when purchasing advertising on a new network..

What are some important questions to ask the network publisher?

I know one important one is how they calculate uniques (frequency cap)?

Feel free to pitch in :-)

Ask about it being targeted. If it's not, don't waste your time.

Also, when you ask that, make sure to specifically request their
definition of the word "targeted." Some ad networks tend to have
a skewed view of that phrase.

The best,

Dan

I think it's best to look for advertisements yourself. That way you know if it's targetted or not, in some cases you can view stats and you can start or stop whenever you want when you are or aren't achieving your goals. Besides that it usually is cheaper to directly contact your advertisors.

With respect to the other questions, I'm not sure how important this one is, but:
I'd ask if the network purchases bulk/wholesale traffic, and where it starts and to where it flows with their network.

I think that the only traffic available from bulk providers is from annoying pop ups/unders and expired domains. Not sure how good such traffic is, but they seem to provide loads of it.

A good food for thought is whether advertising with pop-ups on unimportant websites for the search engines can get your own site penalised from the search engines.

If you just buy traffic you should probably expect less than average results. Buying traffic works in some situations pretty well but in many cases you will need to buy a much higher level of traffic to see similar results as when doing more targeted advertising.

Not talking about buying traffic, talking about PPC and PPM campaigns, I know bought traffic doesnt always work out so well..

cybex: You were saying to see if the network actually buys their traffic correct? thats a good question.

Dan: Are you talking about nontargetted Traffic? Or non targetted ppm ads?

Also I think alot of people put too much weight on targetting. While I do agree a targetted ad does well, you also have to take into account the cost of that targetted lead.

For example I can pay 5 dollars a click on google ads and get nice happy targetted ads from people that are looking for hosting. Thats all well and fine. I also happen to frequent a large jeep forum. Jeep forum? That has nothing at all to do with hosting. But it just so happens that a portion of the forum is my target demographic. So by running a PPM campaign there, at around $3 ppm, I get around 14 visitors given a .7% ctr for around the same price($6). This type of campaign would not be considered targetted by any means. These visitors are interested in what im offering or they wouldnt have clicked on my banner (because its not ppc so they arent trying to help the forum by spam clicking). and I tend to have a decent conversion rate of these visitors. So I tend to get better ROI from PPM ads than PPC, maybe thats my dumb luck but alot of bigger firms ie. 1&1 run ppm ads and they arent going to be doing something that doesnt work. Not discounting at all what dan says because well dan runs a very succesful business and knows what he is talking about... I just have my own opinions also :-)

regards,

I agree, banner and text ad ppm's provide extremely targeted visitors and have also never been cheaper. Don't underestimate the humble banner ad!

Originally posted by abstracthost
when purchasing advertising on a new network..

What are some important questions to ask the network publisher?

I know one important one is how they calculate uniques (frequency cap)?

Feel free to pitch in :-)

It's important how they count their frequency cap ... but more important is whether you are using a reliable tracker (inhouse or 3rd party) to track conversions ;)

targeting is very important thing.

but anyway don't expect essential CTR.