Webmarketingtoday.com Banner ad

The ad:

I ran two separate banners. They were fake html banners below:

The results: First of all, I should make it clear that I did not pay for these ads. I swapped a top sponsorship in my BizWeb eGazette so I could try their banner advertising. My hope was that it would perform well and I could make regular banner ad buys at their site. I was sorely disappointed.

A total of 58,013 impressions were served which resulted in 365 clicks to my site. That is just 7 clicks every 1000 times the banner was shown. With that click-through rate of less than 1% I would have lost thousands of dollars had I paid for the ad.

I suspect that the reason is where the banners are placed. There's no white space around the banners as they are served at this site, but rather a blue border. In my humble opinion. the banners do not integrate into the site too well. They load slowly and simply look like ads -- and web surfers just don't click obvious ads.

So far I've yet to meet a banner advertising campaign that is worth repeating. My best advice is to stick to better online advertising strategies such as the various email marketing resources described at the ad results page.