Should we use banners or text links?

Every post that we publish on the internet is an opportunity for us to promote something. Whether we want to promote a product to sell, an opt-in page to build our list, an affiliate program or a referral link, posts on hive or other platforms are in general a great way to do so.

If we write a specific post, we can make the promotion through the post and place the link in an organic manner within the post. If we want to write a post that is not related to the topic of the promotion, it is also possible to set an ad in the signature of the post.

The question here is, should we use a banner or a text link to make this promotion.

Should we use banners or text links to promote things in the signature of our posts?

I've been running several crypto currency faucets on my website ref-hunters.ch. At the moment, I have only one single working faucet that offers free dogecoins to the users. I had a big battle with bot users in the past. If people use bots, there is absolutely no way that I can cover the costs of the faucets. In order to be able to distribute coins to the users, a faucet owner needs income from the ads that he puts on the website. Bots don't click on ads and they don't generate any income.

Anyway, before I suffered from these bots, I always tried to increase the return from my faucets so that I could pay more to the users. I had some ads from networks (List of ad networks that I use) on the faucets and also tried to promote referral programs. I usually used banners to promote other faucets. One day however I was in a hurry and I didn't find a banner so I put a text ad instead. The funny thing was that the number of referrals for this program skyrocketed within days!

I had always believed that banners were more effective than text links. This experience made me curious. Was I totally wrong about this asumption? I started an experiment in which I promoted two programs on the same page and on the same spot within my website. For one program I used a banner ad and for the other I used a text ad. Both websites were very similar but the results were very clear. For the program that I promoted with a banner ad, I got 5 referrals within 2 weeks. In the same time, for the program that I promoted with a text ad, I got 23 referrals. Since then, I always used text links to promote referral programs and I got much better results.

With text links I got 4 times better results than with banner ads

Use text links in your signatures

In addition to being more successful, text links also have the advantage that you don't need any graphic creations to produce your ad. Text also allows you to play around with words and to make the ad more attractive.

I've been using text ads not only on my faucets but also in the signature of my posts on hive, steem, publish0x or lbry. I also found that text links are more efficient in forum signatures than banners.