Hidden advantage of banner exchanges

A benefit not often appreciated from using banner exchanges is that they expand your market reach to another pool of potential customers for your website products and services. ie. the other members of the banner exchange. This is especially true if you use some of the special interest or niche audience type banner exchanges (eg. martial arts), whose members may not be people who would normally visit your website, but may have in interest in your product because it has some relationship potential.

For example if you are marketing music CD's, why not target book purchasers with educational CD's ? 

People are going to leave your website at some point anyway. If they click on a banner from a banner exchange, at least you will get some traffic benefit from their departure.  

As well, you can gain additional impressions by getting others to join the banner exchange from your referral link. In other words, some banner exchanges cater for downline building, and over time this can boost the number of additional hits you are getting well above a 1:1 ratio.

As you can gather, its all about trade-offs. You give up something ( space on your website ) and gain access to a different audience in return. Whether this is worth it to you is something only you can assess.

What sort of results can you expect?

Our experience has been that the click through ratio for a specific banner can be anything from almost zero to around .20%, with most clustering around the .02% to .05% band. On occasions you can get .3% or more.

Response rates to banners for affiliate sites tend to be very very low as you are competing with perhaps 000's of affiliates all displaying an identical standard banner.

In these cases you will likely get better results by using banner exchanges that allow text banners with content that you write. Or you could design your own original graphic banner for your affiliate site and display that instead, to differentiate yourself from all the others.  

So are banner exchanges worth the trouble?

We have all seen those garish free webpages that show multitudes of banners from different exchanges, take forever to load, and have no other real content that gets our interest.

Creating these 'banner farms' as they are called is a definite 'no-no'. You will get sprung very quickly if you break the terms of services that most banner exchanges have, and it does nothing at all for your online reputation.

Using banner exchanges that way is almost a complete waste of your time. 

Careful selection of a few banner exchanges can be quite positive for your website traffic , especially if you take the time to think through the benefits and trade-offs you are making in your own particular case.

One banner exchange with some great features is BannerBeast.

We have been getting very acceptable click-thru ratios with this exchange, (a massive 1%  in some cases).