Traffic Exchanges: Fit for Purpose?

By: David Murray (Co-owner and Webmaster of this site)

This is just a short article based on some work I have been doing recently in connection with our own businesses. While most of our use of traffic exchanges has been in the core process of exchanging page views, other aspects have become especially important to two of our business ventures:

• Banner advertising, and
• Geographically focused promotion.
• Also, we have been promoting non-IM products

This has led me to evaluate a number of exchanges with respect to our specific requirements.

Most exchanges provide for banner advertising, but some provide better and more flexible arrangements than others. Without attempting to write a major dissertation on banner advertising, here are some of the main lessons highlighted by this recent work.

• I particularly warm toward those which have a simple, straightforward method of converting exchange credits into banner credits. However, watch out for the conversion ratio; it can vary by as much as five times between different exchanges, from 1:10 to 1:50. (I still have not worked out the rationale for such major differences).
• Look carefully at the positioning of the banner displays. One small but growing exchange (Envision Hits) has what seemed to me at first to be a very good arrangement of placing banners directly over where the cheat-proofing click bar is about to appear, so while you're waiting to click once you've decided the main page is of no interest your attention is focused right on that very spot. The downside, however, is that the moment the click bar appears the banner is gone. Possibly, therefore, this type of arrangement may prove better for brand awareness raising than for attracting immediate sales, but I'm still planning on using it. (Incidentally, don't join Envision at the free level unless you want to spend hours surfing; they absolutely insist on about 3.5 hours a month or they disconnect your site displays. I know. It's just happened to me. - In fairness, unlike some others, they do warn you very clearly and upgrading is not expensive).
• Another thing to watch is the colour scheme. I've noticed blue banners being displayed against blue backgrounds, and very pale-coloured banners against white. They're almost invisible. Don't just dump your banners indisciminately in any and all exchanges. Check which will suit each specific exchange and so produce unmissable displays. Personally I find the colour scheme of TrafficPro-X to be highly banner-amenable but have not tested this scientifically.
• Another lesson has been to browse each exchange in order to discover what else is being promoted there at present. If you're promoting a particular affiliate programme and there are already five other people pushing the same thing you might be well advised to use a different exchange for a while and come back later. However, if all that promotion activity is in page displays and you seen no banners, why not put some up there and capture the parallel space.
• Returning to the question of flexibility, make a note of the exchanges which make it easy for you to move banner credits around. If you've loaded up 25,000 credits for a particular programme and after 10,000 you've had a click-through-rate of only 0.02% you might want to switch the remaining 15,000 either to a different programme or to a different banner design. This should be made easy by the exchange owner. Exchanges which make it a very simple matter include Hit2Hit, DragonSurf and ILoveHits.

Earlier I mentioned geographical focus. For many purposes the internet's genuine global outreach is a great benefit. For some purposes, however, it can be wasteful. Someone promoting a local hairdressing business or health and fitness centre in Scotland is not likely to benefit much from exposure of her website in Adelaide, Australia.

We have a similar issue in our own BrunleaBooks business. Some weeks ago we had a particularly heavy early-20th century set of sixteen volumes for sale and had enquiries ranging from Ireland and Canada. The trouble was the weight; postage costs would have been more than the value of the books. Eventually we sold them, over our eBay store, to someone who wanted them delivering just a few miles down the road in Nottingham. For high-value and relatively rare items we sell and ship all over the world but other parts of the physical books business are chiefly within the UK. This is where geographically focused exchanges come into their own. - Oh, and by the way, it is not a waste of time promoting non-IM products and services on hit exchanges (more on that in a moment).

WebMasterQuest and TrafficG both provide for this requirement, and you can specify which parts of the world you want your site to be shown. Another is EM-Hits, although they split the world up into zones and have the US, Canada and the UK together which doesn't help with my particular need. Then there is Hits-UK, which has a very high percentage of UK-based surfers although I've found my credits there sticking recently, as they cut my display-rate when my surfing rate fell off for a while in spite of the fact that the majority of my balance was paid for in hard-earned cash.

Finally, the matter of promoting non-internet-marketing products and services on the exchanges. It is true, of course, that the people surfing traffic exchanges are there because they want to generate hits on their own sites, not because they want to buy something from you and me. However, they're there! And they're seeing our promotions! And, just like you and me, they occasionally buy something!

So keep on promoting your non-IM offer, but monitor what is happening very carefully. I have discovered that there are major differences between exchanges. Precisely why, I don't know. It probably has something to do with the demographics of the various traffic exchanges and different types of people attrated to the different designs, but I'm guessing.

What is not a guess, however, is that for one of our non-IM sites the "bounce rate" (i.e. the percentage of people leaving from the first page they see) ranges from 100% on some exchanges down to just over 70% on others. This means that on certain exchanges more than one in four people who see our home page (and in that particular case we're not using a splash or squeeze page) click on one of its links and progress to other pages in the site. Indeed, as far as we can tell from the rather basic site statistics we put in place for that test, around one in ten visitors arriving from certain exchanges views between four and six pages before leaving. That is worthwhile traffic!

The lesson? Test, test and test again, not only your banners and pages displayed to see what gives the best responses but also comparative results from different exchanges. You'll eventually find a formula that works for you. It is hard work. Promoting through hit exchanges will not generate immense riches from working 15 minutes a day, but keep at it in a systematic manner and I'm confident that your investment of time on the exchanges will not disappoint you.

Newark, England, 14th August 2007.