By Kelly Rogan, on 16 February 2016
There are increasingly more webpages and online environments which are beginning to get a considerable amount of traffic and want to monetize this, in other words, make money from the insertion of advertising formats. For this reason, I want to teach you with this article how digital advertising works on webpages, how to sell and how much you gain.
“How can I “sell” my website?” If you have planned to monetize your website, surely the option of putting web advertising has crossed your mind, in order to get income with little effort. It is vital, however, to know how to have patience and realistic expectations. So in this article, we will explain how to put a price to your website’s advertising, what advertising formats exist and who can help you commercialize your website with advertising.
Putting a price on the ads on your site
If you want to throw yourself into the market of website advertising, first you will need to know how to realistically value your page’s potential income. With particular emphasis on “realistically”: although we’ve all heard stories like the Australian guy Darren Rowse who made 250.000 dollars from his blog in 2007, the hard truth is that few webpages manage to bring in profits that significant. Furthermore, it would be wise to remember that web advertising should not be your only source of income, as it depends a lot on outside parties (like Google’s AdSense) and a small change in their policies could bring your profits crashing down in flames.
With that warning in mind, there are a few things you should calculate to value your website’s potential income:
- How much traffic do you receive? You should not fixate only on your Analytics data: you need to get help from outside platforms such as Nielsen, Omniture or ComsCore to have an authorized number of unique visitors.
- How much is that traffic worth? Its not just about quantity, its about quality too! Nor is generalized traffic the same as segmented traffic. If you are able to focus on a concrete niche and prove it with statistics, it will be easier to sell your website to that sector’s advertisers.
With this data, you will be far better prepared to estimate the value of advertising on your webpage. There are various types of prices, but the most common are the cost per click (CPC), the Cost per Thousand Impressions (CPM) and the Cost per Lead (CPL). For example, if your cost per thousand is 2 euros, and an advertiser hires 100.000 impressions, you will receive 200 euros once you are able to show the ad 100.000 times to your visitors.
Once your campaign is on the go, you can follow a few more pieces of advice to max your profits:
- Work with the SEO. Although it may seem obvious, you can never remember it too often: the higher you are ranked in Google, the more visitors you will attract, and, in turn, more profit you can generate.
- Try out different formats. According to Google’s data, the most popular ad are the ones positioned in 336x280 and 300x250 rectangles, and in 160x600 skyscrapers… but every website is different. Study different formats and measure the results to get the most out of your advertising.
- Careful with the position of the ads. Users do not pay the same amount of attention to the whole webpage, which make for better and worse place to position your ads. Generally, they will be more visible if they are on the top part of the page, and located close to relevant content or navigation aids. If you have doubts about where to position them, you can look for specialized tools which can generate heat maps to see what are the hottest spots on your site.
- Careful with the colors! The idea is that your ads blend inconspicuously into you webpage, and not seen as something alien. If necessary, look for color configuration options to see which ones blend into you page as much as possible.
What digital advertising formats are there?
According to the IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) these are the available web advertising formats:
- Standard integrated Formats (with a fixed position on the page):
- Medium rectangle 300×250
- Square 300×300
- Splitscreen 300×600
- Banner 468×60
- Half banner 234×60
- Half banner 234×90
- Megabanner 728×90
- Megabanner (+)900*x90 (*depende del soporte)
- Skyscraper 120×600
- Special Formats:
- Expandable: built-in formats that have the capacity to grow and gain visibility, through a second format called panel.
- Medium Rectangle 300x250
- Square 300x300
- Banner 468x60
- Half banner 234x60
- Megabanner 728x90
- Skyscraper 120x600
- Floaters: Formats which do not have a fixed position on the page
- Interstitial 800x600
- Layer 400x400
- Rising Stars
- Billboard 900x250
- Filmstrip 5 segments 300x600 (300x3000)
- Portrait 300x1050
- Slider 950x90 (expandable up to 950x550)
- Sidekick 300x250 (Expandable up to 850x700 moving editorial content to the left)
- Pushdown (expandable up to 970x415)
- Expandable: built-in formats that have the capacity to grow and gain visibility, through a second format called panel.
As you can see, there is a whole world of options out there to choose from, and as such, opting for one or another depends on the requirements of your ad and the space on the website available. Always keep in mind not to saturate the available space, as this makes a bad impression on the user and loses quality, and ends up being counterproductive. Remember also that there are advertising providers specialized to video and mobile.
Who can help you commercialize your website with advertisement?
If your goal is to generate passive income through banners, your first choice should, without a doubt, be Google AdWords and its advertisement sales program for websites, AdSense. But there are many other options also: Smowtion, Infolinks, Chitika, Yahoo…
On the other hand, placing digital advertisement on websites is not the only way to profit from your site. There are other options such as content marketing, which is based on selling the influence of your online environment and writing skills through sponsored posts, product reviews, etc.
We hope this post has served as a useful introduction to placing advertising on your web pages. One last piece of advice: if you want your monetization strategy to work, concentrate on creating high quality content and never forget that web advertising is a long-term investment. Good luck!
Kelly Rogan
Image by Sensationimage.com and Empresariados.com
