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As a member of the online RPG community we’re spoiled for choice. Whereas other webmasters have to search around high and low, dodging marketing schemes or even malicious code in their attempt to find a banner exchange, we have access to a number of generous options. This page sets out to illustrate the do and the do-not of the banner exchange.
I’ll start on the friendly bit first – the do’s.
Do consider joining a banner exchange. If your website is not heavy with graphics already then the banner exchange is a great way of injecting some colour and some illustrations into your page. Join an exchange you can trust. For most of us this will mean subscribing to an exchange offered by a fellow RPG site. Exchanges work by showing your banner on another site every time your site manages to display one of their banners. The term used to describe the displaying a banner is “impression”. Exchanges that offer a 1:1 ratio mean that for every single impression you generate you’ll have your banner shown once. You’re exchanging banner impressions for banner impressions. Here in the community most exchanges are kind enough to offer this but out in the wider internet you’ll find exchanges tend to use 1:2, 2:3 or 3:4 ratios. 1:2 is the worst for us. An impression does not mean that someone will go visit your site though and that’s why the first important step is do everything we can to insure that our banners are being shown to people who might be interested in our site – another reason to join an exclusive RPG banner exchange.
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Different designs of banners perform differently. Design a good banner and more people will visit your site. This is rather tricky since not only do you have to keep the banner small in size (memory size) you have to do better than every other webmaster out there. Banner design is a bane for me; I can’t draw to save myself, if you can draw then you already have a strong advantage. Banners that use bright colours do well. Banners with faces and eyes do well. Animated banners tend to do better than static ones since the movement draws the attention of web surfers but there’s not much more annoying than a poor animated banner. Phrases like “click here” do well and so do banners that ask questions.
That’s a start. If you’re lucky enough to have your banner showed many times through an exchange then over the course of time it’ll loose its attraction; people get bored and the chance of luring someone who’s used to seeing your banner to actually click on it grows less and less. You need to replace your banners now and then; you need to keep them fresh.
You do need to make sure that the url to your site and graphic is correct. You’ll loose everything if people can’t click into your site. If the url to your graphic is dead then you’re highly unlikely to earn any clickthroughs and are likely to annoy fellow webmasters in the exchange by scarring their site with failed images. How many dead banner images have you seen at the bottom of GameWyrd? It’s annoying, isn’t it?
Despite all this hard work you must struggle to keep realistic expectations. Most web users are so used to seeing banners that they automatically ignore them. The last figure I saw stated that on average the click through ratio of banners to impressions was 0.03%. This figure climbs to a less than breathtaking 0.1% for sites such as Yahoo and carefully targeted advert serves like DoubleClick and Advertising.com. Advertising.com has boasted that their new target technology can improve this exchange rate to almost 3%. Is it worth it when the figures are so small? If there’s room on your site for a banner and you don’t think it’s going to spoil the professional appearance of all your hard work then you’ve got nothing to loose and more users to gain.
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If you go to all this effort on your banners then you don’t want someone else to come along and mess it up for you. Here begins the negative half of this essay – the do nots.
Play fair. Exchanges make a point of putting in their rules that you mustn’t hide a banner out of site in a tiny or off-page frame. This means you’re generating impressions without giving a user a chance to click onto the banner and into the other site. People who do this are easy to catch and so people rarely do. There’s a lesser crime though and very many people freely engage in this selfish activity. I doubt you’ve never been to a webpage that has a veritable tower of as many banner exchange schemes as they can find tucked away at the bottom of the page. I hate this; I encourage readers to hate this too. The bottom of the page is a perfectly acceptable place for a banner, GameWyrd does it and research has shown that banners at the bottom of page perform only slightly less well than banners at the top. The web user has finished reading the page and so they may very well click on the banner if it interests them. However, if the user needs to scroll down even a little bit then the chances are very high they’ll do something else instead. If they come across a whole collection of banners then the chances are that they’ll go somewhere else instead. Even if the surfer stays on the site the chances of them clicking on your banner when its surrounded by many other banners are minute. You wouldn’t want this to happen to your banner so don’t do it to other peoples.
It is possible to be a member of more than one banner exchange without resorting to “banner farms”. Only display one banner from an exchange on a page at a time. If you have access to dynamic script languages like ASP or PHP then it’s easy enough to code up a rotation. You may be able to display two if your content is long enough to separate the banner at the top of the page from the banner at the bottom.
Never display two banners from the same exchange at a time. This is a rule of most exchanges. It’s an important one to follow. Exchanges tend to work by remembering the banner your page is currently showing and then redirecting any user who clicks on it to the right site. If you display two or more banners on a page from the same exchange they’ll all point to the same page rather than the websites they actually represent.
It is generally not against the rules to put an exchange banner on a separate webpage that pops-under your actual webpage; but it should be. Some sites try and get away with having a reloading/refreshing second screen that keeps busy promoting their site while burning your hard earned impressions without ever letting anyone else see them. If you catch a site doing this send the webmaster an angry email.
Do get all that you can from our friendly online community but don’t succumb to temptation and become a banner bugger.
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