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Excellent Advertising Method for Image Sites

Discussion in 'Placement / Reviews / Examples' started by Help Desk, Oct 30, 2006.

  1. #1
    First a little history. I have a fun site that contains a bunch of pictures. You vote for your favorite part by clicking on it. You then see where everybody else has clicked.

    The site is www.FavoritePart.com and I was having an EXTREMELY low click through rate. I played around with all ads and tricks and received negligible results. It seemed the harder I tried, the worse my CTR would become.

    What I needed to do was twofold. 1: I needed to look at my average visitor's visiting habits and then 2: figure out how to place an ad such that they didn't realize it was an ad. People train themselves to avoid ads. How many times have you clicked on the ad at the top of this forum? For the thousands of times I have visited, I have clicked zero. You need some creative placement.

    So looking at my visitors it was enough to see how many pages they visited on average. My number was 8. That's not bad! Most sites will have between 1 and 3.

    Now I know that the average visitor is looking at 8 pages and ignoring the ads each and everytime. One clever way would be to move the ad around each time the person went to a different page. This seemed a little complex.

    What I ended up doing was hiding the image on about every fifth page view and showing an image ad. If you go to www.FavoritePart.com and click on the photos, you will see I eventually hide the image and show an ad. I includde a "Click here to Remove Ad" link to show the people the image that they wanted.

    I chose the number 5 because some visitors visit much more than others. 5 seemed like a good guestimate.

    This method can be moved to text pages for sites that serve a higher number of pages per visitor. You just include a text ad inside of text on every N number of visits.
     
    Help Desk, Oct 30, 2006 IP
  2. T0PS3O

    T0PS3O Feel Good PLC

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    #2
    Your 'click here' seems too close to the ad IMO - risky ground.
     
    T0PS3O, Oct 30, 2006 IP
  3. BILZ

    BILZ Peon

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    #3
    Yeah, i would be careful with that - its pretty misleading.
     
    BILZ, Oct 30, 2006 IP
  4. andheresjohnny

    andheresjohnny Well-Known Member

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    #4
    Good idea on substituting the ad every several pages. I especially liked how you used your server stats to determine how many "regular" pages to show before slipping in the ads.

    I too wonder if Google would have a problem with the "click here" practically right on the ad.

    On a side note ... I love your site. I have been checking it out every week or so after you first introduced it in one of your posts several months ago. It's been very interesting to see how you've tried different ad placements and layouts during that time. The site has reallly changed .


    1 Question:

    There was a point where you placed a vertical ad block right next to 4 verticle pictures. These pictures were clickable, and when clicked would become the new focus of the page ... the new photo where people could click-on their "favorite part".

    I thought this was very good placement, assuming that someone would HAVE to notice the ad as they where moving the mouse over to click on the next picture to bring up.

    This ad placement didn't work at all? I was going to intergrate it into one of my sites ... I'm surprised to see it gone from yours.


    Thank you
     
    andheresjohnny, Oct 30, 2006 IP
  5. Help Desk

    Help Desk Well-Known Member

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    #5
    Very few people were clicking on the vertical banner next to the image selection. Also nobody was clicking on the small one above an image result. I thought for sure the one above the results was going to go through the roof! However now I believe that because it is almost entirely image based, people don't notice the words on the page. Very few see the categories on the right hand side or the links to the discussion groups, image index or submission link on the top.

    I think that if I changed the overall theme to something more professional and made the text links images with words on it they might get noticed more.

    Secondly, If I removed the images in the selection list and only showed the words, I think text ads would do much better. I think I am going to seperate the link to remove the ad right now.
     
    Help Desk, Oct 30, 2006 IP