Selling Advertising Space on my Site

By myself - no third party companies

[wfernley]

Hi everyone,

Currently I run AdSense on my website but my earnings are going down and my traffic is going up. I want to start considering advertising actual companies related to my website niche.

I was curious of how I go about setting that up? I don't want to use a seperate company that gets all the ads for me (like AdSense). I was going to create a media kit and add that to my site. Does anyone know any good tutorials on creating a media kit?

I was mainly concerned about how much to charge. What is the standard rate? I know I should check out my competition to see what they are charging, or sites related to my website, however, there aren't any. Is there a standard price I could go off of, lets say $0.0X for every visitor so I would charge like $75/month to advertise?

I already have a couple companies that would interested when I get this going and it sounded like they were interested in a fixed monthly fee and not a PPC or per 1000 impressions.

Can anyone get me started on the right foot?

Thanks!

Wes

[CannonFodder]

Pricing will relate to you content, your traffic and your industry.

You'll need some sort of Ad Serving software, like PHP AdsNew or Max Media Manager to host and track statistics. Most advertisers will want to see how their campaigns are performing.

Dan

[wfernley]

Thank you for your reply!

What stats do they want to see? I know how to write in PHP and I have made a script that counts clicks and impressions.

What stats do they need to see?

Thanks!

[CannonFodder]

They'll probably want to see impressions, clicks, unique impressions.

Other than that, I'm not sure, perhaps someone else can add to that list.

Think about advertising on a site, what would you want to see to ensure your dollars were being well spent.

Dan

[wfernley]

Thanks again Dan.

Yeah those three stats would be very important.

If anyone knows any additional stats to add to the list, please add them :)

[fourchette]

hummm

I started this on one of my sites and the biggest problem is to deal with false clicks from crawlers or other scrapers.

For the moment I'm building a blacklist but at some point it will be impossible to manage so I'm alreadu looking for another solution or maybe simply get a flat fee from the advertiser.

[wfernley]

Most people I have talked to about advertising on my website want to pay a monthly fee and not per click. I think this is a good idea as well considering you know what you will be making that week and you won't have to go indepth with blocking crawlers and false clicks.

[fourchette]

I agree about the fact that a flat monthly fee is the way to go if you don't want (or can't) manage click tracking, especially when 'under attack' from crawlers and scrappers.

Personnaly I use the tracking functions of google analytics to track the cliks I will actually sell to the client. I just can't track all the bots myself in a short time, and gogle seems to do a pretty good job at that.

I'm still a little unconfortable eith the idea of letting a third ^party service calculate the valid clicks, but on the other hand these numbers can less be considered false by the client since it's google that says it and not us...

In the end, I think the way to go is a flat fee for unlimited impressions/clics. No headaches, no pain in the ass running after the bots thing.

Any more comments about how to live with those crawlers, etc?

[wfernley]

I setup mine to track IP's which I found to work well. I'm not sure if crawlers can display different IP's. I know Googlebot does but you can just setup something in your robots.txt file to deny it from clicking the ad.

I hope that helps.

[fourchette]

The problem I had is that some home made crawlers/scrapper crawlers come on my site and they gove me a hard time to keep up just to ban them from the site.

Also, most of them don't follow robots.txt instructions...

[wfernley]

Yes, but usually they are from the same IP which never changes so you can ban them using their IP.

[fourchette]

Well, like I said it is quite difficult I think to track all Ip.s because you have to check all the logs to spot bot-patterns on the site. With a couple of clics a day it can be done, but that way of doing things cannot be scalable IMO.

I cant imagine myself tracking all IP and tracing them to make sure its a human that clicked on a link and not a bot.

On the other hand, like I said I;m not sure it;s the best idea to have google analytics track the clicks for me as they can and will make mistaked and i;ll never know about it...

what I need is incredibill bot blocker... is it out yet? :)

fourchette

[wfernley]

Haha I wish ;)

I'm not expert on the subject - as you can tell - but I bet there is a service out there that monitors for bots and has a list created. You then just have your stats tap into their list.

I understand what you mean by tracking IP's it is time consuming and would be too much work.

[TitanJeff]

I've been selling ads based on a monthly and yearly rates for the last few years and it's worked well for me. My trouble has been in finding what is a fair rate to charge. For that, I had to experiment by running an AdSense campaign which didn't earn me much but did track impressions for me well.

After a few months, I got a good average and then ran into my second problem which is what is the value of the ad for each 1,000 impressions. I found CPM prices all over the place and finally settled on $1 per based on the niche my site provides. Maybe it's low. Maybe it's high. It's hard to know.

Once you set that CPM, you have a decent idea of what your monthly rate should be. I adjusted for smaller sized ads and ads "below the fold", etc. And you get an idea pretty quick if your rates are too low or too high by the response.

If you don't see much interest, offer "special discounts" or free months. Be willing to negotiate.

What I'm hoping to do next is add a means for advertisers to sign up and add their own ads. I've not found anything yet which does this the way I am envisioning.

[wfernley]

Thanks for your message.

I have a question for you. Should I have some kind of contract? Or would I be fine just giving them a price and getting them to pay me via paypal.

Just curious if i need to protect myself.

[TitanJeff]

I've heard two ways to handle this and I'm sure it's based on the size of advertising contract you are looking to get.

I get my stuff paid up front via PayPal or by check. But my site has been active six years and I think I've earn a rep that means I won't shut down in a couple of months.

But I know the bigger advertisers may want to do something where much of it is paid in 30 days. I don't do this now but I'm sure I would for the right company.

I don't think you'll find ONE way to do this.

[wfernley]

Do you charge monthly, quarterly or annually?

[TitanJeff]

I do monthly and yearly. I basically make the yearly deal about the same as 9-10 months purchased individually.

But my site is about a NFL football team, we have pockets of lower traffic time that makes selling advertising more difficult.

I have also sold quarterly and season (football) packages as well.

I am flexible in all my ads. If someone wants three months, I might give them a fourth for free or offer them 20% off.

[wfernley]

Great! Well my website is in a new market that is not very popular yet. So I know I wont have a ton of people knocking on my door. That is why I want things to work good from the start so I don't looks advertisers and I can maybe turn this into a full time job.

[CannonFodder]

TitanJeff,

Do you have some sort of Media Guide or rate sheet that you use, or do you just negotiate on a per case basis?

Dan

[Valto]

I think that everyone that is trying to sell their ad space directly should create their mediakit or ad rate card. This will make interested advertisers purchace much easier. If it's easy to buy, it's easy to sell. As simple as that.