July 5th, 2006
Affiliate Ads: Size Does Matter
Knowing that affiliate marketing has the potential to be a big money earner (or at least, a good way to diversify) in product-based blogs is the first step. The next would be to analyse what “ad” formats work best.
While for conventional contextual ads where the rectangle formats (the large rectangle especially) tend to have the highest clickthrough rates (CTR), for affiliate ads, Aaron Wall has found that the smaller the ad, the higher the conversion rate (up to a turning point of 100×100). This trend, of course, doesn’t include text links, which outperform every other affiliate ad format by a mile.
It’s counter-intuitive if you’ve worked primarily with contextual ads so far, where wider and larger formats facilitate reading, and where banner ads placed right above content bring in pretty good CTRs. But I guess this only goes to show that all of us have to ensure that one mindset doesn’t clog our development in other areas, especially money-making ones.
P.S.: Never forget that no matter the advice given by anybody, personal testing is always the best way to determine which ad formats and positioning work best.
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