How do you price your advertisement spots?

Argus

Active Member
I have been looking at many different websites and checking the prices that they charge to put your advertisements on their websites. I am curious how the website owners know what to charge people to place their advertisements on their website.

If your website has more pages, more visitors, better rank then you charge more for your advertisements. This just puzzles me how they decide what price to charge. You have any ideas?
 

ProfMike

Active Member
Argus,

I do a lot of advertising for my training site. From what I have seen the web site owners will base their fees on the number of impressions that the ad receives. Based on that assessment you need to be careful that you choose sites that are close to your target audience. You want the impressions to lead to Click Through on the site.

This can be kind of tricky as many of the sites I have chosen to have ads placed on at first glance seemed like they should be a good fit but have led to very few conversions on the CTR. I have also noticed that many times the CTR that the site is reporting is not any where near the rates that I am seeing on the actual site.

Over the last few months I have started using unique URLS, I will actually add a 6 or 7 digit ID to the URL to measure the real click through rate.

I created a database table to capture these URLS as they hit the site and it grabs a bunch of other information also. Site origination, host provider, IP, location, etc. This gives me some really good data to see if the clicks are actual clicks into the site or someone running up the numbers from the host advertising web site. It is sad to say but it is getting harder to trust anyone anymore when it comes to real web traffic.

This seems to be working and based on the data that I am gathering I will be making some big changes to the sites I am advertising on.

I hope this helps.
 

Dean

Well-Known Member
Based on personal experience I have found that there are many different things that website owners base their advertising rates on. Some base their rates on the amount of traffic their site receives, some on how well their website ranks in the search engines, some base their rates on similar sites and their rates.

It really does vary from one website owner to another. As @ProfMike stated, the advertisers need to advertise on sites that have a target audience of the types of people that they are interested in having their advertisements shown to.

Based on my own experience, when an advertiser places an advertisement on a website it might not perform perfectly at first but over time that advertisement can start to grow in worth and produce better results over time.

One of the tricks to finding the best advertisement spots is to find people that might be interested in what you are advertising. One thing that can help advertisers out sometimes is to change the design of their advertisement to look a little different.

Some ads perform well on one site but poorly on another and can be, in part, based on the look of the advertisement. Changing your ad can yield better results for the advertiser and that can make the advertiser happy and that leads to more money for advertising for you.

Back to what you asked. There are just so many things that website owners base their advertisement rates on that it is hard to know exactly without asking the site owner. What I have usually done for my sites is to see what similar competitor sites are charging and go from there. That's a decent starting point at least.

Hope this helps.

Cheers, Dean.
 

Argus

Active Member
Based on personal experience I have found that there are many different things that website owners base their advertising rates on. Some base their rates on the amount of traffic their site receives, some on how well their website ranks in the search engines, some base their rates on similar sites and their rates.

It really does vary from one website owner to another. As @ProfMike stated, the advertisers need to advertise on sites that have a target audience of the types of people that they are interested in having their advertisements shown to.

Based on my own experience, when an advertiser places an advertisement on a website it might not perform perfectly at first but over time that advertisement can start to grow in worth and produce better results over time.

One of the tricks to finding the best advertisement spots is to find people that might be interested in what you are advertising. One thing that can help advertisers out sometimes is to change the design of their advertisement to look a little different.

Some ads perform well on one site but poorly on another and can be, in part, based on the look of the advertisement. Changing your ad can yield better results for the advertiser and that can make the advertiser happy and that leads to more money for advertising for you.

Back to what you asked. There are just so many things that website owners base their advertisement rates on that it is hard to know exactly without asking the site owner. What I have usually done for my sites is to see what similar competitor sites are charging and go from there. That's a decent starting point at least.

Hope this helps.

Cheers, Dean.
Thank you. I guess I will just have to do some investigating when the time comes for advertisers. I am just always trying to be prepared as much as possible before I need information or something. Thank you for the help.
 

Argus

Active Member
Argus,

I do a lot of advertising for my training site. From what I have seen the web site owners will base their fees on the number of impressions that the ad receives. Based on that assessment you need to be careful that you choose sites that are close to your target audience. You want the impressions to lead to Click Through on the site.

This can be kind of tricky as many of the sites I have chosen to have ads placed on at first glance seemed like they should be a good fit but have led to very few conversions on the CTR. I have also noticed that many times the CTR that the site is reporting is not any where near the rates that I am seeing on the actual site.

Over the last few months I have started using unique URLS, I will actually add a 6 or 7 digit ID to the URL to measure the real click through rate.

I created a database table to capture these URLS as they hit the site and it grabs a bunch of other information also. Site origination, host provider, IP, location, etc. This gives me some really good data to see if the clicks are actual clicks into the site or someone running up the numbers from the host advertising web site. It is sad to say but it is getting harder to trust anyone anymore when it comes to real web traffic.

This seems to be working and based on the data that I am gathering I will be making some big changes to the sites I am advertising on.

I hope this helps.
Thank you again for your help. One question. How can you know how many impressions there will be on your website? Is this the same as number of visitors? This is a new term for me so I do not know what exactly that means.
 

ProfMike

Active Member
No problem Argus, anything I can do to help let me know.

The impression of the website are the number of times the page is shown, in other words, how many times is the page called to be displayed in a browser. Measuring this accurately can get a little tricky as page calls can be from a variety of sources. Many of those sources, bots, spiders, crawlers will serve no benefit to people advertising on the site.


The number of visitors to a site is normally measured with each site visit regardless of what type of visit it is. This is usually the number that a site owner will use for impressions, because it is normally higher, sometimes significantly higher than true visitors.

I hope this helps.
 

Argus

Active Member
No problem Argus, anything I can do to help let me know.

The impression of the website are the number of times the page is shown, in other words, how many times is the page called to be displayed in a browser. Measuring this accurately can get a little tricky as page calls can be from a variety of sources. Many of those sources, bots, spiders, crawlers will serve no benefit to people advertising on the site.


The number of visitors to a site is normally measured with each site visit regardless of what type of visit it is. This is usually the number that a site owner will use for impressions, because it is normally higher, sometimes significantly higher than true visitors.

I hope this helps.
Thank you for the information. Is there a way to find out for advertisers to know how much traffic is real and how much is fake? I would always want to tell the true number of real people. There is no sense in not being completely honest with people who you are in business with. That will lead to the advertiser going somewhere else with their business.
 

ProfMike

Active Member
That would be a nice concept and the right thing to do but I have not seen that happen in any of the sites that I have dealt with and in fact many will argue the point that all traffic is good traffic. I can see there point as they are in business to make money also and there income is based on the number of impressions that they receive to the site, after all that is what they base there pricing on.

When I am dealing with a new site, I compare there numbers to my numbers very closely the first few months, especially if the conversion rate is well below the average for my sites. That is really the best thing to do. It just takes time to find the right sites to advertise on. I am constantly tweaking the ads and where I place them to find the right combination.
 

Argus

Active Member
That would be a nice concept and the right thing to do but I have not seen that happen in any of the sites that I have dealt with and in fact many will argue the point that all traffic is good traffic. I can see there point as they are in business to make money also and there income is based on the number of impressions that they receive to the site, after all that is what they base there pricing on.

When I am dealing with a new site, I compare there numbers to my numbers very closely the first few months, especially if the conversion rate is well below the average for my sites. That is really the best thing to do. It just takes time to find the right sites to advertise on. I am constantly tweaking the ads and where I place them to find the right combination.
In my experience trusting people who you do business with is very important to the success of both parties.

When you say "Tweaking" do you mean changing the design of the advertisement? I know that colors can have an influence on people even if they do not realize it.
 

ProfMike

Active Member
That is exactly what I mean, when I tweak my ads I am usually adjusting color, wording or animation effects.

I agree that you have to have a level of trust with the people you are advertising with but I have found over the years that when it comes right down to it they are in it to make a few bucks and that is the bottom line. You always have to consider that when making your advertising decisions.
 

Argus

Active Member
That is exactly what I mean, when I tweak my ads I am usually adjusting color, wording or animation effects.

I agree that you have to have a level of trust with the people you are advertising with but I have found over the years that when it comes right down to it they are in it to make a few bucks and that is the bottom line. You always have to consider that when making your advertising decisions.
Have you noticed if there are particular colors for your advertisements that work better? I know that there are usually colors that work best for certain topics but for your tutorials I do not know if one color is traditionally better for that field.
 

ProfMike

Active Member
I have noticed that some colors work better than others based on the subject. In the niche that I am focused in it seems that the soft muted colors seem to work better, or at least draw a higher CTR.

With that said, I try to base the colors of the particular ad on the site that I am placing the ad on. I try to find colors that compliment the site. I want the ad to appear more natural with the site content.

These are just things that I have found seem to work. I am in no way a marketing person and most of what I have learned in that arena has been through trial and error. I am open to any tips I can get when it comes to improving the conversion rate of the site.
 

Argus

Active Member
I have noticed that some colors work better than others based on the subject. In the niche that I am focused in it seems that the soft muted colors seem to work better, or at least draw a higher CTR.

With that said, I try to base the colors of the particular ad on the site that I am placing the ad on. I try to find colors that compliment the site. I want the ad to appear more natural with the site content.

These are just things that I have found seem to work. I am in no way a marketing person and most of what I have learned in that arena has been through trial and error. I am open to any tips I can get when it comes to improving the conversion rate of the site.
Is it good to have your advertisement blend in with the website? I thought that an advertisement was supposed to draw more attention to it so it would be better for it to be noticed more easily.

I do not know much about these so it might be a silly question.
 

ProfMike

Active Member
I am like you, I am not very knowledgeable on marketing, that is not my niche. I try to learn a little with every new advertisement but it is a process.

As for the last few months I have been looking for way to improve the traffic to the site, when I started the site over 4 years ago, I was mainly focused on my University students having access to the sites the files and the videos. But now I have other Universities and High Schools interested in the materials so I am trying to branch out and reach a larger audience.
 

Dean

Well-Known Member
I try to learn a little with every new advertisement
It's the same way with me Mike. I am always taking notes on what the setup for an ad is and the major details along with the kind of results I get. Then I make some changes and takes notes again to see if there was an improvement or not. I am always constantly trying to make improvements, even if I only get a small improvement.

As for the last few months I have been looking for way to improve the traffic to the site, when I started the site over 4 years ago, I was mainly focused on my University students having access to the sites the files and the videos. But now I have other Universities and High Schools interested in the materials so I am trying to branch out and reach a larger audience.
Are these schools and Universities in your general area or do you have some interest from elsewhere? I would think the product/services that you offer would be in high demand everywhere as more and more people are having their own website/s. Plus the youngsters are getting more and more technical at younger ages there days.

Cheers, Dean.
 

ProfMike

Active Member
The schools and Universities are from many different areas of the country. The videos have spread by word of mouth and students showing them to friends.

The videos do pretty well, I reset the counters the first of every year that tracks the number of views on each video and they run a thousand or so views for each video a year. That's pretty good as some of them are over 20 minutes long.

You are correct on the youngsters. This is the first summer that I taught a technology camp for a local private school during the summer break. It was a volunteer thing but I was surprised at how many young students were interested n programming. When they approached me with the class idea in March, I was hesitant on it as I did not think it would do well.

They announced it for their summer camp program and within a week the class was sold out. They added an additional class for the summer and have already asked me if I would do it again next summer and increase the length.
 

Argus

Active Member
I am like you, I am not very knowledgeable on marketing, that is not my niche. I try to learn a little with every new advertisement but it is a process.

As for the last few months I have been looking for way to improve the traffic to the site, when I started the site over 4 years ago, I was mainly focused on my University students having access to the sites the files and the videos. But now I have other Universities and High Schools interested in the materials so I am trying to branch out and reach a larger audience.
Well then we are both learning more about marketing. I have learned some things here on this website and by searching in google. There is a lot of information to learn and it can be intimidating sometime.

You work for the universities or are you a contractor?
 

ProfMike

Active Member
Learning is a constant process. I do not think I will ever stop learning new technologies and concepts. It keeps you young.

I was a Director for a large communications company that deals with implementations of Public Safety systems. I am winding that part of my life down and focusing more on the teaching aspect of it. Through college I majored in Computer Science Engineering and systems programming. After college as a hobby I taught Flash and ActionScript when Macromedia first introduced them many years ago, I did this both online, when online learning was in its infancy, and at the University.

While doing that I was asked by a couple Universities if I would be interested in teaching web development. At that time it was a brand new field of study and there were few teaching the principles of web development. I jumped on the chance as I love to teach. From there it has just snowballed.

I stay way too busy, but that is the way I like it.
 

Argus

Active Member
Learning is a constant process. I do not think I will ever stop learning new technologies and concepts. It keeps you young.

I was a Director for a large communications company that deals with implementations of Public Safety systems. I am winding that part of my life down and focusing more on the teaching aspect of it. Through college I majored in Computer Science Engineering and systems programming. After college as a hobby I taught Flash and ActionScript when Macromedia first introduced them many years ago, I did this both online, when online learning was in its infancy, and at the University.

While doing that I was asked by a couple Universities if I would be interested in teaching web development. At that time it was a brand new field of study and there were few teaching the principles of web development. I jumped on the chance as I love to teach. From there it has just snowballed.

I stay way too busy, but that is the way I like it.
Yes learning is constant and I agree completely. This is one reason why I am trying to learn about websites and online marketing. Both of these things keep getting bigger and bigger and I will be left behind if I do not try to learn these. Many people tell me that I am too old to worry about learning these things but I do not think a person is ever too old to learn new things.
 

ProfMike

Active Member
You are never to old to learn, our whole lives are spent learning in one form or another.

Learning keeps you looking for new answers and things and keeps your brain active. Whomever told you, you are too old to learn new things, they are fools. I would venture to bet, they probably have not touched a book in years, or read a good novel since they were forced to in school, and probably plant themselves in front of a television, or a bar stool when they are not working. Both of which are a complete waste of time.
 
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