I sent an email to our advertisers to help them out with some tips, tricks and ideas I thought would be helpful for them. After some thought, I decided to post that email here as well publicly to help potential advertisers and new advertisers who didn’t get the email.

What follows is the email that I sent to our advertisers, maybe you can benefit from it as well..

Dear AirsoftForum.com Advertiser,

You are receiving this email because I got a response back from one of our advertisers who said,

“…We haven’t really seen any sales from the traffic…”

So as I was evaluating their account to see “what the problem was”, and I discovered that not only did this particular advertiser have a few probable issues with their account to explain why they were not seeing any (or very few sales), but I also found that many of our advertisers have similar issues that need to be addressed when I checked out some of their banners and websites.

As an advertiser and webmaster myself for many websites for the last 15 years, I know it can be difficult to know where your advertising dollars are best spent so I thought it would be helpful to send all of our advertisers (past & present) some helpful instructions to not only improve their results with AirsoftForum.com but to also help you with advertising in general.

I am telling you this because I don’t want you to be wasting your advertising dollars with us and I really do care that you remain a long term advertiser with us and for that to be financially possibly both of us, your advertising here needs to be productive.

(…Please Note: that we currently have 22 advertisers and there may be some of you who are receiving this email but are not actively advertising with us currently. This is because you have advertised with us in the past and I wanted to send you some helpful information to encourage you to re-new your advertising with us and to show you that I really do want to help you generate sales here. If you do not wish to receive any more emails from me regarding this, please reply to let me know so I can remove you from my contact list…)

…Ok, so back to the (hopefully) “Helpful Advertising Information”…

>>> Here is what what I am finding with some of your accounts…

#1 There is a big difference between some of the terms that you need to understand if you don’t already – Click-Throughs, Impressions, Hits, Conversions, Visitors, Customers, etc. so erase the word “hits” from your vocabulary because it is confused misnomer.  A “hit” is any object that can be loaded from a web page (an image, frame, block of text, the page itself, etc.). it is not necessarily a visit, visitor, page view, impression, or “click-through”.

#2 Some of our advertisers are hardly getting any clicks or click-throughs to their website at all, while other advertisers are getting quite a few click-throughs but they are not really generating any sales to speak of. So what follows are some explanations to help you understand why..

…Some of the first things that come to mind are…

#3) it may be helpful to setup a special landing page to count / measure the traffic that does come from ASF so you know exactly what is coming through from your links on the home page and banners. In fact, you may want to create different landing pages if you want to track those click-throughs independently; However, You should already be getting banner ad statistic reports on a weekly basis with impressions and clicks. If you’re not getting those reports, please let me know.

#3a) A “click” is not necessarily a “click-through” and here’s why: If our ad server software says you got XXXX number of Impressions and XX number of Clicks, there are variables that determine if the visitors actually made it to your page. Sometimes it takes a second or two to get through the process of making it to your website and visitors “hit the stop button”. Some of your websites are in other countries that are very slow to load and visitors stop the loading and go back. Some of the ads are shown as poping up in a new window and many visitors have pop-up blockers that do not even display your page to them even though our ad server software says you got XX number of “clicks”.

#3b) An “impression” is your link or banner being shown to our visitors so whether or not they click on it opens up a whole new set of variables…  Is your banner attractive? Are the words in your text calling them to action? Do they even see your banner? Do we have 2 or 3 banners in the required sizes to even display your banners in the first place? So as you can see, there are many factors to determine an actual click-through to your website. If you need help with any of this, please let me know so that I can help you generate sales.

#4) As you know there is a BIG difference between “Clicks” and “Conversions”. Just because a visitor comes to your site – does not automatically equal a sale – you know that. However, there are many factors that can help determine if a visitor is converted to a customer and this is an on-going task that many many webmasters long to discover the secret to.

In fact it is very difficult to convert visitors into customers and thus there are many times when a webmaster does not feel that “the advertising is adequate” or top quality, when in fact the real problem may be with their website itself. Is your website slow loading? Are your prices fair and competitive? Does your customer service suck or is it non-existent? Do you have a phone number, can visitors reach you other than email? Do the layout, colors and overall appearance scare or dissuade your visitors? Why would a visitor want to buy from your website as opposed to the dozens if not hundreds of other options?? These are questions you need to ask yourself when evaluating your  conversion performance.

Experts say that on average it takes about 1-3 seconds to win the interest of your visitors to make them even want to stick around a few extra seconds to check out your website in the first place. This is referred to as “bounce rate” but I am not going to get into that in this email – Google it or check your Alexa or Google analytics for more helpful information on that.

So as you can imagine, just because you get a visitor from AirsoftForum.com does not automatically mean that they will buy something!  In fact, experts say that generally a visitor has to see your product, logo, or advertisement many times before actually converting to a customer! Therefore if we only have ONE banner for your website and it is being rotated with 40 or more other banners from competitors, you can see why you may not experience any sales or very few of them. It is important that you get in front of the customer as much as possible BUT do not kill that with a crappy website or you will not convert well!

…SIDE NOTE: This reminds me of another thing that only a few of you are taking advantage of… As an ASF Advertiser, you are allowed to post items for sale and interact with our members on our forum but a lot of you are not doing this. Many of you do not even have a completed forum profile on our website. In order to inspire buyer confidence, you need to make your presence known and you need to interact positively with our members on a regular basis. You may or may not know this, but advertisers who pay by the year get their own sub-forum on  AirsoftForum.com to use as their very own forum. If you are doing this, it is imperative that you respond to topics, posts and inquiries regarding your website, products or services. If a member / visitor feels neglected or ignored, you can bet they probably will not buy from your website…

We try to be as fair as possible when it comes to advertising your website and products so all advertiser banners are rotated equally, but that doesn’t mean you only have to have one banner. I recommend that you have 2 or 3 banners in the following sizes: 468×60, 728×90, 160×600, 120×600, and 125×125. The first 2 sizes are the most important on AirsoftForum.com and the others are being integrated for better prominence elsewhere on our network (other related websites).

AirsoftForum.com is now receiving nearly 30,000 unique visitors PER DAY as well as nearly 300,000 PAGE VIEWS PER DAY so if your advertising here is not converting well, the problem is most likely YOUR WEBSITE, Your Banners, Your call to action (or lack their of), etc.  PLEASE NOTE: that I am not placing blame or trying to make excuses, I am simply trying to help you improve your results here so that we can maintain a long and productive relationship for your website and AirsoftForum.com

IN SUMMARY, if you are getting low impressions, then we need more banners, if you are getting very low clicks, then the problem is most likely with your banners. If you are getting very low conversions, then the problem can be many other issues (as I have touched on above but generally – Your Website).

People may not like your colors, they may not like what the banner or link says or maybe it doesn’t get their attention or worse – doesn’t inspire them to click it. Banners are often called, “Creatives” and for good reason, because if you are not getting clicks, then there are reasons people are not clicking on them and you have to “get creative” to explore other designs, phrases and concepts to “CALL THEM TO ACTION”.

I am sorry for the long length of this email, but website conversions and advertising tactics are so complicated that few websites / webmasters have mastered. If you need more help, don’t be afraid to ask me.

ONE MORE THING… I don’t spend all day on the website nor do I check my email 24/7 like many of you so if you have a problem or question, please contact me on my PDA Phone for an immediate response. You can call or text anytime: 616.617.4103. If you are trying to send me banners or website links, please use admin (at) airsoftforum.com and advise me on the pda phone that you have done so and I will check my regular email to deal with your issue.

I hope this email has helped give you some ideas and if you are not currently advertising with us, I would like to encourage you give us try. Please Click Here for an overview on advertising with us and /or to re-new your advertising subscription:

-admin

Quoting (anonymous advertiser):

…We haven’t really seen any sales from the traffic either…..
>
> —–Original Message—–
> Sent: Thursday, July 08, 2010 8:40 PM

……WOW – If you have actually read all of that (yes it was a long message), but if you have actually read through all of that, then give yourself a pat on the back because persistence and patients is what it takes to have website success!

If you have endured all this text, then you obviously care to learn what it takes to have marketing and advertising success! As you can see, we really do care that our advertisers also have success in marketing their products and services here too and I am willing to go the extra mile in helping you so please signup now to become an “ASF Sponsor” and start advertising your products and services here today!

If you would like to hire me for Search Engine Optimization on your website and or some advertising / marketing instructions to help your website better perform, please contact me for more information.