You Can Do Better Than Banner Exchanges

They look so tempting, don't they? The promotional materials sound great: get 2 impressions for every three you show, get one impression per impression, get ten thousand free impressions when you sign up! Sometimes they are real fancy, with different size graphics, pop-up windows and the new fad, pop-behind windows. There is even one service (and probably many more) that will pop-up a full page of ads (which they nicely allow you to add a couple of banners to) behind your site!

Of course we are talking about banner exchanges. The concept here is simple. Create a banner and submit it to the banner exchange. They will show your banner on other sites, and in return you will display other people's banners on your site.

There is usually a ratio of their impressions to your impressions. This means for every 2 or 3 times you display a banner from the exchange another site will show your banner a specified number of times. A common ratio is 3:2, which means every three times you show a banner, your's will be displayed twice.

So what's the problem? Well, I've personally experimented with many different banner exchanges, including some of the more exotic versions, and I have yet to run across one that actually produces any meaningful traffic. By that I mean the number of hits generated by the exchange did not increase by a detectable amount.

You see, a couple of years ago when the internet was much younger and more innocent, banners were all the rage. Everything seemed new and fresh, and it was not uncommon for as many as 5% of the people who viewed a banner ad to click it (this is known as click-thru).

Now you are lucky is a banner produces a click-thru rate of .5%, and rates of less than .1% are increasingly common. What's happened? People are just plain tired of banners. Thus, as a method to promote a web site banners are simply not useful anymore. (The exception is professionally designed, precisely targeted, perfectly tested banner campaigns).

In addition, banners take away space from your web site viewing area. This is especially true of the higher ratio programs, as they often require the banner to be placed on the top of your home page. This not only takes away from your web site viewable area, it's takes it from the most premium area - the top of the home page.

Even if you do place the banners at the bottom of the page you are still reducing the load time. Banners tend to load slowly anyway because of their site, and it often seems as if the servers running the exchanges are slower than most. Thus, adding one or two banners at the bottom of your page could cause it to load very slowly.

On top of all of this, you generally do not have very much control over which banners display on your site. Some programs do allow you to specify categories or exclude certain types of sites, but that is just about as far as you can go. Most exchanges do manually check each banner to be sure it is suitable, but you are basically giving up control of a part of your web site to someone you do not know and who may not have the same taste as you.

Even worse are the pop-up window variations on banner exchanges. The windows which pop-up in front of a web page are truly obnoxious and should, in my opinion, never be used. I don't know about you, but I really hate it when the first thing that I see when I surf to a web site is a pop-up ad!

There are several kinds of pop-up windows. Your standard window will pop up when you enter the site. An exit window (also known as an exit console) will display when you leave the page (and the smarter ones display when you leave the site, not the page).

Another variation is to have the window jump behind everything else (I refer to these a "pop behind" windows). The theory here is you (the viewer) will eventually have to look at the window, at the very least to close it. I've also seen these windows immediately minimize to the tool bar, and recently I noticed that these are starting to include timers. By this I mean the window minimizes, then periodically a small window pops up to give you an advertisement. This could occur long after you have left the site.

The most obnoxious, horrible banner exchange program combined the worst of all of these features. If you signed up your site for this program you would get a web page which includes a couple of dozen banners of all sizes. You will then get to add your own banners to the exchange to be displayed randomly on other pages for other sites. The idea here was to cause a pop-behind window to display with all of these ads. The program offered an incredible (sarcasm intended) 10:1 ratio (meaning you display the window 10 times and you get one display on someone else's site). This is truly one of the most loathsome derivations of banners and pop-up windows that I have ever witnessed.

The final kicker is not only will you receive little or no extra traffic from these banner exchange programs - you will most likely loose far more traffic than you gain. First, by presenting a pop-up window or banner you are giving someone an opportunity to leave your site. Second, by including banners and increasing your load times you are improving the odds that someone will simply surf along somewhere else.

So the question that begs to be answered is "are banner programs useful". And the answer is a resounding "no". You've got far better tools at your disposal to promote your site.

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