Should I host my own Advertising Banners?

Practically every affiliate program offers advertising banners that you can use to advertise your products. The majority of these affiliate programs will also allow you to use the banners which are hosted on their servers.

While this can be convenient, I don’t recommend it. For one, this is just yet another DNS Lookup the visitors computer has to do when they visit your website. Second and most importantly, if the affiliate programs server is down that they use to distribute the images, then your visitors are going to be greeted with a big red X.

Also I’ve noticed quite a few affiliate programs decide to delete their banners, and not replace them with any new banners or even notify affiliates that they were removed. Affiliate programs also can change URLs from time to time which will require you to update all banner code.

Unless it’s a dynamic banner that updates based on the latest news or events, host your own banner and save yourself a lot of hassle with red X’s.

Posted in: General Affiliate Questions