Testing Ad Performance

Yesterday, one of the affiliate programs I am involved in launched a pay per click program which I think is particularly suited to one of my website audiences.  In the past, I've made simple website changes and watched my adsense income drop immediately, so I'm being very careful to watch this one change.

Thankfully this change isn't causing any problems to the google campaign - but it has not attracted a single click yet.

Heres some interesting figures:

• I'm averaging one click for every 16 text adsense impressions on my website.
• I have another affiliate campaign on the same site which I'm averaging one click for every 142 text ad impressions.
• The new banner campaign has had 72 unique impressions without a single click, and it's on the front page.  By the way - unique impressions means unique IP addresses, which is a particularly annoying stat. This ad could have been displayed up to 4 times more than that, I'd have to waste time cross checking stats with other data to get the number of ad impressions.

The 1 click per 142 impressions campaign is actually performing as well as expected, because it is after a specific niche of people.  I could probably do better, but for now, I am happy with it.

I'm fairly certain that the new banner campaign is going to be a dud.  While the ad is promoting a website in the exact same market as mine, the way it is promoting it is using an "adventure" theme.  This theme is very, very, loosely attached to the primary target audience.  You would not think adventure, and immediately think of my target audience.

I may be able to move the position of the banner to improve performance into a better position, but I have much higher performing ads already in that position.  If I moved them, I'd loose money.

So what have I deduced from this?

The current banner ads don't perform as well as the text ads do.  Also, in all advertising, it's about targeting your market correctly.  I don't believe the Banner Ad does that very well.  Knowing what your readers are looking for and delivering ads about the products and services they want is a sure fire recipe for making more money from your ppc ads.