Swap Ads to Increase Traffic by Turning Exits into Landings!
We all know that 100% of website visitors will, at some point, leave. If we have done our job right they will leave by affiliate links, click adds, impression ads and not by the dreaded “Close Tab”.
What if there was another option? What if they could exit to another publication and that publication could send you a new visitor. What if you could trade a visitor that has bypassed all your monetization efforts for a new viewer entering your publication at the top of the page?
AdSynergy makes it easy to turn exit traffic into new visitors with our ad swap program.
Here is How Our Ad Swapping Works
- You sign up for the Ad Swap program. Its totally free, no credit card required.
- You add some ad slots to your page under the Ad Swap program.
- You upload an ad that you want to run on another site.
- You can use AdSynergy to find a swap partner - a complementary publication that you want to trade with
- Or you can invite a content provider, that you would like to trade with, to join the platform.
- We display their ads in your slot and your ads in their slot.
- We provide click fraud protection and statistics on impressions and clicks.
For every swap impression your site shows, your site is advertised on the swap site. In “Banner Exchange” lingo this is a 1:1 exchange or swap. If conversions on the two sites are similar, then you will receive a new visitor to a landing page of your choice for every visitor that exits your site via the swap ads.
Does Ad Swapping Make Sense?
Clearly you are not going to put Ad Swap code at the top of your page, before the visitor has a chance to read your content. Depending on how you monetize your site you may have a different strategy for swap placements. Generally your are going to want to place them at or towards the end of your content, after they have passed all your calls to action, your affiliate links, your click ads and links to your other content. Place them where all attempts to monetize the visitor have been passed and then do them a kindness – recommend other content they might find interesting. By doing that you have a chance of turning the exiting viewer into a new viewer that lands at the top of your content. Essentially you are swapping exit traffic with another content site. So yes, with the right swap partner and the right placement, ad swaps can increase traffic to both sites. Definitely a win-win.
Not Your Grandma’s Banner Ad Exchange
Banner Ad Exchanges have been around since the beginning of internet advertising, and have a somewhat shady reputation. At best they trade attention grabbing in your face (aka annoying) ads for even more annoying ads. The classic banner ad exchange would typically provide a 2:1 trade, for every two of their ads they will show one of yours. The way they made money was by selling off the extra ads they gain. More recently some of the banner/traffic exchanges have improved the ratio to 5:4, (for every 4 or your ads they show 5 of theirs) which is clearly better, but does not solve some of the underlying problems with these sites. Common Problems with Banner/Traffic Exchange Sites
- You have no idea where your ads are being served and by where I mean, where in the world, on what websites and where on the page. Many sites that use banner exchanges are 90+% ads and 10-% content. Your ad may get displayed at the bottom of a page loaded with ads. Where you are displaying there banners much more prominently.
- The net, net of this is that websites can only manage the ad campaign by click through rates which are very low for these sites. The best way to get more clicks is to show more ads, hence there is a race to the bottom to show more and more “catchy” ads.
- Any quality content site manager know it makes no sense to allocate space to ads that are inevitably going to look like crap and will only rarely return any qualified traffic.
- More recently some Banner/Traffic exchange sites offer a 1:1 exchange and give you even more back through a multi-level-marketing program. We think, when its too good to be true, it's not true.
- Many Banner/Traffic exchanges farm out delivery to other networks, reducing your visibility and control even further.
The AdSynergy Difference
First and foremost - you make the swap with sites you respect and ads that you approve. Game changed! Now you can swap exit traffic to another quality content site. You will know what site, what page and where on the page your ad is. You will also know the exact ad that will appear on your site. The swap rate is 1:1, for every ad you display, you receive one ad display in return.
Ad Swaps by the Numbers
We did the math so you don't have to and here are the results: If you do an ad swap, to swap exit traffic for fresh traffic, you can DOUBLE your traffic in a very short time frame. Starting at 100 visitors a day with the following CTRs (click through rates) here are the days to double your traffic to 200 visitors a day:- CTR 1/100 DOUBLEs your traffic in 100 days.
- CTR 2/100 DOUBLEs your traffic in less than 45 days
- CTR 3/100 DOUBLEs your traffic in less than 30 days
- CTR 4/100 DOUBLEs your traffic in less than 21 days
- Both sites, yours and the site you swap with, must have 100 visitors to start
- Both ads, your ad your swap partner ad, must have the same, or better, CTR
Even better news is the above numbers are conservative, in practice you should hit the days to double even sooner. (We used "whole visitors" to run the numbers rather than straight math that would have used fractional visits. If the math said you had 1.9 visitors we rounded down by dropping the fraction, to simply 1.) In practice you don't have to have the same # visitors or the same CTR, just base the calculation on the lower number of visitors and the lower CTR.
Ad Swap Examples
There are many potential cases where curated ads shown on your site and vice versa can help both parties. Here are a couple that come to mind:
- A personal finance blog swaps ads with an upscale lifestyle blog. The finance blog viewers have motivation to follow the financial plan to achieve that lifestyle, and the lifestyle viewers might find some finance tips that get them that lifestyle.
- A cooking blog swaps ads with a kitchen hardware blog. Cooking blog viewers may enjoy seeing the latest gadgets, where kitchen hardware viewers will need some recipes to go with those gadgets.
Who Would I Swap Ads With?
As the examples above indicate good swap partnerships can be very specific to the site's content and monetization. As this service is just getting started we do not yet have a list of trade partners. When we do we will be listing some blogs and content sites here. Stay tuned.
How We Benefit
We are building a reputation as a trusted Ad Server and an Ad Social Marketplace. This service is part of building that reputation. It also helps you and us to build ad inventory data. Perhaps in the future you might want to sell some of your ad inventory to highly compatible advertisers, we hope you use our platform.