growers

Making the most of your advertising investment on the Internet
By Kevin Godbee

The first part of our article about advertising online covered:

1. Finding sites to place your advertising.
2. Determining if the site has the right environment and audience.
3. Analyzing and cross-referencing traffic stats and looking at Alexa rankings.
4. Reviewing ad rates. Flat monthly fees, CPM, CPC, PPC and CPA.

Part one can be found here.

Part two will cover:

5. Making Contact with the Publisher.
6. Negotiating a deal.
7. Creatives – Banner Sizes, Text Links, Advertorials.
8. Measuring ROI.

Making Contact with the Publisher & Negotiating a Deal.

The site selling advertising is referred to as the “publisher”. The buyer is the advertiser. It can be beneficial to make contact via telephone when considering a larger investment on a high traffic site. Communicating by voice helps establish a relationship and can make it easier to negotiate a deal beyond the published rates.

Sometimes, in lieu of a discount, it may be easier to arrange for additional exposure at little, or no additional cost. Committing to multiple months can result in discounted rates.

Creatives – Banner Sizes, Text Links, Advertorials.

Older standard banner sizes, such as 468x60, 120x60 are starting to suffer somewhat from "banner blindness". However, these sizes are still widely used as of this writing. Newer sizes like 125x125, Skyscraper 120x600, 234x60 and so on can be quite effective.

Text links are becoming more popular. The belief is that some people purposely ignore obvious ads and only look at the text. An “Advertorial” is when your promotional text is integrated into the content of the site.

Measuring ROI

In the beginning of this article, we asserted that advertising is an investment. Therefore, we should measure the return-on-investment, or ROI.

One way to measure ROI is to use a spreadsheet such as the example below:
Publisher Clicks per month Monthly Cost Cost Per Click
Site #1 12,000 $400 $0.03
Site #2 8,000 $300 $0.04
Site #3 50,000 $1,000 $0.02

Regardless if the ads are purchased on a flat monthly fee, CPM, CPC, etc., is it useful to determine your monthly cost, and chart the clicks per month to make the calculation of your cost per click. In other words, you are now able to realize what it cost to have each prospect walk through your front door from each source. You can then compare them to see which campaign was the most efficient. In addition to the efficiency of a campaign, you should also analyze the effectiveness.

In the chart above, the greatest investment was the most efficient. The $1000 campaign realized the lowest CPC of $0.02. However, the chart does not tell you which visitors bought your product, or signed up for a membership. With the right type of tracking, you can tie sales to visitors and where they came from. The most efficient campaign may or may not be the most effective.

Many publishers will track the impressions and clicks for your ads. You should do the same on your end. The publisher’s stats and the advertiser’s stats rarely match exactly because of differences in server settings and software configurations. They should be close however. There are several ways to track ad stats on your end.

You can have a script on your server to track clicks to and from specific URLs, and/or unique “landing pages” for different ads on different sites. Webalizer is a free stats program offered by many web hosting companies. It resides on the server and displays charts and graphs via a web page.

Web Trends is one of the most comprehensive stats programs. It resides on your local machine. You download your logs and process them with the software. Tracking web site statistics is beyond the scope of this article, but you can learn more by clicking Webalizer or Web Trends.

You should now be armed with the basic tools to get started investing in online advertising.

Kevin Godbee has practiced marketing and advertising in the mainstream for 18-years and has worked in the adult industry since 2001.

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ramona72

another really great tutorial with great tips, well done, keep up the good work, these definately help a lot.

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thanks, ramona72