maybe it was just a bad timing or those forums does not perform well.

 

Any sales or conversions?

 

To be honest most Internet Marketers would tell you that $170 for 30k impressions on a forum would yield with an insignificant return. For starters, an impression is just someone landing on a page. A single person could click through 20 pages in a session and that could be 20 impressions on your banner. Let's look at a hypothetical:

• If a forum has 30 regulars who visit the forum once per day for 30 days and click on 25 pages each session that would be 22,500 impressions in a month. Would you pay $170 for that knowing that those 30 people have visited the forum every day for the last 5 years and are less than likely to click on anything other than a thread?

What is your marketing goal? Most companies who use banner ads are using retarget/remarket strategies and are most likely already branded. They also use it as a "billboard" and it's just a small piece of their marketing plan. If a one time of $170 for 30k IMPRESSIONS was YOUR marketing plan you failed before you even finished payment.

If you only have a $200 budget you should put the money back in to your pocket. You can do way better by SEO, social media, videos etc. for free.

 

Ad banners in forums or in other sources as well?

 

Personally I've never trusted in banner ads... We all see that's a very low click-trough rate. Might be the text and color on the banners weren't engaging enough. Most of the 52 clicks converted after?

 

Great money can be made with banner ads. I am actually looking at banner ads and just paid someone for a training who knows his stuff with banners. Trends changed so much since I last did some banner ad training and what I am learning is entirely different to what I knew 5 years ago.

My suggestion is don't give up after a $170 test run. It is going to take more than that to learn how to effectively run ads.

One of the thing I learned off him is that ads actually need to not look like ads and seem like they are a part of the website, they need to be interactive and have say drop downs or a quiz like format to get people to click the banner so that they land on your landing page.

You have to study the psychology of the website you are advertising on and make the ad blend in with whatever else is happening on the page. The fact that you are getting clicks is something so don't just give up after a couple of trial runs

 

What 3 those site you buy from..?

 

BuySellAds.com

 

Hopefully you did your research on your ads before you bought them if you didn’t!
This how you stay in front of your competitors and know want to purchase
Before hand! This is a tool that will help you a lot like it did me. It’s just like printing money on demand.