One giant misconception that the average publisher will easily make is how easy it is to make money running a website. It is a difficult business. We fight with consistently low or high CPM’s or CPC, then we get complaints from users that ads are setting off a malware of spyware warning, then we have geo targeting and ad placement guidelines. On top of that, we are also constantly battling to market our own sites, and create content that draws visitors.
I am going to table up what I have discovered from my experience as a publisher.
My first tip is to first, before you do anything else, try and understand your audience and your market. Understand where your users are coming from, and where they are geographically located. Understand how many pages your users are viewing each time they find your site, and take note of everything.
Now, completely disregarding the above, one could easily just serve ads from Adsense or AdBrite, but with a strong movement of publishers wanting to avoid AdBrite’s consistently low CPM’s, and AdSense not needing an excuse for life banning members, people are looking for more solutions. And they are publicized everywhere. I am going to talk about three ad networks here, which I will briefly describe below.
Burst Media – Deliver primarily to the US market, with some ads targeted to Canada and the UK. Fill rate varies between 10% and 70% with CPM’s as high as 7$ and as low as 10c. Ad targeting is great, with clicks always occurring. Burst Media have a strict policy on “above the fold” ads needing to be displayed on websites and the majority of their ads are required to be displayed above any other ads you have on site.
AdsDaq – Deliver ads primarily to the US market only. If you live outside the US, the only time you would ever see an ad from the Contextweb network is if it was a glitch. or if by the odd chance they are delivering ads outside of their usual teritory. You can set your own asking price with AdsDaq, with ads only being served if the advertiser agrees to pay that CPM.
Smowtion – Deliver somewhat average CPM and quality ads. Smowtion heavily emphasize that every page view deserves an ad, so they do everything in their power to make sure that the entire world can view ads. CPM is much better than AdBrite, and ad targeting is much better.
So, this leaves a little bit of a puzzle to figure out. The average blogger will want to run ads near the top of the page that are visible, and in turn will earn a high CPM, and target a few more lower on the page to target those who are reading long articles, and navigating the site.
Here is a basic diagram, at least, what I would suggest in this combination of ads.
In this diagram, you can see that I have structured ads based on what the Advertising Networks preferences are, geographic location, and the ability to set asking prices on these ads. I have alsop kept in mind that with Burst and AdsDaq, some ad campaigns are limited per viewer, so that viewer can only see one particular ad 1 – 4 times. Whilst I cannot recommend that everyone sets their CPM asking price to 4$, as I can guarantee that will in almost all cases make you no money at all, if you are having a good day with traffic, someone will see you, and will want to advertise on your site. For that small boost, it is very well worth it, and could also develop into more regular advertisers wanting their ads on your site as well.
The key here is simple. Don’t go out and place every ad you can think of on one page from any provider. And most importantly, don’t just use one Advertising Network because it is easier for you. Get to know your advertising networks, what kind of users they are targeting, where they are targeting, then figure out from there how you can benefit from that situation and experiment.
I have provided a list below of advertisers that are well worth your time looking into.
Tribal Fusion – High end advertising network that has a high fill rate, but is quite hard to get into, as their requirements dont suit the average joe webmaster.
Burst Media – Fantastic advertising network with above average payouts, an active community, and very fast response from their support team.
Smowtion – A real cat in the bad. Smowtion pay better than most well known advertising networks, they have an extremely high fill rate, and their CPM’s vary from being above average to extremely high (I have seen as much as 14$). If you are interested in signing up for Smowtion, use the link I have provided to sign up, as they will give you 80% profit share rather than the usual 60% as a bonus.
Adify – I haven’t had the chance to have any experience from Adify, based on the fact that after a month of waiting for a website to be approved, it has still not been approved.
AdBrite – Extremely low quality advertising network. Extremely low CPM’s and terribly targeted ads. Suitable for sites that have a large amount of traffic who are not members of any other advertising network. Also a great starting point for anyone who is new to selling advertising space on their website.
ContextWeb/ADSDAQ – Serves primarily to the US audience, they give you the ability to set your minimum CPM’s, and for the US audience, they have an above average fill rate.
CPAlead – Fantastic CPA Network. This is a different method of monetizing a site, revolving around the use of surveys to unlock content. On average, surveys pay out at about 1$ each, and can go as high at 15$ per survey. Highest payouts that I have ever seen, but this kind of CPA marketing is only to be used sparingly, otherwise it can, and probably will have a negative affect on your traffic.
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