Should I use banner exchanges?
There are many banner exchanges on the web that you can join. these are programs that will give you a code to place on your website. In exchange for you placing this code on your site, your banner will be displayed on other sites in the network. generally for every time you display the exchange code on your site twice, you will receive 1 credit. That is your banner displayed once. That is a 2:1 banner exchange, which is the most common.
This sound like a good deal until you realize that things are not simple. You see, banner exchanges are one of the earlier forms of advertising on the internet. Well, surfer have trained themselves to ignore banner ads. Banners on the internet are given a surfer expects to see banners ever where. Since they are so used to seeing them, they have sort of just become part of the background. Because of this, banner click through rates have dropped to a frightening low.
Lets get back to the 2:1 ratio offered to you by banner exchanges. Banner click through rates are around 1% right now. This is pretty low. For every 100 people who see your banner, one person will click on it. These are just averages, but they tend to hold true most often.
With the exchange programs offering you a 2:1 ratio, if you have 200 visitors, your banner will be displayed 100 times on other sites. Not bad.
With the banner click through rates as low as they are, that begins to sound less appealing.
In theory, that changes your agreement to display the banner code two times for your banner to be displayed once. Your agreement has become, for every 200 visitors you can get to your website, the banner exchange program will send one extra visitor your way. You would have to have over 1000 visitors to your site before one of these programs gave you an extra 5 visitors!
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