You can call them link exchanges, banner exchanges, or even automated banner exchanges. They've been used for website promotion for at least a decade, maybe longer. And they often don't work very well. Here's why.
I admit, I'm coming to this game a little late; I hadn't even heard of banner exchanges as such until recently, although I'm familiar with the somewhat related concept of reciprocal link exchanges. So I needed to do a little research into how they work. If this idea is new to you too, let me give you a little explanation.
Banner exchanges are typically a service offered by a central company that has built up a customer base focused on several general topics or categories (such as health, hobbies, shopping, sports, travel, etc.). Customers create a banner ad promoting their own website, and agree to show the banner ads of the central company's other clients on their website. The central company requires its customers to put a code on the web pages on which the business will show the banner ads. In turn, of course, the customer's banner ad gets shown on the websites of the central company's other customers. There's usually a ratio involved, often 2:1 – so if the original customer shows banner ads for the central company's other customers to 500 visitors, their own banner ad gets shown 250 times.
Let's break this down into a fictitious example. Say I run a store and website aimed at inspiring children to be creative – we'll call it creativekids.com. I join the Southern States Banner Exchange. I create (or hire someone else to create) a banner ad that meets SSBE's specifications for use in their exchange, and submit it. I look at SSBE's list of categories, and choose the one into which my business fits most comfortably. This calls for a bit of thought, as I'll be displaying ads from other businesses in the same category – and they'll be displaying MY ad.
Once that's taken care of, I decide on which page or pages of my website I'm willing to display banner ads from other businesses. I also get code from SSBE to add to those pages, so they can track the impressions those ads receive. Say we're working with a 2:1 exchange ratio. For every 1,000 impressions my site provides to SSBE's other customers, my banner ad will be displayed 500 times on other customer sites. Naturally, these banner ads can all be clicked, so visitors can leave the site they're on and go somewhere else.
Does this make sense so far? Good, because I'm very bad with math – and apparently I'm not the only one. A number of small businesses that have used automated banner exchanges may not have run the figures completely. I found an article on website promotion myths that does exactly this, however. It discusses some of the problems with automated banner exchanges – and I hate to tell you how old it is. Yet if you do a search on the related keywords, you get plenty of hits in Google. Have they worked the bugs out? What's going on?
Website Promotion 
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