Statistics To Ask For Before Buying Website Advertising

Buying advertising space on someone else's website can be just what you need to give your website's visitor numbers a real shot in the arm. And if your website is also a commercial interest it may also provide a healthy boost to your bottom line. But how do you know if the website you are considering advertising on is a good choice?

Here's What You Should Consider

Spotting a good deal isn't difficult. Here are 3 basic factors you should weigh up:

1. Does the website have an audience potentially interested in your product or service (well targeted)?
2. Are the traffic statistics good enough and what is the source of their statistics?
3. Are their advertising rates reasonable and inline with visitor traffic numbers?

Below I will show you how to address each question above.

Find Well Targeted Websites

This point should be a no-brainer. It makes sense to try and find websites that will most likely have an audience with tastes or needs similar to what you can offer.

Surf some of your favourite sites or blogs and it won't be long before you'll see banners ads with little or nothing to do with the content on the site. Why is this? Because many website owners have a commercial interest in raising revenue from their site. The fact that the advertised products or services are of little interest to the publishers readers hardly matters to them - they just want the advertising dollars!

Don't make this mistake. Only consider advertising on websites that are a good match for you and your website. Use your common sense here.

How To Read Traffic Statistics

Traffic statistics are straight forward to understand once you know what you are looking at. Here are the key terms you need to know:

• Visits
  This number represents how many times the website was visited. The same person may visit the site many times - each time they do they will increase the Visits count by 1.
• Unique Visits
  This numbers is always lower than Visits. This statistic should represent how many distinct individual visitors viewed the site over the given period of time the report covers. If the same person Visits 2 or more times they will still only be counted once.
• Pageviews
  As the name indicates, this represents the number of times a page from the website was shown. An important factor when you are being charged depending on how many times your ad is shown (this is known as the CPM model - 'Cost Per Thousand', M being the Roman numeral for 1000).

With these three core stats you can make a good decision on whether or not to advertise on a particular site as I will show you below.

Statistics Source

I quickly want to mention the source of the statistics the advertiser has given you. Make sure you ask them what the source of their data is. It matters because some statistical software is very poor at determining if a 'Visit' is a human visitor or a 'robot' such as Google visiting the site.

Google Analytics is an excellent source. It is more than accurate enough to base your decisions on. On the other hand many smaller sites will quote data from programs such as AWStats and Webalizer, both of which are poor judges of human vs robot visitors and will show inflated figures.

Are Their Advertising Rates Reasonable?

Once you understand the statistics it's easy to work out if you are getting a good deal.

Here's an example given some sample data:

• Visitors per month (Visits): 50,000
• Cost of the ad space you want: $250

What we typically do here is work out how much it costs to show your ad to 1000 visitors (CPM - see above).

Here's how we work it out:

Cost in Dollars / (Visits / 1000)  = CPM

So $750/ (50,000 / 1000) = $15

As a rule of thumb a reasonable price is anywhere up to $40 per thousand impressions ($40 CPM). However you may expect to pay more for a niche site as opposed to a site with a broad range of topics.

A Note About Forums

Be very shrewd when advertising on forums. Forums generate a large number of page impressions which are generally considered poor quality for advertising. Why? Because forum users jump between pages frequently and quickly. They rarely spend much time on a page, usually skimming comments and completely ignoring ads in the process.