Persuasive Advertising

What you need to know on persuasive advertising techniques: a brief guide.

Banner Ads

Banner ads can still be used to market your own products, but here we deal with selling on commission.

Terminology

Hits per month is simply the number of items loaded down by visitors in the course of a month. As these items will include several gif or jpg images per page, plus frames sometimes, this information is of little value. Webmasters and advertisers are interested in three measures:

 

• visitors per month: total number of visitors per month, including those who repeatedly visit the site.

• unique visitors per month: excludes repeat visitors.

• page impressions per month: total number of pages loaded down (i.e. viewed by visitors) in the course of the month.

All three should be high. Moreover, a genuinely popular site will see a high page impressions/visitors ratio, and an appreciable percentage of repeat visitors.

Now the banner ads terminology:

• CPM: cost per thousand pages viewed with the banner ad (M stands for the Roman thousand, incidentally, not month).

• CTR: click through rate: percentage of people who actually click on a displayed banner add: can be as high as 5%, but the average is about 0.4% and falling.

• PPC: cost per thousand click-throughs from a banner ad on your site.

• Rate Card: your rates, minimum buys, banner sizes and payment policies.

• Media Kit: your accredited website traffic plus demographics: see below.

Media Kit

Advertisers will want to inspect your site traffic statistics — visitors per month, unique visitors per month, page impressions per month. Access to the statistics supplied by the hosting company may satisfy them, but they can also demand an independent analysis of the server logs. And on the more general sites they'll also that your visitors fit their target profiles. That means detailed information on gender, age, household income, profession, job title, responsibilities, budget responsibilities, etc. You'll have to get your visitors to complete a questionnaire, probably by offering some inducement.

Rate Card

Now you can devise your rate card, which specifies:

• what you charge for CPM or PPC.

• minimum orders.

• banner sizes possible (standard, sizes up to).

• any limits to banner file (memory) sizes.

• subject restrictions (adult material, gambling, etc.).

• agencies accepted?

• length of agreement.

• payment terms.

• tracking equipment employed.

Get CPM if you can. Advertisers can drive hard bargains at present, but you'll not make much money if you accept payment for action (either click through or commission on sales) or allow excess pages to be sold off cheaply at CPMs of a few dollars. Persistent and aggressive marketing is essential. Letters and emails may prepare the way, but generally you'll have to phone the decision makers in sales, armed with statistics and persuasive answers. It's hard work, and a trained salesperson can be a real asset.

Displaying Banner Ads: Mechanics

Banner ads are devices, sometimes 468 x 60 pixel images but more commonly separate pop-up pages, that invite viewers to click through to the site advertised. These have to be rotated randomly through the site, and the statistics recorded. A banner advertising agency can provide the necessary software, but you will otherwise have to purchase the software yourself, at anything from $50 to $20,000. The more expensive programs handle larger visitor flows, and provide real-time information that advertising companies require: pages viewed, click-throughs, click through rates, running totals and summaries of their advertising spend. Our resources page lists some of the better-known random banner rotation programs.

Working It Out

So how much are you going to make? Suppose your site has 500,000 page impressions per month, and you've sold CPM at $50. Revenues are then $50 x500 or $25,000 per month. The media agency may take 20% in commission, leaving you $20,000 per month in net revenues.

Unfortunately, a CPM of $50 is now optimistic, for three reasons:

1. Click-through rates have fallen from a late nineties average of 3% to perhaps 0.4% now, which has made advertisers reluctant to pay the CPM rates of a couple of years back.

2. Rates depend very much on the demographics of your visitors. If you can demonstrate that the majority are wealthy professionals, then $50 may be realistic. Other categories will be worth much less, however, from perhaps $20 for average households to $1 for students.

3. There's currently a glut of advertising space, and you'll be lucky to sell more than 10 - 30% of your available pages.

Doing the sums again, with $5 and $1 for CPM, gives monthly revenues of $2,000 and $400. Useful, but hardly a bonanza.

Conclusions

Banner ads of big companies can give your site credibility and some revenue. But do remember that it can take years and a large advertising budget to build traffic sufficient for the investment to start providing a decent return. Many visitors dislike ads, particularly the pop-up variety that are difficult to close down, and employ software to prevent their appearance. Even more detested are the advertising of products unconnected with the site and sites that disable the browser back button.

Fuller listings of ad networks, agencies, companies that create banner ads and provide advertising rates are provided by the e-book.

Making money through other forms of persuasive advertising is covered in selling advertising and sponsorship.

 

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