What is considered as a good CTR percentage for a media buy campaign - I am doing banner ads on AOL network
what niche?
health & wellness niche
The biggest myth about CTR is that CTR is the be all end all matter in
ads. Nothing could be further from the truth. CTR is a great indication of
how well or badly an ad is doing, but at the end of the day the only thing
that matters is your cost per conversion (CPA). Sometimes a banner with a
great CTR will have a terrible CPA and vice versa.
Let’s look at some possible explanations for this. After all, if a banner
has a great CTR it must perform right? This isn’t true. If your ad is
really eye catching but doesn’t say a ton about your product, you may get
a lot of curiosity clicks (people clicking to see what it is) but the
people clicking aren’t the people you want buying. On the flip side, you
may have a ad with a super low CTR but the people clicking are the ones
you want and a high percentage buy. The important thing to remember about
CTR is it’s about finding the right audience for your ads and creating a
banner that reaches them. Once you figure out what’s working, you should
always strive to improve the CTR while maintaining that same group of
clickers. How do you do this? Test, test, test and test some more (banner
elements).
The next big question about CTR is when to cut an ad. Cutting an ad isn’t
a science, there are strong mathematical formulas that you can use to
figure out when something for sure isn’t working (called a confidence
interval). The only issue with that, is to get to a high level of
confidence an ad isn’t working, you’re going to spend a ton of money to
get the correct number of impressions. Personally, when I optimize, I like
to give an ad a spend of around 3 times my CPA goal. If the ad doesn’t
show promise at that point, I’ll cut it. If it shows promise, I’ll start
to optimize it. How do I do that? Test, test, test and test some more
(spotting a trend yet?). Rinse and repeat this method until you have the
best possible ad you can.
Make sure the ad is converting first before you worry about CTR.
@mattaw
I am doing competitive analysis on whatrunswhere and I see the traffic sources listed for ads as adblade, Quigo Adsonar, advertising.com, pulse360 etc...
Is Quigo Adsonar now part of AOL (Advertising) network ?
Also for some ads the traffic sources say Media Buy - What does that mean ? adblade, aol, advertising.com, pulse360 all these are media buys too what does that mean in whatrunswhere ?
Quigo is AOL's text ad venture.
Each of those is a ad network... they're text ad media buys
advertising.com is AOL banner ads, quigo adsonar is AOL text-links. AOL network is composed of high traffic sites such as huffington post, aol, aol mail, cnbc, fox news, etc