Ready To Sell Banner Ads On Your Site?

By Julie Martin

Before you can sell banner ads on your site, you'll need to determine who's visiting your site and who would want to advertise to this audience. And how do you know if you have enough traffic to attract advertisers?

Following are some guidelines to help you determine if selling ads on your site is feasible and, if it is, tips on how to price your ads and serve them on your site.
Targeting Audience, Advertisers

The first thing you need to ask is, "Who are my visitors and potential advertisers?" Site visitors and site advertisers are not necessarily the same.

Consider an online art gallery whose primary visitors include art buyers and the artists selling art on the site. Which of these groups would be the best advertisers? Probably neither. The best advertisers would be businesses that want to reach these two groups. They might include online art supply stores and frame shops.

Content is king. Content can mean interesting articles "How to Market Your Art" might appeal to the artists as well as useful services, perhaps an escrow service to benefit buyers. Now that you've identified your visitors, you need to develop content that appeals to them.

Why? Because the better the content, the higher the traffic and the more impressive your traffic numbers will be when you solicit other businesses to buy advertising. And the type of content on your site reveals something about the interests of the people who visit it.

This is valuable information; advertisers want to know the audience they reach.

It helps if your site has features that drive visitors to categorize themselves according to their interests and that help them easily find the content they want. The features will help you identify the most popular content and possibly charge higher ad rates for those pages. In addition, they can help you continue to produce relevant, attractive content that keeps people coming back.
Looking Good

Where your visitors come from, how they arrive and where they go on your Web site are very important for making your site look attractive to advertisers. Repeat traffic, usually visitors who have bookmarked the site, is extremely desirable because it means viewers will see ads more than once.

Frequency of exposure to an ad increases the probability that a viewer will click on it. And if you know where your visitors come from, that helps advertisers target their ads. You can track visitors' IP addresses and use them to help determine what part of the country visitors live in and/or which company they work for.

You'll need to gather demographic information to help advertisers target their ads and know they'll reach the right audience.

Smaller sites can use online surveys to encourage visitors to share valuable information with them that can be used to develop a detailed user profile.

Larger Web sites with more traffic might consider hiring an independent auditing company to profile their audience on an annual basis. This verifies that their demographic information is accurate and nonbiased.

Rates are typically based on the number of page impressions served up by the site, as well as by the server architecture used. Prices start around $900 (U.S.) per site traffic audit. Some auditing services charge a set-up fee.

For auditing information, visit the Audit Bureau of Circulations, BPA International or Nielsen Media Research.
What You're Worth

Ad rates are based on several factors, one of the most important being the amount of traffic your site receives. Advertisers and agencies usually seek sites at least 6 months old that receive 500,000 or more impressions per month.

Don't despair if your Web site doesn't have quite this much traffic. Although sites with huge amounts of traffic generally can command higher rates, niche sites that have a highly targeted and desirable audience still attract advertisers.

A common banner ad package consists of 100,000 impressions and costs from $20 to $100 per thousand impressions. Rates from $25 to $70 cost per thousand (CPM) are average for popular sites. Remember, most sites have repeat visitors, and most visitors view more than a single page per visit, so 100,000 impressions might represent 10,000 to 30,000 unique visitors.

In some cases, impressions are guaranteed; in others, they are estimated. Some sites will charge a flat rate for estimated impressions. If the delivered impression count is higher, some sites let their advertisers keep the "overdeliveries" at no extra charge.

Other factors that affect banner ad rates include:

* Banner size. Industry standard banners sizes are 468 x 60 pixels and 234 x 60 pixels. Larger banners cost more. You can put a limit on banner file sizes(7 kilobytes [KB] to 10 KB, for example) to keep download times to a minimum.

* Supply and demand. Ad space on sites that appeal to a prime target audience can fetch a higher price than space on sites targeting a broad, general audience. Depending on your industry, your site's branding and the availability of your inventory, you can develop an appropriate fee structure.

* Competitors' rates. The best starting point for determining what to charge advertisers is to learn what sites similar to yours charge. If you feel you can afford it, you might want to offer a slightly better price at first to attract business. The easiest way to do this is to call a company and ask. Companies serious about business list phone numbers on their Web sites.

* Audience profile. The more targeted your audience profile, the more you can charge. The more targeted your advertising is, the more you can charge. For example, on the Wall Street Journal's site, you'd pay $64 CPM for advertising on a specific site within WSJ.com, $79 CPM for running a banner ad to coincide with editorial content on that site that appeals to certain viewers, and $98 CPM for targeting your audience based on profession, gender, industry or company size (rates effective July 7, 2000).

* Statistics. If you can show advertisers visitor return rates, average length of visit, average pages viewed per visit, click-through rates, viewer-to-customer conversion rates and so on, you can give them a feel for the loyalty of your site visitors. This justifies higher pricing. You can get this information by using traffic analysistools.