BANNER ADS DISPLAY ON THREE (3) WEBSITES IN GARDENING NICHE

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1 This is one of Cosmo Ellis s case studies. Purpose of these series is to help other fellows internet marketers on taking the right decision about where to advertise or not, and what techniques are the best. All reports are based on my personal experience and all results are genuine facts. Even a campaign was a success or a big fail, you will have it here. Sometimes is good to see what others have done and adapt some results to your own campaigns. The reports will be from many verticals like internet marketing, work from home, health/fitness, gardening, games, gambling and others using banner ads, text ads or different techniques. What s important is you to grab some ideas and adapt to your business. BANNER ADS DISPLAY ON THREE (3) WEBSITES IN GARDENING NICHE Network Used The display networks are BlogAds and BuySellAds platforms which are majorly used in searching for advertising placement (banner advertisement). About Gardening Niche Gardening niche is one of biggest growing vertical niche for e-commerce online sells nowadays. It works perfectly for Amazon affiliates, affiliates in general i.e. CJ, ShareASell or for your own website if you are in e-commerce business with your own products or brand. Here are some US statistics: over 100+ millions fans, 1/3 males and 2/3 females, years of age, 88% own their own house and HHI is $ This niche has good results everywhere in the world. It works in a specific way for me now and I will encourage everyone to try it because on this niche is common to directly negotiate with the seller (website owner) about a commission on all traffic and sales I generated. You (I did this now) can also tell them to make a special offer the same time you re promoting their website. If you cannot find any of this, it s okay to use Amazon or other home/garden website as an affiliate. In Gardening niche, the two best times to promote is the spring and autumn. My campaign is in April, so practically I missed that time, but together with the website owner, we decide to put on sales pre-orders for saffron bulbs with delivery in June-July. So practically I sell some bulbs that do not yet exist promising that the owner will make the delivery in the next 2-3 months, and it works out well even in these conditions. I m telling you this because if you will make your promotions in a better time of the year you will probably have great results in Gardening niche.

2 Saffron bulbs packages are of 16 pcs, 30 pcs, 40 pcs 100 pcs and 150 pcs while the 150 pcs is only for Europe dispatch with delivery time of 2-3 months because it s a pre-order sale and the owner can get 15-25% discount on the ordered goods from its normal price. Placements The two advertising platforms I used to search on are BlogAds and BuySellAds BlogAds: Blog Ads is a good provider for blog advertising, they have a decent amount of publishers and the statistics they give are very useful. Because this time we are in garden niche, we search for home/garden vertical, the two websites looking promising are The Cheap Vegetable Gardener and Gardenrant. Firstly, The Cheap Vegetable Gardener blog on statistics, we learn that they have up to 3,556 impressions per week and I use the 160x600 pixels banner size to advertise on it. Remember that we are talking about very targeted visitors. This is the copy of the banner I used and the results in print screen: Ads were visible for 1 week from 3 rd to 9 th April beginning from Sunday and ends on Saturday, it cost $76 and I was able to send 160 clicks to the website. Tip about BlogAds prices: 1 st 5 advertisements you buy (at least 5, maybe more) have 5% discount. Use the coupon they provide at checkout. Looking at it from all the statistics, what I want to say is about on days results. In my other ads before I also noticed that for Gardening niche weekend is definitely the best time to advertise, and on the first two (2) days of the week the results are poor.

3 Secondly, at the same time I bought 50,000 impressions using BuySellAds in Pioneer Settler website. In this advertising platform, I didn t find a specific vertical for gardening but I later used keywords like flowers or garden to search for it. Pioneer Settler is well established and the statistics from BuySell Ads reveals about 860,000 impressions per month, I choose 250x300 px size and I m buying to test the minimum allowed of 50, 000 impressions, starting by April 4 th until the delivery of all impressions which is going to take about 3-5 days to deliver.

4 Here is the copy of the banner: Ads was visible for 3-4 days from 4th to 7th April starting on Monday, it cost $62.50 and I sent 24 clicks to the website (from impressions) - Not so happy with it though, but this is how I learn. Thirdly, after all these results I decide to use the third website from Blog Ads platform Gardenrant and here is the estimated traffic generated per week 16,691 impressions. This time around, I choose the biggest banner size of 300x600 pixels and I bought it for 3 days which is on the weekend days (Friday- Sunday) 15 th -17 th April. Here is the copy of the banner I use with print screen results: This time around, Ads was visible for three days plus from 15 th to 18 th April starting from Friday to Sunday and it cost $74.10 in which I was able to send 143 clicks to the website.

5 Lastly, I make use of retargeting method. In this method, I used the traffic generated to grow a retargeting list for which I chose Perfect Audience Company. The campaign started by sending visitors back few days after my last banner was active because it requires 250 different IP s before its start displaying. This was a good decision because these retargeting ads are still displaying up till the time I m writing this case study with good results at a very low price. The sizes I used for retargeting was the three (3) banners used above plus a new 728x90 pixels. Now I realize after looking back critically that using Perfect Audience was not the best retargeting company choice because of the 45 days maximum cookies time policy i.e. the IP s will be deleted after 45 days and preferably, I would have chosen other re-targeting company who allows a longer cookies time.

6 Longer cookies time is better for gardening niche s pre-selling seeds, probably for other niches doesn t matter too much. CONCLUSION In conclusion, the costs for 3 banner ads used are $76+$62.50+$74.10 which is equal to $ in total and the total clicks made on the website is Three Hundred and Twenty Four (324), for the Cheap Vegetable Gardener I made One hundred and Sixty (160) clicks on the website, Twenty-four (24) clicks on Pioneer Settler and One hundred and forty-three (143) clicks on Gardenrant. I don t have the exact link statistic of the purchase that was made because most of them were made after the end of the campaign that s coming from Perfect Audience, but I believed that the Blog Ads websites was successfully campaigns and a total sum $ sales were made up till 30 th of April as estimated below; One (1) package of 30 pieces bulbs, Five (5) packages of 40 pieces bulbs and the rest packages of sixteen (15) pieces bulbs, no sales for 100 or 150 pieces packages bulbs, all the customers are from US except an order received from Saudi Arabia and another one from Russia. Because I was lazy I finished writing this report in the 2 nd week of May. The only good thing is that I can update the sales: Other 5 packages of 30 bulbs and more than 10 packages with 16 bulbs were sold. Total value increased over $893 (US customers plus 1 order from Austria). I estimate to double this amount until the end of May, and this is a direct result of good banner placement combined with retargeting strategy. Last update: over $1300 made from pre-sales until May 15. Website owner ( is happy and he decides to end in 1 week some promotions and prepare the new bulbs season with actual sales packages (not pre-sells packages). This was the only advertisement they ever made (they will repeat a banner ads campaign after 1 month). Estimated sells for this season time (July-September) only for saffron packages are more than $ My conclusion as Internet Marketer is positive, and confirms the fact that retargeting is a must. Also garden niche is huge and banner advertising made in right place converts well. Things to improve building an list. I made some print-screens and paste them all in Photoshop so you can see how the last banner (300x600 px.) looked in the Gardenrant website:

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