Does Banner Ad Advertising Work

Giggle,

Banner ads can and do work, but you have to consider a few variables.

1. How targeted the traffic is to the site? The CONTENT is accounting related, but are the visitors to the site?
2. Is the site a community that frequents often and has a "buy in" to the community itself?
3. How much are the ads?
4. WHat size ad can you place?
5. Who is designing your ad (the marketing of the actual banner ad has a HUGE amount to do with this.

The traffic you mentioned is nice, but how active is it on the site? How long do they stay on the site? How many page views per individual visitor? From an advertising perspective, THESE kinds of statistics are more important than just number of visits as you want the visitor to interact with the page as they will be more likely to click on your banner.

Anyways, I have run these programs on one of my sites and while we are a membership based social network, I have done a fair bit of research in this area leading up to our banner ad program. I hope that helps a little, good luck with the program if you decide to pull the trigger!

Mac the Knife

I agree with all that Macurdy said.

Ultimately, make sure the site you are targeting is going to have very concentrated niche visitors directly related to your site. Make sure you get an awesome ad (even shell out some money to get something pro out there) and maybe throw in some good text that will be a good hook to catch the fish something like "Top X Ways To Do Really Awesome Thing". Just IM 101 stuff. After that, do a small run, test and see the result. If it looks it's worth it, keep going, make sure to tweak to get best results, even if it's failing a little or going good. Just keep tweaking until it works. If it's a complete failure, find a new site or a new strategy.

Also, another tidbit I forgot...offering aspecial or discount to members of THAT site really helps increase conversion...

Mac the Knife

From my experience, banner ads on IM related websites are not worth the money. First, because website owners usually charge more because they treat this as business. Second, because those visitors are blond to banners, and you do not get a lot of traffic.

However, for other niches, not IM related, banner advertising can be very profitable. You can get a deal for $25-$50 per month for a banner ad, and this can give you 300-500 visitors, so if your page converts well, the ROI can be HUGE. It all comes down to the numbers - if you know how much you can make from 100 people on your site, you can easily get an idea of whether it`s worth it or not.

If I were you, I would first try to get an ad somewhere for up to $100, to see how things go, instead of jumping to $500 right away.

Hope this helps.
Alex

Personally I would not do it, unless you have money that you don't mind parting with. I also understand that a accounting lead or sale can be very lucrative. But if you are going to do it. Ask them how many and what pages are they tracking to get these numbers and where will your ad be placed, because (whatever search engine) could be indexing from with in the site heavily, but the landing page or home page may not be receiving much traffic. And they may put you there.

I use banner ads to promote a targeted twitter follower adding website of mine. It works extremely well. Just assume your CTR is going to be at or below .05% and run some numbers. Try and see how well your site is already converting, then how targeted your traffic will be and figure if you stand a good chance of being profitable. If its looking grim maybe look for a more highly targeted site, because there are hundreds of thousands of sites that offer space for sale, don't waste money on those that are not directly related to your product/service!

-Safe Travels