Forum Moderators: skibum
My site gets about 500K pageviews during the offpeak season (january to early august) and in its first year of football season got over 2 million pageviews a month. I'm anticipating more next season obviously.
Initially we were getting 22 cents a click on a CPC basis, and tearing off a 1.5% CTR.
As of late we are lucky to get 15 cents a click, more like 11, and our CTR is plummeting to around 1%. Worse, we are beginning the slow time of the year and I'll be lucky to hit 500K pageviews this month.
Here's where I'm at a loss: We have a great demographic. 85% males between 18-54, 73% males between 25-54, 45% college graduates, 85% some college, average annual income > $39,000, and geographically targeted to Texas (60%) and further, to Austin (32%).
Surely there must be some way to find targeted "sponsors" to put full-time banners on our site that are ads and ot click based. Local restaurants or what have you.
Short of getting out a phone book and calling people trying to hit them up for ad purchases, does anyone know of a way to do that? Is there an agency that specializes in these types of targeted campaigns?
Thanks in advance. I'm looking for anything.
Wheeler
<edit: no signature urls, please NFFC>
You may want to look into using affiliate programs in place of a banner agency.
For instance, Commission Junction [cj.com] has over 1100 merchants from which you can pick, and target your audience. The problem is, they don't have a lot of CPC campaigns. Most are CPA, paying for leads and % of sales. CJ is a good company, and does pay on time. They also have what is called the "smart zone." It is basically an ad rotator, where you pick the merchants that have accepted you, and show which banners you want. You put the smartzone code on your pages, and it automatically rotates the banners. You can also select to show certain banners more often than others. I haven't used the smartzone myself, but I have heard of a problem: When a surfer clicks through your site, they see the same banner on every page, unless they refresh. However, it has been a while since this came up, and it is probably fixed by now. If you might be interested, but want to know for sure if smartzone works or not, I can test it with my account and let you know. CJ aggregates payments from all merchants, and pays you monthly with a $25 minimum. Checks are mailed around the 20th of each month, or you can opt for direct deposit.
A couple other companies :
DirectLeads [directleads.com] - also has a banner rotator, which I have heard of no one having problems with.
onResponse [onresponse.com]
websponsors [websponsors.com]
I have worked these programs for a while, and have been paid on time by all of them.
sponsorhips.net [sponsorships.net] has three cpc campaigns, one for office.com at $.20 per click, and 2 offer rotators at .12 and .10.
websitesponsors [websitesponsors.com] is notorious for having good CPC campaigns, right now running .12-.25 CPC.
I have not used the above 2, but know many who have, and have been paid on time.
Working targetted lead campaigns can produce very good overall CPC amounts. (you don't get paid by click, but the lead amount makes up for it, leaving you with a decent or even better overall CPC) I have run many lead programs at different times that ended paying well over .25 CPC in the end. (I have also run many that delivered nothing, the key is finding reliable merchants that are highly targetted to your audience.)
If you're going to pursue restaurants, etc. my first advice would be to have the site TELL them how to sponsor/advertise. You'll need a media kit citing your demographics, some history of how the site got where it is, and some examples of HOW they might advertise. This needs to be written on a 7th grade level, not ADspeak.
Also, you need to cultivate the local webmasters for referrals. I believe it is a conflict of interest to pay a webmaster for recommending your site (convenient, eh? but the truth) and I tell them so upfront. I also tell them that I do know how to make them look good to their clients, and -more importantly- remind them that if the client doesn't get traffic he's not going to be very excited about spending more money on future web development.
100% of the requests for sponsorship or advertising come via email, I do not have a sales staff. Usually, they have only partially read the information I have on the web, but it gets them moving in the right direction.
