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 Effective Affiliate AdvertisementsBefore you go beserk putting affiliate program ads all over your site, let's look at what type of advertisements work. What sort of click through rates can you anticipate from different sorts of banners, buttons and text links?
Special Note - June 2004I used to have real examples of the banners and buttons and their percentages... however,I can no longer do that...And that illustrates a major problem with many affiliate programs... and that is when the program manager makes wholesale changes to their site... YOU have to make changes to yours!!! I hope you have the time to maintain your affilaite links if you have lots of them in place!!! Banners vs ButtonsFrom the stats section of my affiliate program manager, I see that buttons, which are usually placed in margins (best one click through of 2.3%), far out perform banners (usually under 1%)One thing I can safely determine, is that out of the 20 different ads being shown for my merchants... the ones that feature scantily clad women (or men) have the best click-through rates by far!
How do these rates compare?It's well known that the effectiveness of banner ads - the standard 468 pixels wide and 60 pixels high graphic ads which usually appear at the top of web pages - has dwindled a lot in the past few years... but if you run banner ads on your site, what click-through rates can you anticipate?I run banner ad programs on two sites, and on the site with the most impressions (the site contains a lot of "deep and meaningful" employment related content, so I'd expect the lower click-through rate) the best ad has a 0.9% click-through rate - or 1 click through in every 114 exposures. The worst ad has a 0.2% click-through rate - or 1 click through in every 443 exposures (there was one that had a 0.1% and 1:886 rate... but it is no more) With the other site (a directory of links to web sites, so I'd expect a higher click-through rate), the best ad has a 2.2% click-through rate - or 1 click-through in every 46 exposures. Here the worst ad has a 1.0% click-through rate - or 1 click-through in every 100 exposures. Interestingly, the worst ad from the first program scored a "terrific" 1.9% click-through rate on this site - or 1 click through in every 52 exposures! To summarise then, on my sites which contain highly focussed content, banner ads average around (or well below) 1.0% - or at best, one click-through for every 100 exposures. The rate is a little better for my site which is more general in the content it contains.
What about TEXT based ads???With my implementation of Google's Adsense program, and their text based ads, I am very interested in how they perform against the "traditional" banners and buttons...WIthout revealing too much (Google says I can't mention my actual figures without breaching their terms and conditions) what I can say is that their text based Adsense ads are consistently performing at an average click-through rate (based on all nine of my web sites) of around 7% Is it all worth it?Well... the proof is in the pudding so they say... so after reading all about my "experiment" in affiliate marketing, what do you think the result is? Read on and find out...
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