Posted by dano on February 14, 2010 at 4:02am
I would be interested to know if any of y'all out there have had experience hosting Ads from outside sources (not Ads sold in house).
We get about 3500 unique visitors a day. They don't click on Ads hardly at all though. Is there any substantial revenue potential for hosting outside Ads on a site like like ours?
Our Ad sales lady does a bang up job of keeping our pages full of local Ads but I am wondering if we are leaving money on the table by only hosting Ads we sell ourselves.
Thanks!
Comments
Google Adsense - Drupal
If you have not already tried, Google Adsense is definitely a good place to start. Most image Ad get paid for impressions - i.e even if a user doesnot click the AD we get paid. Contextual text Ads provided by Google are also a good source of revenue. The Google Ad revenue can be optimized by positioning Ads based on the Analytics traffic.
Use the Drupal module Adsense to enable the same.
Shyamala
Unimity Solutions
Adsense
I'm actually looking at moving away from adsense because it doesn't pay much at all. I only get about 200 unique visitors a day, though, so it would likely be a lot more at 3500. Still, though, adsense tends to be the bottom of the bunch when you read how-tos on advertising. There are a bunch of similar services out there so be sure to check all the options.
I'd like to move to all local ads since it's a local site. Does your ad sales lady have any tips on how to do that? :)
As for your question, I can answer from the point of view of a reader: I prefer to see local ads on my local newspaper. I like to see them supporting the local economy. I'd be much more likely to click on one for a local business than for a national business that has ads all over the place.
Michelle
We have only local ads now.
We have only local ads now. We tried adsense and Linkshare, among others, all under-performers compared to what we do now. A telling situation arose when the local book store just refused to advertise. We seemed like a perfect fit for them and it would have been mutually beneficial. The problem was we had some Amazon ads and it really annoyed them to the point they wouldn't advertise. We dropped Amazon and all of the other affiliate advertising and ad sales increased.
Our salesman makes it a selling point that there are no competing internet only merchants who are allowed to advertise. If a local advertiser has an online presence that is fine.
We also gave up on the ppc model and have a fixed cost system. It is much easier for everyone involved and is much easier for the advertisers to understand, many of whom are mom and pop type stores. You pay x amount of dollars for y amount of weeks. It is the convention they are used to using from yellow page ads to print newspapers so we use that concept.
Using a time-based sales
Using a time-based sales approach seems to still be the best way to sell adverts for small-medium businesses. The vast majority of web users, including SMB owners, simply don't know how to put together page views and impressions and budget for it. Knowing they're buying a simple product--two weeks of advert. space--is easy and lets them focus on their actual business.
Regarding the original question, the success of a small-town news site making money on national ads will depend on
1.) Advertisements targeted specifically at the content of the article next to which they appear, and
2.) The placement of those advertisements WRT the content and viewing habits of the user.
If you can find a national ad service that does content-sensitive ad matching, where it does a good job at only displaying adverts. that are relevant to the subject and content of the story, the ads could be successful. If you A/B test enough to determine where to show those ads for maximum click-through, the ads could be successful. However, the overwhelming trend for those national ads is payment-per-click, which can fluctuate wildly or generally fail depending on the profile of the visitors to your site (are they the kind of people that are comfortable clicking advertisements?)
I'm a fan of the hyper-local model for small newspapers. We all hopefully know that a small paper just can't compete trying to provide original coverage of national news; AP, Reuters, etc. exist for a reason. Similarly, while a site can cover national ads, the salesperson suddenly has to expand their zone to include an enormous amount of geography and often loses the intimate contact used to cultivate local business advertising clients. Simply, a nationally relevant company won't care about the mutual support of your paper like a local small business will. For the national advertiser, you're simply a potential revenue stream. Think physician conglomerate networks vs. individual family practices.
I would try expanding your ad net regionally before starting the tango between dissociated national ads and locally relevant ads.
Regarding local advertisers, we've implemented the module package http://drupal.org/project/ad on a news site I help maintain. It has provided everything we've needed to host advertisements we've sold ourselves, including timing, frequency and reporting.
AdSense a Good Backup
I agree AdSense is the worst option...but for each ad spot, any site should fall back to an AdSense ad in case you don't have any local ads to display. Some money is better than no money. CornellSun.com uses that strategy - very helpful for when business doesn't sell online ads.
Do you know what your
Do you know what your website's demographics are? I hear a lot of talk about visits and pageviews but that information distorts the reality behind demographics.
Don't be thrown off by a low click through rate on an ad. For Google Adsense that sucks. For local ads it isn't how we should be analyzing the effectiveness of the ad.
I just logged into my OpenX adserver which integrates nicely with Drupal. Slows things down a little, but that's ok. OpenX tracks everybody's ads that they host which is faster than hosting OpenX yourself, they have servers all over the world which can make things milliseconds faster. Yesterday, they served 2,250,000,000 ads and 5,000,000 were clicked through. I divided 5M by 2.25B and got 0.0025 -- that's nothing.
Demographics is key here. You have the attention of a group of people who someone might also want the attention of. The effectiveness of an ad is best measured by how many sales leads it generates. If an ad that costs $20 a month to place and generates $200 in sales a month for a company that expects a 15% profit without the extra sales adding any overhead costs to their business except for the price of the ad then it is worth while for them to post the ad.
Click through does not measure this. If you have the attention of a small town, the air conditioning guy only needs to sell one item to make the ad worth while. The knitting an yarn store in that small town will have to sell quite a bit of yarn to make the ad pay. From my experience people don't even need to click through to consider buying from that company. Most of the time, just an instance in the corner of the eye will remind people who to get the yarn from.
Marine job board with Drupal 7 at http://windwardjobs.com
About OpenX
I don't want to derail this thread so put my question more generally in the forum: http://drupal.org/node/717132
Michelle
Adam, I agree that
Adam,
I agree that click-through conversion sales are difficult to leverage in these situations. It could be helpful to suggest strategies for monetizing time-based or impression-based ad sales models.