What to do with poorly performing ads?

[tresmom5]

On our site we use both an ad agency and we also sell some ourselves. Clickthrough rates in general are low, but the people that are buying from us are very new to internet advertising and have exteremely unreasonable expectations. I would like to see their clickthrough rates higher, but not sure what I can do as far as ad design, placement, etc to get higher click through rates. These are usually small sites investing small amounts of money, usually around $50. I am not sure what to do about this. Most of our adverstisers are new to this and so therefore we get a lot of complaints from people expecting very high click through rates. What do you do with poorly performing ads to increase their performance? And what do you do with people with buyers remorse to keep them from spreading bad word of mouth?

[Fairla]

Maybe you can find statistics on typical click-through rates to show them, to help moderate their unrealistic expectations?

I'm not an expert in this area, but changing the position of the ads on your site can sometimes help clickthroughs a bit.

[Undead Hunter]

Show them the quarterly stats DoubleClick produces: Basically, the click-through rate on banner ads is something like 0.4%.

Show them they'll only get a handful of people per 1,000 visitors. Google it for the latest info...

[sean]

suggestions:

If none of the advertisers are having success, you might want to use a clicktracks-like tool to see patterns of where people tend to click. Does the placement of the advertisements say, "click us" or "ignore us"?

If some of the advertisers are having success, you could put together guidelines to eliminate worst-practices and encourage best-practices. Also, are the ad formats the most appropriate for beginning advertisers?

[tresmom5]

Thanks for all your advice. We decided to stop doing direct advertising for now. At this point, the amount of time we are spending on this is not worth the money. Not when we can get ad agencies and google to pay as well without the headache and aggrivation.