I bought 3 banners (ad spaces) on 3 forums for $170 [CASE STUDY]

[jefis]

Side note, how have results from advertising on BHW been compared to WF?

I'd love to know this as well.
Has anyone ever published results for BHW banners before?

 

[theIMMachine]

Nice share OP - the caste study. Since the impression count which we need to buy from these sites are more, was staying from these for a while. But really appreciate you effort.
I was lurking through a similar service last few days. One thing I found out, let's say the website has around 100k - 300k impressions or someone had 400k before but the graph is slowly coming down for last couple of months to 200k or so, such kind of sites sell ad spaces on top right side etc for $50 - $90 for 1 month (permanent).
It stays there for 1 month and considering the price against impressions that you bought here, I think this might be another direction that you can try out.

 

[jefis]

Here are the final results:

Make your own conclusions

 

[loukeyzee]

Terrific share.

 

[LordCameltoe]

I'm curious, what network did you buy the spots through? I doubt people are knocking down doors to buy ad space at $2 to $5 CPC for Worldwide traffic. Which means there must be a shit ton of unsold inventory.

Even if you managed to get 2x the CTR, it would be almost impossible to monetize that traffic, so this tells me you could easily renegotiate that price to something that makes more sense.

I think you may have just overpaid for traffic you should be able to buy at 1/10th that price.

 

[blackhatyonko]

Lately, I've been looking for new places to advertise one of my websites, and I thought to give a try on buying banner ads.

I myself am blind to ads and banners, so I didn't have high hopes about them, but I thought I'd give it a try, since my product is about SEO, and I had the opportunity to buy ad spaces on 3 forums about SEO and online marketing.

On May 6 I launched ads (banners 728x90) on all 3 websites.

I spent $170,10 on 3 ads. They'll be shown for a month, 10K impressions each. That's 30K impressions TOTAL.

They've been Live 10 days now, and the results are... TERRIBLE!

From 7,5K impressions, I received only 17 clicks!!! Which is only 0,23% CTR.

The results from each website vary. The best CTR is 0,36% and the worst is 0,10% (which is, by the way, the most expensive site).

This has been one of the worst investments I've ever made. But if I wouldn't risk it, I wouldn't ever know.

Maybe my banner ad looks like shit (I don't think it does), and maybe the CTR would have been better by testing different designs, but purely on the results so far, it sucks so much.

By the way, I've been testing ads on Quora, and the CTR is way higher (around 5-7%) and the cost per click is way lower.

Here are stats from Quora ads:

I'll update the thread once the ads stop showing, to show you the final results.

thanks

 

[jefis]

I'm curious, what network did you buy the spots through? I doubt people are knocking down doors to buy ad space at $2 to $5 CPC for Worldwide traffic. Which means there must be a shit ton of unsold inventory.

Even if you managed to get 2x the CTR, it would be almost impossible to monetize that traffic, so this tells me you could easily renegotiate that price to something that makes more sense.

I think you may have just overpaid for traffic you should be able to buy at 1/10th that price.

From buysellads.com

 

[seocrab]

Great share, thanks for the update.

Seems like a pointless question, but did any of those 54 clicks result in sales?

 

[jefis]

Great share, thanks for the update.

Seems like a pointless question, but did any of those 54 clicks result in sales?

As I stated before, I didn’t track them, so I don’t know. It was a mistake which I will not make again in the future.

 

[LordCameltoe]

From buysellads.com

You got ripped off no doubt about it. You should never be paying $7 CPM for forum traffic. Those are rates that agencies charge to bigger companies for "awareness" campaigns (which is a fancy way to overcharge clients).

Banner impressions should be in the $0.50 or less CPM range unless highly targetted. Forum traffic is much less valuable as each user is generating 20 impressions or more per visit, so that's a much lower CTR than usual. If you were to ever try the experiment again, I would suggest you deal with the forum directly instead. Buysellads is defintely over inflating costs.

 

[rafark]

Here are the final results:

Make your own conclusions

Ouch you paid more than $3 per click!!

Would've been much better to pay half of that for targeted Adwords traffic. Funny how they don't show you the cost per click in the stats...

 

[Compazz]

i think the

Here are the final results:

Make your own conclusions

awesome case study most important question is have you made any sale?

 

[defi logic]

Damn, that's bad.
Like you said never know whats good until proven.