Sitepoint.com Banner ad

The ad:

I ran the following four banners.

This first banner was designed to look like their site.
Click-through rate achieved: 1.3%

This next banner was fake html banner and it worked well.
Click-through rate: 2.2%

Another fake html banner.
Click-through rate: 2.5%

The simplest of the four and by far the most effective.
Click-through rate: 3%

Analyzing the results: A total of 100,037 impressions were served (that just means my banners appeared 100,037 times) and 2,307 clicks resulted. This is a click-through rate of 2.31% and is considered excellent by today's standards in banner advertising.

However here's why I do not like banner advertising nearly as much as ezine advertising...

At their regular price of $35 CPM or $35 per 1000 impressions I would have paid $3500 for this campaign. (I got a break by swapping some ad space with them.) That means I would have paid $1.50 per visitor. That is much higher than my average per visitor price in my best ezines. So even with "great" results, banner advertising cannot touch top sponsorship ezine advertising, in my humble opinion! Unless you can get targeted impressions for $10 per 1000 or less, banner advertising is too costly.

In closing... Sitepoint was great. Super banner appearances, clickthroughs, and excellent reporting. But banner advertising itself is not as profitable as many other strategies including ezine classified advertising, top sponsorships, solo ads and pay per click search engines.