The Secret To Super Effective Ads or What BuySellAds Is Hiding From You?

I hope the guys from BuySellAds won’t hate me for this post.

That’s because it will teach you how to get more visitors to your website while spending less money. On the other hand, armed with this method some new people may sign up to BuySellAds, so I guess I’m doing the right thing sharing it with you.

There’s my previous post where I talk about getting the biggest possible CTR (Click Through Rate) on BuySellAds. I encourage you to read it first if you’re new to BuySellAds.

Not ROI, but still…

How do you measure if the ad you’ve paid for is effective? It should bring SALES!

Well we ain’t going to take sales into account this time. There are tons of things on your website that may prevent even the most engaged visitors from making a purchase. Thus, to secure myself from questions like “Tim, I’ve followed your method, where’s my money?” I’m going to focus on a different metric – visitors.

So I’ve just analyzed our monthly results with BuySellAds and discovered that the highest price we were paying per visitor was $0.83 while the lowest was $0.11 (I wonder why BSA doesn’t show you this metric in their report? I had to calculate it manually for each of my ads.)

I’m sure you’re like me and prefer to pay less where possible, but how do you know what would the CPV (Cost Per Visitor) be before you buy the ad and run it for sometime?

You can’t get the exact number unfortunately. But raw number – easily!

Do the maths!

Oh please… Don’t pass out as you hear the word “maths”. If you’re smart enough to buy yourself a cup of coffee I’m sure you’ll handle this:

Where…

And so the resulting formula will look like this:

The only variable here that BuySellAds doesn’t show you is CTR. It’s not possible to know the CTR before you publish your ad, but I’m sure the guys at BuySellAds have some nice estimates that may have helped us a lot!

Unveiling the Unknown

When I need to know the CTR before publishing an ad I usually call David Copperfield.

C’mon! You know I’m just kidding. Just run your ads on different spots for a few months and I’m sure you’ll get the idea of the CTR you can expect from each ad placement.

Here are some of my own observations that might help you out:

• 125×125 pixels Ads won’t have a CTR more than 0.03% (even if they are above the fold) – Examples: graphichive.net (above the fold) & graphicmania.net (below the fold)
• 200×125 & 260×125 pixels Ads placed below the fold will have the CTR of 0.04-0.05% – Examples: smashinghub.com & cruzine.com
• 300×150 pixels Ad placed above the fold can have a CTR of 0.12% – Example: web3mantra.com
• 200×90 pixels Ad (and this is just CRAZY) can have a CTR of freaking 0.22% if it’s above the fold on a website with no other graphical content (such as a web forum) – Example: designerstalk.com (those ads are crazy visible as the rest of the page is pretty dull)

Putting it to the test

I bet many of you are lost at this point. Don’t panic! I’m about to guide you through the whole process of picking the best ad for it’s money.

I’ve picked three sites with somewhat similar pricing. Let’s see what we know about them:

speckyboy.com – 265×150 pixels ad – 1,940,000 Estimated Impressions – $350
webdesignledger.com – 125×125 pixels ad – 1,850,000 Estimated Impressions – $400
hongkiat.com – 257×125 pixels ad – 4,230,000 Estimated Impressions – $600

Now lets guess the CTR based on our past experience:

• speckyboy.com – from a 265×150 pixels banner placed below the fold we can expect the CTR of 0.04%
• webdesignledger.com – 125×125 pixels banner won’t get any higher CTR than 0.03%
• hongkiat.com – 257×125 pixels banner and it’s above the fold. Let’s give it a CTR of 0.06%

And here goes the maths! Calculating what’s the cost of a visitor from each of the sites:

• speckyboy.com CPV = $350 / (1,940,000 * 0.04%) = $0.45 per visitor
• webdesignledger.com CPV = $400 / (1,850,000 * 0.03%) = $0.72 per visitor
• hongkiat.com CPV = $600 / (4,230,000 * 0.06%) = $0.23 per visitor

Whoa! Isn’t this amazing? The most expensive banner turned out to be the best deal as it brings you the cheapest visitors!

That’s it! I hope you’ve enjoyed this little research and it will help you a lot in promoting your website online. In case you have any questions in regards to the ramble above – feel free to use our comments section! 😉

Hi guys, my name is Tim and recently I’ve joined MotoCMS to handle all kinds of web marketing endeavors. I’m happy to share my experience on this blog and I’m always eager to answer any questions you may post in comments! Cheers!