How much do I quote?

How much is advertising space worth?

[incywincy]

Hi everyone.

I own a website that is generating around 20,000 human page views a month from about 8,000 visitors. The site is a directory and lists information about thousands of let us say 'UK Hotels' as an example.

The information is specific to the UK but because it ranks well for generic keywords (e.g. 'Hotels' ) we receive visitors from around the world.

An american website has emailed me about advertising on my site. How much is advertising space worth? I obviously don't want to under or oversell myself!
I can provide raw logs, processed stats and internal search results to them if they wanted them.

Thanks in advance for any information you may give me.

[incywincy]

someone sticky mailed me to say that he didn't think i'd get any replies. guess he's right. anyone got a good random number generator?

[rcjordan]

I'm working in the $5 to $15 CPM range now. The tighter the focus, the higher the CPM. The US site, at least as given in the example, is just on the fringe of the category. I'd ask $5 CPM.

[JamesR]

I think of it in terms of value to whoever is buying. Traffic is worth different amounts in different sectors. Try looking at the top PPC bids on overture, guess how many impressions it would take to produce a click, and go from there.

[brotherhood of LAN]

Having a specialist informational site should always get a good ad rate

Im a member of a well known third party ad company and my site is getting around 1500 visitors / 6000 page views a day

Im getting roughly 50% of impressions paid for at about $1 CPM. Im looking for ways to increase this too!

It is a science site, and targets tutors, professionals and high school students, so Im hoping that a CPM can reflect this targetting

Any suggestions welcome! :)

[skibum]

You might consider asking for quotes to advertise on other sites in your market.

[Brett_Tabke]

If you have the inventory wide open, why not try to work within the advertisers budget and expectations? If it works for both of you, that's a good start on advertising. It allows you to get a system setup for serving ads. When the campaign is done, you can thing run, "click here to buy this space" type ads.

[Bogglesworld]

Hi. This is a very timely topic for me at any rate. I am also making less than $1 per CPM on about 250 000 page views per month.

Question: For those of you who are getting $5-15 CPM. Do you actively canvas for advertisers or does it just happen, I mean do they eventually come to you?

Recently, I had three inquiries into rates etc. and I was so desperate I went for $2.50 CPM but I couldn't close any deals. Traffic is good and growing but revenue is not.

Thanks

[eljefe3]

Hi Bogglesworld,

This advice from JamesR seems right on the money (no pun intended)

>>Try looking at the top PPC bids on overture, guess how many impressions it would take to produce a click, and go from there

Alternatively you could set up some sort of redirect/ counter script and charge per click loosely based on how much the clicks are going for on go....overture.

Before doing this you would have to make contact with the prespecitve advertiser and work out some sort of mutually beneficial deal. After a couple of months I'd sit down with the advertiser and reevaluate/renegotiate.