Ad Churning and Irrelevant Site Wake Up Call

This is the second time you've said or implied this, Derek. I see traffic from Coop sites because I look to see where my traffic is coming from. I'm not Microsoft or Google or Amazon, but I wouldn't say my main sites are either tiny or with no traffic. I'm also not claiming that the Coop is providing anything like a high percentage of the traffic to those sites... but as someone (yfs1, I think) said earlier, if even 2 or 3 a month click through and "stick", that's a pretty damn good ROI for free advertising.

My concern is that in the single-minded pursuit of backlinks and Google PR, some Coop members may be missing this benefit.

If you really don't care about it, then of course your strategy of ignoring it makes perfect sense.

 

In my case it is sales but if you were advertising a forum, a signup would be a conversion. Both are valid conversions.

Even your example of a newsletter signup is valid as a conversion if that is your goal when using the advertising network.

I am not saying that the SE benefit isn't a big part of the network. All that I have asked is that the Advertising part not be sacrificed for SE benefit. Shawn seems to agree by his posts and in the direction the network is moving (i.e Stats)

 

See, this is the part I am (sincerely) having difficulty understanding.

If you could show me proof positive that I would derive zero backlinks from the Coop, why would I NOT want to take advantage of free advertising? That's not a frivolous or rhetorical question: I'm dead serious. How often does someone offer you genuinely free no-strings-attached advertising? And what would be the downside to taking advantage of that?

 

I don't see how 'ignoring' it will change the results at all. I'll either get click-thrus from the coop or I won't. I can't exactly change my link text to try to get click-thru's without HURTING my Google/SE efforts. Personally, I'd rather spend my efforts trying to get another couple hundred clicks a day from Google-- from people SEARCHING for what I have, versus 2 or 3 a MONTH from an unrelated site...


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Derek

 

It's not free. I'm contributing valuable space on my sites to display the ads so that I can get ads displayed throughout the network. When the ads are displayed on the network in the footers in small text(effectively 'on your shoes'), I can't exactly expect this to have a good ROI.


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Derek

 

And there is free advertising offered elsewhere but without fail it has very poor approval processes and no where to post about bad links.

It is the quality of this network that makes a difference

 

No-one is trying to stop you from doing that

 

To clarify, when I say "ignoring" the potential advertising benefits, I am referring back to my point that it may help to examine your Coop ads from the perspective of advertising and click-throughs rather than solely from the perspective of anchor text.

 

And how can I change my coop ads without sacrificing the benefits the anchor text gives to Google?


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Derek

 

I'm not sure what you're using for anchor text and there is not NECESSARILY a conflict between good anchor text and good ad text. The point is a simple one: Read your ads from BOTH viewpoints and ask yourself:

1. If I care about the ad potential of this ad and not just the anchor text, and

2. if I were surfing and spotted this particular ad,

3. would it have sufficient "snap" or whatever to meake ME click on it?

Addendum
And if you don't feel you can satisfy both in the same ad, then create separate ads for the two aims and mix them up a bit.

 

All three of these as well as 100 other points made in this thread would be addressed and solved with the adoption of something similar to what is in post #116.

With only the intention of trying to help this group, can I get some feedback on this?

 

Damn, I got a neg rep for this post...

Now I don't have two greens

 

That sucks Oliver. I have to spread some rep before giving it to you again

 

Beautiful idea JoeWood, but not exactly easy to implement. There are 5000 sites in the network, which means probably at least 5,000,000 pages. (figuring there are a bunch of < 1000 page sites, but quite a few 10,000+ page sites to make up for it)

That's a lot of spidering that needs to get done, and it has to be done regularly.

Not only that, but probably a lot of ads wouldn't find a home, or would be limited to certain sites.

 

Thanks. I'm the first to admit I couldn't do it technically, but...

- None of the ads 'have a home' now.
- I didn't have in mind a traditional spider with a memory, simply if the keyword were listed on the page X # of times AFTER the ad is placed on the page, then it sticks for the appropriate amount of time.
- Best of both worlds because there would be full rotation, like now, unless there are keyword matches which make the site relevant to the target.

 

How about if you were forced to choose between using the co-op and some other advertising network due to the exclusivity clause in the TOS. If the co-op was giving you no benefit in the SEs would it still be the network of choice?

 

We already have a choice now with Link Vault. Some people have made the choice to go with them, many have kept the majority of their sites in the Coop

 

Link vault is different enough in my opinion for it not to be considered an alternative...

 

You don't really get much weight or voltage as they call it with link vault for placing the links on a forum with tons of pages compared to placing their links on pages that have higher pagerank. As it's valued on a page by page basis so it's very different in that sense.

 

Some good points made with a semi static system. That would atleast help a bit