Helen Bailey of TemplateMonster.com wanted to share her company’s experience with BuySellAds. They’ve had to tackle a lot of issues faced by advertisers online, so we thought some advice would be helpful to our advertisers (and hopefully publishers will find it helpful to get into the minds of an online advertiser too). Here’s Helen!
If you’re new to TemplateMonster, we’re a web design company offering website templates, WordPress themes, Joomla templates, HTML5 templates and other design related items. We have been in business since 2002, and for the last three years we’ve been using BSA to promote our products and services. If you’d like to know the details, we’ve been mainly promoting our WordPress themes (you can see them here). Of course, it’s a highly competitive niche, but we’re satisfied with the results and we hope our experience will help you avoid mistakes that could cost you money.
Actually, the idea of this post is to help advertisers like us use BSA services even more effectively. However, at the same time our advices may be also interesting to publishers as we will explain what kind of websites attract advertisers most of all.
Why We Use BuySellAds
BSA is not the only service helping people buy and sell ads online, but we decided to use it as it gives us a chance to place our banners on good sites. By good sites we mean sites with a high PageRank, high traffic rank and of course sites with top quality content which is relevant to our audience (we’re mostly interested in design related sites).
For us, BSA means more people visiting our site, more sales and an ability to quickly build ad campaigns and easily manage them. What’s also important is that we don’t have to spend our time looking for the best placements for our ads. We just check what BuySellAds has to offer and decide which placement is worth a try.
Oh, I forgot to say that we’ve checked many similar services before setting on BuySellAds and what we really like about BSA is that the guys at BSA do not only claim they choose the best websites, but they really do this. (You can check it yourself by visiting this page).
Top Features of the Most Successful Websites for Your Ads
From our experience, you can expect good results from websites with the following features:
- Page Rank 4 and above.
- Alexa less than 30,000. The lower the Alexa rank, the better.
- Domain Authority higher than 50.
- Websites offering a good placement for your banner. (It’s better to keep your banner above the fold; for example, at the top of the sidebar, below post title, etc).
When selecting a placement for your banner it’s also important to check the price and the size of the banner. And of course, you’d better avoid those websites that have not been updated for months. You can use similarweb.com or other similar services to figure out how much traffic a site gets.
How to Monitor Clicks
We want to have the most precise information about our ads. So we check both our BSA account and our Google Analytics account. It happens sometimes that the information we get from BSA differs from the information we get from GA. Still, these differences are minimal when it comes to trustful websites like os-templates.com, wplift.com, web2feel.com, html5test.com, getk2.org and many others.
If you want our advice, test as many websites as you can, monitor the results and keep your ads only on those websites which give you the best results.
Unfortunately you never know before you try. So it should come as no surprise that we have tried many sites before we found the ones that work best.
How to Understand if the Banner Works Well or Not
So, you’ve bought a banner and you want to understand if it’s effective or not. Then it’s time to see how many clicks it gets, if people spend a lot of time on your site, or they just come and go, and so on.
As we’ve already mentioned we compare data from BuySellAds and Google Analytics and what we want to know is the cost per click, the number of clicks, the number of visits, Bounce Rate, Click Through Rate (CTR), Ecommerce Conversion Rate and average visit duration. Based on these data, we decide whether or not to renew the banner.
Do you think the more clicks the banner gets the better for you? No! You should also pay attention to the quality of clicks! For example, we had a few sites giving us a lot of clicks, but those clicks were useless as the people were only visiting our site for a few seconds.
So, it’s important to monitor your ad campaigns to ensure your ads are placed on the right sites and are shown properly!
As for us, we feel lucky when a click costs between 10 cents and $1; Bounce Rate is lower than 50% and CTR is more than 0.15%. As for the number of visitors, it’s specific for each individual site.
A few more tips:
- The most expensive banner is not necessarily the most effective one.
- Don’t follow your competitors. The same website can work well for them and be totally useless for you.
- If you buy a banner on a good website, you may get very good results even if your banner is placed below the fold.
How to Create an Effective Banner
This is the most creative part and creativity does not like advice, so we’ll give you just a few hints: go for a unique design and do not overload it with too many words. And remember, your banner will have just a few seconds to get noticed or ignored.
You can create 2 banners, or more, for one campaign with BSA. Thus, your ads will rotate and you’ll see which of them gets more clicks. Then you can remove the less successful banners and feel like a hero because you did your best to get the most out of your campaign.
A Few Words about BSA Support
We enjoy working with the friendly support team at BuySellAds. We mostly communicate with Angela and she always answers in time and to the point. All our issues have been solved in a positive, professional, and timely manner. This gives a feeling of reliability and trust. So we’d like to say a special thank you to the whole team, and especially Angela.
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So, that’s all. Thank you for reading and I hope our advice will help you find the best placements for your ads. Of course, we can’t guarantee which site will give you the best results, but we believe that our experience will help you use your advertising budget wisely.
For some great Publisher case studies, check out our BSA success stories! Are you a publisher or advertiser and you want to share your story?
Email us!