LinkExchange Banner Network – Product Review

By Paul Lang, Editor, Sell It!
June 27th, 1998

Every Sell It! reader will be aware of the importance of promoting their Web store in order to maximize their sales. And many merchants make effective use of the many low cost and effective methods available, for example posting to newsgroups and mailing lists, requesting links from other sites and submitting to search engines. However, limited budgets often lead to a reluctance to embark on one of the most prevalent methods of promotion, banner adverts.

To overcome this, many banner exchanges have sprung up. These allow merchants to place banner ads on other Web sites, in return for hosting other peoples banners in their Web stores. The biggest exchange of all is LinkExchange, which has well over 200,000 registered hosts, and claims to reach over 30% of all home Internet users.

There are of course costs involved in the running and administration of a co-operative scheme like this, but in the case of LinkExchange these are met by selling up to 25% of available banners to paying advertisers. LinkExchange takes a further 25% of impressions to promote itself and this leaves 50% of impressions available for members. The net result is that members operate on a 2:1 ratio, earning one impression for their own on another member’s site for every two impressions they provide on their own site.

Members can also purchase additional impressions to supplement those earned through the exchange. These cost between $10 and $25 per thousand impressions, depending on the volume purchased and the degree of targeting required.

Often one of the shortcomings of banner exchanges is the inability of members to target their own adverts at suitable sites, or to control what adverts appear on their own sites. LinkExchange uses two main techniques to control banner placements, content rating and categorization. In addition, LinkExchange excludes certain types of sites, for example sites featuring pornography.

Every site that joins the network has to rate itself from 1 to 3. Rating 1 covers sites that are intended for children only, Rating 2 is for sites targeted at general audiences and Rating 3 is for sites aimed at more mature, specialized audiences. Although site owners rate themselves, LinkExchange employees periodically audit them.

Members also have to assign their sites to 1 or 2 content categories. There are over 1600 categories to choose from, organized in to a three-level tree structure.

In addition to rating and categorizing their sites, members classify them into business and non-business, and specify if their site is related to a specific geography.

This process of rating and categorizing allows advertisers to choose the categories of site they wish to target, the rating level of sites they want their banners to appear on and any geographic or language preferences.

Hosts can select to allow banners from business or non-business sites, specify what rating off sites they will accept ads from, and choose to host only static or static and animated banners. They can also filter out up to two content categories or request that adverts from a specific site are excluded. Finally, hosts especially concerned about the content of banners on their sites can elect to host only ads for LinkExchange itself.

There are currently two LinkExchange programs running, Basic and Deluxe. There are several advantages to joining the Deluxe program: larger banners are allowed and hosts have to place them “above the fold” that is, within the first 480 vertical pixels of a Web page.

The major disadvantage of the Deluxe program is that hosts have to position a LinkExchange banner at the top of their home page. Many sites will be aiming to host a mixture of paid-for and LinkExchange banners, but may find it difficult to secure paid advertising if this key position is unavailable.

Signing Up
Joining and setting up LinkExchange is straightforward.

Prospective members first provide some basic information about the host site and its owners. They then classify their site as business or non-business, and rate its content from 1 (children only) through to 3 (roughly the equivalent of PG13). They then use the ratings system to define which sites they will accept banners from, and which sites they want their own banners to appear on.

The next step requires that each site be placed in up to two of the 1600 available content categories. This is not as difficult as it might at first appear. Categories can either be selected by browsing through a tree structure or by entering keywords in to a search facility that then suggests suitable categories.

Once they reach this stage, members are ready to start hosting banners on their own sites. To do this, a special piece of HTML needs to be inserted in to each Web page where a banner is to appear. LinkExchange provide a tool that automatically generates the necessary code. This can then be cut and pasted in to the pages.

Although members start to accrue credits as soon as the LinkExchange HTML code has been added to their Web site, these can not be redeemed until their banner has been approved.

The final step is for members to submit their own banner. These are limited to 400 x 40 pixels and 7KB for the Basic program and 468 x 60 and 9KB for the Deluxe program. All banners are reviewed and approved by the LinkExchange team before they are made available for placement.

Whilst some of this set up process might be daunting to some, there is a great deal of help available on the site. There are extensive help files and tutorials and external links to a wealth of useful resources.

Once the sign-up process is completed, members can track the performance of both their own banner and the banners they are hosting. Time-phased statistics are provided on the number of impressions banners receive on their own site, the number of impressions their own banner has received and the resultant number of click-throughs.

Verdict: Definitely worth considering if you have a significant amount of unsold banner inventory and are looking for a low cost way to promote your site.

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