Combining Traffic Exchange and Splash Screen Rotation to Get More Hits!

TL;DR: YASR is a tool that allows you to split test click through rates on your traffic exchange splash screens, for free.

In the past, we had banner exchanges.

These gave way to modern variants such as pop-up windows, link exchanges, and all manner of services for which the provision of advertising was a secondary function of the web page on which they appeared.

I remember a comment in my guest book from Geocities days -- you may need to look that one up! -- that said "Banner surfing and caught your wave." This isn't really a comment that you'll see much these days.

However, there are a few corners of the web left where advertising is the sole purpose of the site. One of these is the Traffic Exchange.

What is a Traffic Exchange (TE)?

Put simply, it is a place which displays adverts to members, who earn the right to have their own advert displayed to fellow members in return for their attention.

To make sure that they don't simply click away, and to be sure that they are humans, most reputable TE's put a little clickable puzzle on the screen (matching thumbnail photos for example) which the viewer must resolve before the next advert is shown.

When you accrue enough credits, through clicking the puzzles, your advert will be shown to fellow TE members, ideally in the form of a splash screen.

What is a Splash Screen?

A splash screen is a clickable image that promotes your site, and, when clicked, redirects the visitor accordingly.

There are many online services that can be used to create them -- such as AdKreator -- and they have been shown to be effective in attracting hits.

Of course, not every advert will generate a click through, and so splash screen should be rotated in order to test their effectiveness.

Why Rotate Splash Screens?

There are a number of reasons to rotate splash screens, including:

• Splash screens can be rotated against each other -- to test whether specific adverts for the same service work better than others.

• Splash screens for different services can be rotated to take advantage of a single source of traffic by showing different adverts in turn.

• A combination approach can be used, across different TE's, all supplied with the same rotator URL.

The important thing to remember is that the display and click through rates need to be tracked using an appropriate service.

What Do I Do Now?

To take advantage of this opportunity, you need a few things:

• An image hosting account for your splash screen;
• A free account at YASR;
• Accounts at the top TE sites, such as DragonSurf, HitSafari, EasyHits4U, Traffic-Splash, or FarmTraffic.

With these things in hand, it's just a case of creating a Campaign in YASR, sharing the URL across all your TE's, and surfing for credits!

YASR takes care of tracking hits and clicks, so you can use those credits at the times that get you the best chance of click-throughs for your splash screens.

For more information, check out the YASR web site!

How to Improve Click Through Rate: Email Marketing for Traffic Acquisition

As a traffic acquisition strategy, advertising in emails, and maintaining an email list to send content to rank very highly. Indeed, I'ml sure you've heard one phrase repeated over and over again: "the money's in the list".

However, as with all techniques designed to boost traffic and sales, it isn't as simple as it first seems.

For example, having built an email address list, some marketing experts would have you believe that your work is done, and all you need to do is send them emails, and reap the rewards as they buy any old thing you try to sell them.

Of course, anyone who has tried this knows that it just isn't true.

This article will explain all the sides to the mythical "CTR" or Click Through Rate metric, why it's important, how to best measure it, and, most importantly, how to improve it!

What is Click Through Rate in Email Marketing?

The first thing to remember is that the CTR isn't the same as the conversion rate.

In an email marketing campaign, the reader is presented with a subject line. If they click it, the email opens. They read it. If it captures their imagination, they may well click on a link that takes them to a web site, at which point they will usually be called upon to perform another action.

Each one of these could be termed a "click".

However, the last one, that turns your sales message into a sale, is known as the conversion.

The CTR is the middle one: the action that the reader takes to click a link in the email, abandon their current activity and take time out to do something else. Take a moment to re-read that and gauge the impact that I'm trying to make.

The CTR is a measure of how interested your target market is in your product offering.

Click Through Rate vs Click to Open

The trouble is that, on its own, the CTR isn't terribly helpful: all it does is tell you how many people read your content and clicked the link.

Let's imagine that you take some content that has a good CTR on your web site and then move it to an email campaign. You see that the CTR drops significantly, and therefore the logical assumption is that there is something wrong with the message content.

However, there could also be something wrong with the delivery medium.

Or, the subject line.

In fact, anything that affects the open rate will also affect the CTR. After all, if the recipient never sees the message text, they never have the opportunity to click (or not).

So, many marketers use the so-called CTOR (Click to Open Rate) which gives a more accurate view: it measures the number of times an email link is clicked, per number of times the email is opened (and presumably, read).

Before you can think about this level of analysis, you have to know what to measure, and set up some metrics.

How to Analyse Click Through Rate?

Many tools used to send emails have built-in mechanisms to show you a variety of different measurements:

• Delivery rate: the success in actually delivering each email;
• Open rate; a measure of the proportion of emails opened;
• Read Rate: a measure of the proportion of delivered emails actually read;
• Click Through Rate: the proportion of read emails that generate a click.

Now, because of the way that email works, some of these are easier to measure than others: for example, it's easy to tell if an email is rejected, but less easy to see if has been delivered directly to the spam folder, and therefore never even seen by the target customer, let alone opened or read.

In fact, the only measure that is 100% guaranteed to be correct is the Click Through Rate, which although it could be confused by multiple clicks from the same user -- rare, but not unknown -- is the only one that results in a verifiable user action.

But, everything else contributes to it.

So, to analyse the CTR, you need to know it in terms of everything else:

• CTR to Delivery;
• CTR to Open Rate(see above);
• etc.

It's also worthwhile testing different placements for the call to action (CTA), and attaching different trackers to each so that you know where the reader is getting to in your email message.

One final point: it may be that your email is a long sales letter or a simple come-on. Don't forget that if you are simply asking the target customer to open a sales letter on your site, that you need to measure the CTR of the email to the CTR (or conversion rate) of the sales material as a separate metric.

How to Improve Click Through Rate?

Let's look at a few things that affect the CTR in an email marketing campaign:

• A poor reputation (of the sender) may mean that the email goes straight to the spam folder, or bin;
• Bad subject lines will be dismissed summarily in a few seconds;
• Poor sales copy, copy that is incorrectly rendered for the platform, etc. will have readers deleting the email even if they open it;
• Incorrect targeting -- content and delivery media -- will drive down CTRs.

There are undoubtedly other factors, but these are the key points that you can actually influence.

Each one can be tested.

The delivery rate can be tested against different domains, subject lines can be tested against open rates, and click through rates can be tested for multiple call to action messages, even within the same email.

The point is that everything that can be measured, should be, and everything that you measure can be -- and needs to be -- tested.

In the end, the only real key to improving click through rates is to test, track, and measure your success!

How to Calculate Traffic Acquisition Cost ROI

All traffic acquisition comes at a cost: either real or in terms of opportunities you lose by spending time just trying to get those hits in rather than working on your business.

For example, read through Yahoo's experiences with climbing traffic acquisition costs in 2015.

Although they technically made more money, with a 350% rise in TAC they were left with a loss instead of the profit they had previously enjoyed. There were a lot of factors that entered into the equation, but TAC remain the bane of a lot of pure web businesses existence.

But, is it worthwhile?

In Yahoo's case, the then-CEO Marissa Mayer thought so. She cited the fact that Yahoo was a business 'in decline' and that the narrowing margins were the price to pay for increased visibility. That story did not end particularly well, and Yahoo is now part of the newly formed Yahoo Verizon business vehicle.

From Verizon's point of view, despite not getting the discount they initially sought, a 4.5 billion dollar price tag would argue that the increase in visibility, users, and, in short, customers and traffic (opportunities to make more customers) has a fair bit of residual value.

We're not all Yahoos, or Verizon's, though, but calculating your ROI on TAC is still important.

Let's assume you sell physical objects, and advertise through Facebook and AdWords. For these services, you pay a click fee. Each time a user clicks your advert, and is delivered to your sales page, it costs you money.

A percentage (and I hope a high percentage) of those views become sales. The questions you need to answer are simple:

• How much does each sale make?
• What is the lifetime value of the customer?
• What is the conversion rate?

From these questions, you can create two useful metrics. The TAC ROI and the LTAC ROI.

The basic TAC ROI (traffic acquisition cost) is simply the cost of making a sale. If you pay out $100 in AdWords fees, and generate $200 of sales, then your ROI is double your investment. On the other hand, if your sales do not even cover your advertising costs, then you will enter negative ROI territory.

This may not matter if your Lifetime TAC ROI is higher.

And, it can be much, much higher. In fact, if you sell printers, for example, you can well afford a negative ROI on the sale of the printer if your lifetime value of the customer is linked to excruciatingly high ink cartridge prices.