Are Banners Effective Affiliate Marketing Tools?

One mistake lots of bloggers make all the time is that they promote affiliate products the same way they promote AdSense or other ad programs – by displaying banners in their sidebar. Although this isn’t the best way to make affiliate commissions, some banners do produce great results.

The question is.. which ones work and which are just wasting valuable blog real estate?

Just by looking at a banner, it’s impossible for you to gauge it’s effectiveness. Some banners seem polished and cool, but deliver a poor marketing message. Other banners seem dull but have compelling text or a good call-to-action.

The only way to be sure is to track your banners. Measure every impression and every click. Divide the number of clicks by the number of impressions and you get what the industry calls a “Click Through Rate”.

The screenshot above is from my BlogSell account, and it clearly shows that some banners have a  much higher CTR or Click-Through rate than others.

So I don’t waste my time figuring out why a banner doesn’t produce much clicks, especially if it’s an affiliate banner that I have no editorial control over. I just delete the low-performing banners and replace them with new ones.

How much CTR you should aim for is really up to you, your niche market and the layout of your blog. Are you banners in the right places? Or are you hiding them in the footer where they just gather impression, but no one actually looks at them?

At the end of the day, the lesson here is that you need to track your banners, which most bloggers don’t do anyway. I highly recommend that you create a BlogSell account, where you get the tools you need to become a better affiliate blogger. Some affiliate networks – like Commission Junction – actually reveal the performance of each ad. That makes it easy for you to only use banners that work. However, almost all other networks like ClickBank, PayDotCom etc don’t track affiliate banners.

With BlogSell you can easily add, rotate, track and remove banners ads on your blog. You just need to set-up your banner “blocks” once, and all changes you make are real time after that. In fact, you don’t need to install WordPress plugins or other third party scripts that may break and malfunction every time you upgrade your WordPress blog.