Marketing & SEO

5 Tips That Increased Our BuySellAds CTR by 500%

MotoCMS Editorial 20 February, 2012

– “Maybe I should buy some advertising to promote my website?

I bet this thought have visited every website owner at least once.

And it is very reasonable actually. Free traffic from Google is what most amateur site owners would go for, but it may take years of hard work to build up this source to some reasonable numbers. So the easiest way to bring quality traffic to your website in no time would be the ad networks (in case of course you have some money to spend).

And we’re about to share our experience with getting a high CTR in a well known banner ad network – BuySellAds.

I never click banners! Do they really work these days?

That’s a really good question and that is something I’ve asked myself before uploading any funds to BuySellAds. But then I noticed the amount of expensive ad spots sold out…

This is what the ad zones of Hongkiat look like for example:

buysellads spots buysellads ctr

2. You should be “above the fold”.

Placing your banner in the part of a webpage that’s visible without scrolling might sound as a “no-brainer”. Yet some people think that their “advertising creative” (i.e. banner design) is so awesome and eye-catching that people will notice it no matter what.

Each time you opt to buy a banner that’s “below the fold” you consciously decrease your CTR.” – make sure you read this sentence at least 5 times.

3. Know who you’re talking to.

Once you have a list of websites related to your niche the next logical step would be to spy on their audience and see if they are of the same kind with your “typical customer”.

Don’t have a clue of where to get that data from? Here, grab the tools:

4. Size matters!

The smallest banner size you can purchase at BuySellAds would be 125px*125px and it’s obviously the cheapest option. But except for the well known argument of bigger things being much more noticeable, there’s more…

Smaller banners lead to more advertisers cluttered in one place. And you have much better chances of being noticed purchasing one of the three big banners as opposed to buying one of the six small ones.

That’s what I call a “Battle For Attention“:

battle for attention meme faces in our banner design appeared.

There was an empty banner slot at DesignersTalk Forum, and we decided that “Me Gusta” Face is rather well known among designers and should definitely grab their attention:

14 responses to “5 Tips That Increased Our BuySellAds CTR by 500%”

  1. Scott Hoffmann says:

    Good post Tim. Definitely some things I’ll take from here. But an average CTR of 0.04%?! That’s really low compared to what you get if you chose one of the one-ad-per-page networks. Even the CTR of 0.22% you end up with is low compared.

  2. timsoulo says:

    Hey Scott! Thanks a lot for your comment!

    Which ad networks are you referring to? We’d be happy to test new advertising methods and share our experience.
    I know lots of ad networks, but the majority can only convert some dating or weight loss stuff 🙂

    We’ve chosen BuySellAds in the first place because most of the “design blogs” run their ads and we though we may reach somewhat targeted audience – freelacers and web developers (though I guess ideally “business owners” is who we should aim for)

  3. Scott Hoffmann says:

    Mainly the one-ad-per-page networks. I believe there is 4-5 big once. I’ve tried CarbonAds and FusionAds, but I have ended up with InfluAds, http://influads.com/ and their new Desktop & Web Apps network where I have an average CTR of 1.72%.
    Most of these networks actually have a Design network.

    Would be interesting to see if you could push the CTR on these networks like you did here.

  4. timsoulo says:

    Never tried those! Thanks a lot! Putting them on my todo list for next month. Expect a case study from MotoCMS 🙂

  5. WPFix Team says:

    Nice tips tim thanks for sharing this. i agree with all the points specially the last one do some crazy things. By these tips we can definitely increase CTR. 

  6. really great article…awesome tips…can u provide some tips to increase adsense CTR

  7. nice article, but Alexa’s Demographics are hardly accurate. Lijit’s ones are good, but you need to run their ads for it to work.

  8. Hey Tim,

    Even i did used MEME images in my Internet marketing campaigns and it did worked. You should try the GIF memes too, they work wonders. It’s great to see you got succeeded too.

    Keep Rocking

    Cheers
    Suresh

  9. billwide says:

    Nice post dude! (y)

  10. Sofia says:

    Yep! obviously the main problem is CTR!

  11. SAP Yard says:

    I have added my site to busysellads yesterday. waiting for it to be approved. once approved, i would share my experience as publishers at buysellads.

    my site is http://www.sapyard.com/.

    thank you for your article. this helps publishers like me to plan accordingly to attract advertisers.

    Regards,
    Raju.

    • MotoCMS says:

      Thank you for the comment, we are really glad that the article was helpful!

      • SAP Yard says:

        Unfortunately, my request at BuySellAd has been rejected. I have GoogleSense approved Ads in my site. My site is SAP Technical night and getting around 4500 page views per day.. Do you think the traffic is still not good enough for BuySellAds?

        My site has started earning 150$ USD per month through 5 google ad sense Ads. But, 150 is too little for all the effort and time I am giving. How can I increase the revenue?

        Any suggestion would be appreciated.

        Regards,
        Raju.
        www.(dot)sapyard(dot)com

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