Buying banner impressions through Ebay

no experience here, but I'm a firm believer in you get what yopu pay for. I have bought banner impressions for dirt cheap in the past elsewhere and the quality of click throughs was garbage. If you do end up buying some, come back and let us know how it turned out.

I know one very reputable site operator who uses eBay to sell off his excess inventory. However, I suspect the quality varies greatly; some listings of this type seem very suspicious.

Out of curiousity, I did buy some of those auctions. Not a single click came as a result. My expectations were low, though, and it's not a lot of money. I would have been better off playing the lottery, though.

Hi all!

I'm still pretty new here, but thought I'd add my two cents. I sell some of my inventory on ebay and get a plethora of different advertisers. Click rates of course vary by how the product matches my audience, but I'm sure surprised that a campaign didn't get a single click.

Just like many of the items on ebay, some are good... some bad. I've also bought some ad placements on ebay. I'm very cautious about some of the ads sold as I'm sure some of the sites generate fraudulant traffic / clicks.

A side note: I've been reading these posts and am not sure if I believe many of the posts regarding click through rates. It's hard for me to imagine that some people are getting as high rates as they post. I guess this may be possible with some very well placed text ads in the middle of great content, but I'd love to see some true to life real world stats on banner / button campaigns.

Guys, I was thinking on selling banner impressions myself through eBay, only as I'm not even registered member yet, I wanted to ask on what's the selling process like? How do you receive money and how should you document orders the right way?

I'd actually suggest trying both ebay and webmasterbids.com

Ebay steps:

1: Setup an ebay account: I think all you need is a credit card.

2: Setup Payment: Setup a Paypal.com account. Most widely used payment system over the internet, and it's CHEAP and EASY!

3: Start your acution:
You can write the auction code using your favorite HTML editor and then paste it into the appropriate fields during the process of setting up an auction. Ebay has done a very excellent job of making the process VERY easy and user friendly!

If you need any more help, just shoot me an email (in profile)or post here:

p.s. I'm still trying to decide if larger amounts of impressions are better or smaller.
Bigger is good because you don't have as much admin time setting up accounts.
Smaller is good because more bidders are willing to buy a $10 auction vs. a $100 aution.

[edited by: Drastic at 4:25 pm (utc) on Dec. 3, 2002]
[edit reason] email address in profile, removed url to member's auction [/edit]

ROBSTER, you have a very good point about how big the auction should be.

You see, with all other auctions that are trying to sell millions or hundreds of thousands of impressions for single digit or double digit amounts is hard to compete with, but I believe if you present your site and your audience as a high-quality way to advertise, then buyers might see the difference.

If I start selling, I would sell packages not over $50 worth.

It's unfortunate, but do a search on ebay for "banner impressions", click on "completed items, and then sort by price. That will give you a good feel for what the supply and demand is.... and it's not good.

In my opinion, ebay is a great metric for what's going on in the market for almost anything, and this is a great example.

Actually, I'll do the search for you... here are the results:

ebay [search-completed.ebay.com]

We have tried some banner purchases and ppc buys on ebay. The problem is delivery, a lot of low volume sites sell these...what they dont tell you is that it may take you 20 years to get your impressions at least thats been my experience.

cpmguy,

I was afraid I was doing that very thing as my site's usage is all over the place depending on the school year. I try to be very up front with advertisers about this.

You bring up a good point, what is considered to be "too long" for a campaign. Even a site with millions of hits a day could have a campaign take forever if they are serving ads from 5 affiliate programs and 19 advertisers.

Maybe this should be a new thread, but I'd like to hear some comments here about this. How long is "too long"?

Oh, I thought I had a problem a few months when things were slow, had a lot of advertisers, and realized it would take a while to run through the campaigns. Then I looked at some of the ads I had purchased on ebay from some "big sites" and noticed my ads were taking much longer to show. One site I had to email to find out what was up!

Robster
As far as delivery time I know it can differ from site to site. In most cases I would say if a site cannot deliver the impressions in a 60 day period they should disclose it to the advertiser in advance. Then there is no hard feelings. From time to time stuff happens where a prompt delivery is impossible. As a rule most of our advertisers want 30 day or less service.