Ad Sales for New Site?

[pab1953]

I'm helping develop a "PG" kids video game and digital technologies website. We think the site will be popular and for that reason we think game publishers and tech makers will want to advertise on it.

Three questions:

- The site is designed for pages to have banner ads above the header and above the footer, plus others down the 300px-wide right sidebar. What do we put in those spaces on the pages during the early weeks and months as we're building up enough traffic to justify charging advertisers? Do we offer ads for free to begin with and then payments kick in when traffic hits certain levels?

- How do we get advertisers? Do we approach game publishers and gadget makers individually or is their an ad network that can target out market?

- How do we manage ad campaigns -- duration, ad type, placement, etc.?

Thanks.

[explorador]

Wow kinda complicated.

I think first you need to have traffic. You mentioned to be helping on developing the site. "we think the site will be popular" that's great and hope it proves to be so, but at the point of sales, what you think won't move anything. You need traffic and good conversion to attract advertisers (and to make them stay).

About your questions...

You can go live without banners while you increase your traffic. OR, you can build some campaign of yours to see how the visitors (your traffic) reacts to your banners and see the conversion. IF there is a good conversion you "might" want to offer that for free so your clients SEE it works. Beware some will not come back after the free cookie.

How? put ads stating "place your ad here" and a landing page explaining some stuff and a form to receive traffic details and marketing ideas. You can also approach your potential clients and offer them an option.

You would manage your campaigns by cost per click, cost per impressions or monthly. The "beta" campaign will be useful to find out the ad places that work best.

Good luck.

[werty]

I would join commission junction or an aff network and pull banner ads for similar products. I think the company that makes guitar hero has a program, as does gamefly, amazon, etc etc.

So you could run premade affiliate ads (related to video games) in there just to make it look like you have advertisers already. At the same time you can collect data on the banners and build out a rate card.

There is a good thread from years ago about it...lets see if I can find it:
[webmasterworld.com...]

It contains lots of information that may be relevant to figuring out what you need to do in order to sell advertising.

[pab1953]

Explorador: an "Advertise with Us" ad/box/link would be good to have, with associated landing page.

Werty: Targeted affiliate ads are a good idea. And thanks for the thread link.