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.
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.
30-40% of people have ad blocking software installed. So they probably didn't even see those ad impressions.
Usually, those don't count as impressions for ad networks.
I've never understood why an ad needs to look like an ad. That whole industry (adsense) has been stuck in the 90s.
I'd contact the site owners and suggest some sort of alternative to banner ads. Maybe you get to have your site name been the temporary name of one of the sub-forums? Similar to how companies buying the naming rights for sporting venues. Just an idea but I'd try something else than typical banner ads of any sort.
i never look at the ads. never mind click.
Where are you getting your CTR stats from that make you say your numbers are terrible? I feel like anything from .1 - .2 is right in the expected range for display ads.
It's also hard to gauge the value of a campaign without knowing if you had any conversions (purchases or new leads) and the average life time value (LTV) of your customers.
So let's say on the business and webmaster forum you had 1 conversion for a monthly 34.99 (I'm assuming this is for rankdseo). That customer only needs to stay for 2 months (34.99 x 2 = $70) and you've made a return of $20 on your total advertising budget for that channel. On top of that maybe you have a much longer LTV and for every conversion you are looking at an average of 5 months or ~$175 per customer. I'd happily pay 50 to make 3.5X my investment.
Without being able to measure conversions you just don't have enough data to say whether this worked or not.
I agree about not knowing the conversions. That was a mistake from my end.
But still, $170 for 52 clicks is insane. There are better ways to spend money and get more traffic.
Only do Facebook ads. Im in Hungary, for app installs it does .10 dollars each, for page likes i can buy a like for .03 dollar.