Ok, so last time I talked about rotating banners and ads, but this is useless unless you know which banners are performing and which ones aren’t. So lets look at an example of 4 banners in rotation and see what the score is…
Banner 1
• Impressions: 1000
• CTR: 5%
• Conversion: 1:1000
• Payout: $30
Banner 2
• Impressions: 1000
• CTR: 8%
• Conversion: 1:2000
• Payout: $30
Banner 3
• Impressions: 1000
• CTR: 10%
• Conversion: 1:1500
• Payout: $20
Banner 4
• Impressions: 1000
• CTR: 10%
• Conversion: 1:2500
• Payout: $25
From these it’s difficult just by quickly looking at them to see which is the most profitable, the easiest way is to find out the CPM (Cost Per Thousand – Essentially how much money you’d make from every 1000 impressions your banner gets) of each ad, so we do…
(Payout ÷ Conversion) × (Impressions × CTR) = $ CPM
After doing this we see that…
Banner 1 = $1.50 CPM
Banner 2 = $1.20 CPM
Banner 3 = $1.30 CPM
Banner 4 = $1.00 CPM
After taking that info I’d ditch Banner 4 and replace it with another. Then let those banners run for a week, or until enough data has been collected, then repeat the process.
Doing things this way ensures you always have your best performing banners in rotation at any given time.
Until next time…
So everyone who’s signed up with more than a few different affiliate programs gets those emails promoting the $100 day promos on such-and-such a day, but it’s a pain in the ass to go through all of your sites and swap out your banners for just one day in the hope of getting a signup. Well, that’s why you need some sort of banner management script. Many people just have a file somewhere on their server that they php include into every site so they can go in and change that file when they want to swap out all their banners. Personally I prefer to use OpenX.
I won’t go into details of how to install, configure and use every feature here as that would be about 50 posts on it’s own, but I will explain what features make this better than simply using the php include method.
So you get that email saying there’s a $100 promo day that starts on the 24th of the month, do you really want to have to go in and swap out your banners at 23:59 on the 23rd? Or you could be in a completely different timezone, who fancies getting up at 04:00 in the morning to change there banners over? No problem, you can add your banners into OpenX ahead of time and schedule them to be displayed at a certain time, and do this for multiple banners, so every promo day can be scheduled in weeks in advance saving loads of hassle.
Ok, so you’ve got OpenX installed, all your promos added and scheduled, but what to display in the mean time?
What I like to do is have 3-5 banners, essentially on rotation so every time one of your sites is viewed a different one of the banners is displayed. Then at the end of the week check the stats to see which one performs the worst and swap that out for a new one. Again, a week later do the same so you’ve constantly got your best performing banners being displayed.
Remember when determining the performance of a banner what you want to be looking at is how many impressions the banner had on your sites compared to how much $ it made at your sponsor. Ctr, conversion ratios, etc… are irrelevant here as one sponsor could be converting at 1:200 but if the ctr is lousy then you’re not gonna be making much money. More on how to assess the performance of ads/banners and sponsors to come in another post shortly…