We get a lot of enquiries from businesses who are interested in seeing how they might make money from their website traffic by accepting advertising. Is this something you should consider for your own website? I think the answer depends on a) who your audience are and b) how that audience would react to (and benefit from) finding advertising on your site.
If your website IS your business and it’s offering products, services or information then it might be something that you might seriously consider. However, if your business website is just ABOUT your company then it’s probably not such a good idea. There is of course a thin line between the two, so another way of judging whether you should take advertising is by looking at some of your competitors and seeing what they do.
Before you decide though, you need to consider these factors as well:
Remember, points two and three constitute costs which you’ll need to subtract from the money you make from point one.
You’ll also want to think about what sort of advertising you want to take on your site:
For the purposes of this exercise I’m just going to assume you only want to make £100 from selling advertising a month – and assume that your costs in doing so are zero.
Advertisers are most likely to buy your audience in three ways:
If you could charge £5 CPM and sell on a page impression basis you would need 20k page views to make £100 – assuming that you can sell every page view
If you could sell each click for £0.25, you would need 20k page views also
If you had 20k pageviews, do you think, if you sold a business a month’s tenancy on your site that they would make that money back? After all, on whatever basis advertisers buy from you, they will expect to get more than that value back in return.
The biggest challenge I think is in selling the space. You can look to sell your ad space via an ad marketplace (such that is offered through products like Google Adsense, Doubleclick and OpenX Marketplace – businesses which pool many sites inventory and then make it available to advertisers) but the trade off is that it’ll cost you in commissions and you’ll be a step removed from the advertiser – which makes both controlling the quality of creative and building a case stuffy around the value of your audience more difficult to do.
You can bypass these problems by selling directly. This is a worthwhile strategy considering, as at the end of the day you’ll know your audience best. But is selling that media space really core business for you?
By comparison, the challenge of actually getting ads to appear on your site is much more straightforward. Once you’ve decided where to place the advertising, it’s simply a case of inserting the code that will host the advertising into your website. That code depends on what solution you end up choosing. More on that next.
On the miggle website I write extensively about what considerations you should give and processes you should work through to determine if and how you sell advertising on your site.
In summary though, I’d suggest looking at the following:-
If you want to sell directly, mainly on tenancy and retain full control of the ads that appear – especially to a local market, take a look at addiply.com
If you want to let someone else take care of the sales for you – and are less concerned about having absolute control over the advertising that appears then take a look at Adsense or Doublelclick
If you want to both sell directly, as well as make use of ad marketplaces, explore CPM, Click through and Tenancy models, as well as have total control over what type of ad formats you want to run, take a look at running the OpenX adserver.
If you can identify a site which has an audience you are trying to win custom from and they have an advertiser sales programme, then yes, give it a go!
Unless you have specifically designed your website to make money from advertising in the first place it’s unlikely that selling space on your website will make you any significant revenues. However, taking advertising could offer additional value to your users, and the brand association you might get by having relevant brands advertising on your site could help strengthen the perception of your business.
As you’ll see from the calculations I made earlier, you need a lot of page views and users to make money from selling advertising – which, the chances are, if your website’s core function is to support your business you won’t have.
So, I think, the best recommendation is to look at the tenancy model and to focus your efforts on selling the space directly to other businesses you know who might derive value from your users.
For example, if you run a building supplies business maybe your advertisers are the local carpenters, plumbers and electricians etc that buy from you. If they buy tenancy from you at a nominal fee each month, then they only really need to see perhaps one customer back from this to make it worth their while. The money you make from it may not buy you your next car – but it could help pay for your web hosting fees, or help keep your site maintained. Finally, it might encourage other sites you might benefit to buy advertising from to do the same thing – and thus find you new customers too.
Image by Pascale PirateChickan ~ cc
