Banner advertising vs Adsense

Who would win?

[whitenoise]

You will have to excuse my lack of knowledge in this field, but I am very new to Adsense, and know practically nothing about banner advertising.

Currently I am running Adsense on my site and it gets about xx,000 page impressions a day. Due to the low paying keywords adsense revenue is only $x.xx (yes thats a decimal place) a day. Now I was reading in this forum that someone suggested they should lose Adsense and concentrate on banner ads.

Again, please excuse my complete lack of knowledge here (don't flame me ;)!) but would banner advertising be better? How does it work, do you get so much per impression or is it like Adsense and you get paid per click?

The site has a large number of pictures (plus loads of content), and so while Adsense is making some money (i expected it not to make any at all) would banner ads be more suitable?

Any help would be appreciated, sticky me if you want more info, or want to offer me advice! ;))

[Metaphorically]

I don't know if it would work better for your site in particular, but I believe FastClick pays per thousand impressions. Better still could be to sign up with an affiliate network and show banners (or other ads) that are relevant to your content. The thing is that with the affiliate ads, you don't get paid unless the user follows through with a purchase (or subscription or whatever) with the advertiser. Just try a couple and see what works best.

[ronin]

You can run CPM/CPC banner ads, adsense and affiliate marketing creatives simultaneously.

[whitenoise]

Ok, thanks for the info, I will try Fastclick. Any one encountered problems with them, or things that I should know about?

[disgust]

I've found it hard to get into FastClick actually

I'm trying CasaleMedia right now. CPM's great, layout's fine, payment can be made by paypal... only complaint is that a lot of PSA's are being shown

[kpaul]

stay away from the 'punch the monkey' ads on fastclick. you'll know what i mean when you see them - all the 'click the bug' 'punch the X' and win a free ipod, etc. banners. they may pay a little more, but imho, they make your site look unprofessional...

YMMV...

[universetoday]

It really depends on your CTR with Adsense. Using the big box format at the top of your page, you should be able to get CTRs in the 1-3% range. So, try messing around with the design a bit first. Then you should have a good idea of what your CPM rate is. Price your banner ads a couple of bucks higher than Adsense to sell to people directly.

I found I was getting much less than $1/CPM advertising through traditional banner networks. Really just not worth it compared to Adsense.

[europeforvisitors]

AdSense has delivered a much higher effective CPM on my site than banner ads ever did, but I'm in a commercially strong sector (travel) and have hundreds of subtopics that attract targeted AdSense ads. For some topics, flate-rate CPM banners or skyscrapers might pay better, either because AdSense earnings per click are low or there aren't enough decent-paying ads available for the site's keywords and keyphrases. Testing is the only way to know what will work best on your site.

[jhood]

Something I seldom see mentioned here -- most of the better banner CPM programs (TribalFusion, Burst, 24/7_RealMedia, etc.) are US-targeted. If you have a lot of clicks from non-US points, it makes your site less attractive to them. Beats me which ad reps are best for non-US sites. Maybe someone knowledgeable could start a thread on that topic?

[europeforvisitors]

jhood: Good point. Interestingly, some of the contextual ad networks (AdSonar, Kanoodle) also prefer sites with mostly North American audiences. So much for the "World Wide" Web. :-)

[whitenoise]

Thanks for the info people. I have got rid of all the "punch the monkey" ads in fastclick, now just to see how it compares vs Adsense. I'll probably give it a week or so and if it doesn't perform , I'll bin it.

[teasers]

The best thing to do is to find an advertising agency, that's what I think. You can participate in networks like Burst, FocusIn, ValueClick etc. but:

1) majority of your impressions / clicks will be wasted, especially if you have an international website.

2) what I see in fact on those networks is that their cpm / cpc prices are all "run-of-network" in fact, and they're really low. I am not talking about the very famous "smiley" or "screensaver" ads here, but go to any website and you'll see an ad is displayed on those websites, but in fact all those websites have highly different niche.

3) for getting real high cpm / cpc rates, you have to work with an agency, and that agency must find targeted campaigns that will suit your website. It is so easy to get $10.00 cpm with those kind of campaigns, I have received one in the last week, this price is even without negotiation. Otherwise, we have to deal with $0.20, even $0.10 CPM's. It doesn't even worth to use the CPU of your server for serving banners at that price. Don't get me wrong on this, that word of mine is not to you, that's for everyone of us who accepts campaigns at that prices. I, personally gave up inserting codes of networks serving campaign banners at that prices, whatever their names is (Burst, etc, any of them)

4) What I see last months is that people think as there's only Google in the market for displaying contextual ads, or it is only Google who pays good rates, that's not true.

You may find an agency, and wait for a high paying campaign. While waiting for it, you can use your impressions for serving contextual ads, or find affiliates. What I saw until today is that you have to use different combinations every time to catch the highest possible payout. Sometimes you just have to serve contextual ads, sometimes a mix of those, etc.

[motiv8x]

I've recently signed up an advertiser on one of my sites. They are going to pay me a flat monthly fee (25% more than what I'm currently getting from Google).

However, I do have a stipulation that I can rotate in other ads into the mix.

I'm curious how I would rotate their image and Google Adsense at the same time. Say 50/50 or something like that.

Any ideas? I don't need anything too fancy, like tracking clicks etc. As I'm only taking flat fee for banners. I just need a switch between Adsense and my advertisers' banners.

Thanks.

[david_uk]

Something I seldom see mentioned here -- most of the better banner CPM programs (TribalFusion, Burst, 24/7_RealMedia, etc.) are US-targeted.

I did apply to one of these (forget which one) and despite the fat that most of my site traffic comes from the US, and therefore the content needs to be US orientated, the fact that I'm outside the US means they rejected me. My site is #3 on Google for the primary keywords, and it's a fairly high volume site. Go figure.