Hi all,

I run a site that receives around 1000 hits per day and would like to start selling banner add space. The only grey area I have with all this is how much should I charge the advertiser for advertising ?

Any help mucho appreciated

Thanks

Futurewebs

1000 ads rotating is 1CPM. Since you don't have lots of traffic, you might want to sell a monthly or weekly sponsorship. I wouldn't sell by the CPM on your site yet, its too small a quantity. Make sure you have a quality statistics and ad rotating script, and for your advertisiers, have your site audited by WebTrends Log Analyzer 7.0 so you can show them the true stats about your site.

Just my 2 cents.

i think you can do it. what you have to find out is how many page views you get per day/month then if you get 2 banners on each page you can get an idea of how many banner impresion each banner will get per month if you see its something like 50,000 each then i think you can sell it. maybe for around $15 CPM but to start i think that $10 CPM would be good then after a couple of months go up to $15 CPM

Thanks everyone for the replies so far.

For a bit more info I can tell u that the banner we have at the moment has shown over a million impressions in the last 5 months.

I think thats quite a few. I dont know how many hits some of you guys are gettin.

Cheers

Futurewebs

Originally posted by one_web
i think you can do it. what you have to find out is how many page views you get per day/month then if you get 2 banners on each page you can get an idea of how many banner impresion each banner will get per month if you see its something like 50,000 each then i think you can sell it. maybe for around $15 CPM but to start i think that $10 CPM would be good then after a couple of months go up to $15 CPM

$15/CPM? Are you actually selling any ad space at that rate right now, or did you just make it up. Everything I have seen and read indicates that the going rate is far below that these days (though there once was a time whan that would have been reasonable).

Futurewebs: If you are doing 1 million impressions every 5 months, and the traffic has not been increasing or decreasing over that period, then you're averaging well over 1000 impressions/day. You may be able to sell some ads, but I would try to set realistic (read low) expectations. The market for banner ads simply isn't what it used to be.

I am sure that other people here may have thoughts on this topic, but it might do you some good to check out some other boards where this is discussed more frequently.
www.sitepointforums.com has a pretty active forum on Advertising Sales and Affiliate Programs.

-Joe

Originally posted by one_web
i think you can do it. what you have to find out is how many page views you get per day/month then if you get 2 banners on each page you can get an idea of how many banner impresion each banner will get per month if you see its something like 50,000 each then i think you can sell it. maybe for around $15 CPM but to start i think that $10 CPM would be good then after a couple of months go up to $15 CPM

$15 is too much. the click through ration is declined to 0.3% only. which means 3 clicks per 1000 impressions. folish will only pay $15 for 3 visitor. i think $0.20 - $0.30 is expected click price. you can also sell on CPC bases.

Anyone know any good ad networks other than doubleclick, l90, advertising.com and the really famous ones? Thanks.

1000 hits?

what is that in page views?

Hi again,

When I say we have around 1000 hits thats 1000 unique visitors per day.

So say they each view on average 5 pages we got 5000 page views per day.

Its probably a bit more than that actualy. Our site is has lots of files for people to download and is updated regulaly so they tend to have a good look around.

What is CPC is this cash per click by any chance.

This may be a good way to do it.

If I was to go for rotating banners does anyone know of any good scripts that they would recomend that help me keep track of whats going on.

Thanks again

Futurewebs

Its all about target audience!
I know a guy who can barely get $2 CPM!

A very simple way to set the price of the ads for a smaller site is to figure the cost of displaying the ads (bandwidth, stats from 3rd party, etc) and than ad 50% - 100% + plus banner production but most will design or have some already.

I do not have a list handy but I have seen 3rd party banner serving services that range $0.15 - $0.20 per CPM, but most have a minimum month payment of the $20.00 (if memory serves me correct) So with your 30 CPM per month that works out to $0.67 per CPM so start your rates off in the range of $1.00 - $1.35.

At this stage of the game I would concentrate more on getting your visitors use to seeing ads and buildinghistory of stats and laying the foundation for advertisers more that making it a profitable experience.

$15/CPM? Are you actually selling any ad space at that rate right now, or did you just make it up. Everything I have seen and read indicates that the going rate is far below that these days (though there once was a time whan that would have been reasonable).

no they where just numbers i placed. i guess i should of used more realistic numbers. sorry

Originally posted by Futurewebs
Hi again,

When I say we have around 1000 hits thats 1000 unique visitors per day.

So say they each view on average 5 pages we got 5000 page views per day.

Its probably a bit more than that actualy. Our site is has lots of files for people to download and is updated regulaly so they tend to have a good look around.

What is CPC is this cash per click by any chance.

This may be a good way to do it.

If I was to go for rotating banners does anyone know of any good scripts that they would recomend that help me keep track of whats going on.

Thanks again

Futurewebs

CPC - cost per click. this is famous among advertisers because they pay on results and this works. so for example if you are able to send them 10 visitors a day they will happly pay you $3 - $10. it doesn't matter them from how much impression you sent them this no. of visitors.

this is good banner rotating software

http://www.clickseeadnow.com/

The Adnow 2 Advantage
little bit pricy but good script.

I am going to have to disagree on you about getting $3-10 for only 10 visitors.... Are you talking about highly and very specifically targeted visitors? If you are just talking about any old person I think these numbers are WAY off. I sell marketing for websites, and I don't even get $1 for 10 visitors... its more like $1 for 100 visitors... if that.

Can you tell me of a place where visitors are being sold (not just for sale, but actually selling) for around those prices?

Well it looks like ive opened up a right can of worms here.

For what its worth, the project that I initially asked about is for a client who has a very similar target audience to ours. I reckon anyone who would click through to his site would be interested in the products that he has for sale. We are both dealing with visitors who are interested in the music business and making music. we both offer services related to these subjects.

We currently run a scheme whereby we earn $0.01 per click through to a site with similar products to ours and we earn anything from $20 - $50 per month from that. All this is through a simple link and not a banner that sits on the top of our site.

My main point was I suppose answered by what ive just said. Maybe I should charge $0.01 per click through to their site and not have a flat fee per month as this is pretty useless to the person paying if they end up with visitors that have little interest in their site. I suppose they wouldnt have asked us if we would allow paid advertising if they didnt think that we and our visitors were of some way usefull to them.

Maybe the discussion should move onto whats a good way of tracking how many people we send to them and how we can both keep track of whats going on.

The other thing I was thinking is that we should use rotating banners and advertise more than one site per page. Ie having the banner change every 30 seconds or minute.

we feel that we have learnt something so far from whats been said and now would be interested in how to best implement our plans.

Thanks to everyone that have added their views and opinions, as ever this forum is the first place we turn to when we need to know whats what.

We are gonna be away for a few days so talk amongst yourselves till we get back.

Thanks again for all your help

futurewebs

Originally posted by NetDotHost
I am going to have to disagree on you about getting $3-10 for only 10 visitors.... Are you talking about highly and very specifically targeted visitors? If you are just talking about any old person I think these numbers are WAY off. I sell marketing for websites, and I don't even get $1 for 10 visitors... its more like $1 for 100 visitors... if that.

Can you tell me of a place where visitors are being sold (not just for sale, but actually selling) for around those prices?

www.goto.com is one example of cost per click module. and yes i am talking about trageted visitors. also if people will click only when they are interested. yes it may happen people click yes if nature of web site is different.

like orignal poster said he has web site for people interested in music. so if you will run web hosting ad on such site click ratio will be less. but if you will run same ad on hosting directory click ration will be high.

so all depends on your stretgies etc.

link (http://www.sponsorships.net/promote/advertising/banner_advertising/00001.htm)

look at that link it talks about banner advertising and it also has a list of what is the average cost for CPM ect. its really good.