Photo by AndYaDontStop

In my last post, I told you all about great reasons to consider banner advertising to increase your brand recognition in the local area. Some of the ideas, like partnering with a local blogger, can be pretty inexpensive. Others, however, can get costly fast. Here are some questions you’ll want to know the answer to for each category I mentioned last time. Of course, they might try to smokescreen you with terms and numbers – so I’ll try to cover most of that as well.

To get things started, below is a list of some very basic terminology that you should know before you get too involved with banner ads. It will help you differentiate the good from the bad. I’ve broken it down into two separate categories, advertising and website. The website stuff is pretty universal and will cover your independent blogger and a really big news website equally. The advertising terms might vary depending on how big the site is that you’re negotiating with.

These should be provided as monthly numbers. You might get an average number or a specific number for the last calendar month. Of the two, I prefer last month’s numbers because an “average” could be an indication that the site owner is trying to conceal sliding performance. Best case scenario, ask for a twelve-month history broken down by month so you can really judge for yourself how they’re doing.

• Page views (good). The number of times a page is delivered to a website visitor. This is a valid and important metric. Not to be confused with “hits,” which is neither valuable or important.

  What they won’t tell you: many sites use pagination (breaking a story up, across multiple pages with one or more “read more” links) to increase page views. They might also have photo galleries with a “previous” and “next” button that loads the respective photo in a new page view. This is a pretty sneaky way to increase page views, but isn’t always bad. You can book it that a site that doesn’t do this has much more valuable page views.

• Hits (bad). Don’t be duped by this metric. Many small websites will use it to make themselves look bigger than they really are. Basically, it’s how many items were loaded and can include pages, images, style sheets, etc. That list really can be endless. For example, most news sites have anywhere from 50 to 90 things that have to be loaded just to display their homepage! When you visit just one page on their site, you have received one pageview, but 50 to 90 hits.

  The person controlling the website can arbitrarily adjust this number simply by adding more elements to each page – turning a thousand page views into ninety-thousand hits.

• Unique Visitors (good). The number of unique computers that visited a site. You might hear all kinds of goofy interpretations of this number including “readership,” etc. Generally speaking, though, the unique visitor is the hard number that you really want. Basically, unique visitors is another great metric that tells you how well a website is doing. Any site you advertise on should have thousands of unique visitors – even tens of thousands.

  What they won’t tell you: when you visit a website on your computer, you are counted as a unique visitor. If you go to the same website on your mobile phone, you’re counted again. If you visit it from your home computer, you’re counted again. Get the idea? It’s browser specific, not people specific. Also, if someone clears their cookies, they’re counted again, too. The other side of this coin is when multiple people visit the site from one computer, they are usually only counted as one visitor.

• Page views per unique visitor (okay). Basically, it’s the number of page views divided by the number of unique visitors. Depending on the site this average could vary dramatically. A good number is around 20, anything over 30 is excellent.

  What they won’t tell you: depending on how they’re counted, search crawlers (like google, yahoo, bing, etc.) might still be counted in the page views number. The unique visitor count isn’t usually affected, though, causing the pages per visitor number to be artificially high. This should be relatively rare, but you never know. If the pages per visitor number seems high to you – this might be why.

This is a short list of online advertising terminology you should know a little about. It’s not all inclusive, but if you’re negotiating with a website on rates, you’ll likely hear a few of these.

• Impressions refers to the number of times your ad is called for. Many websites will use this number as the number of times your ad is delivered. More on that in a minute.
• CPM, Cost Per Thousand impressions (M is the roman numeral for thousand). This is in my “okay” category — or “it is what it is.” It’s what you’ll end up with on any major website. Basically, it means you will pay by the number of times your ad is displayed. Generally $10 CPM ($10 per thousand ad displays, or about a penny each) is pretty common for a standard banner – but some ad types and targeting options will get more expensive.

  What they won’t tell you: that your ad is counted when called for (impressions), not when it’s actually displayed. This happens when, while the the page is still loading, the visitor clicks a link to go somewhere else. In this case, the ad was called for, but never delivered. When you get your ad impressions report, ask for the very different ad delivery report. You might be surprised with the difference (which averages 10% nationally.) Some sites even give a 10% impression over-run. Ask if they do this as policy – if not by policy, they may do it for you because you asked. Every major advertising agency knows this trick, and they use it to get that extra 10%.

• Sponsorship (good) guarantees that your ad will show up in a specific position each and every time someone visits a certain section or page on the website. Smaller websites usually offer sponsorship opportunities pretty inexpensively.
• Shared position (okay), or share-of-voice is kind of self explanatory. One thing you want to know here is how many other advertisers are sharing the position with your ad. If you’re given a share-of-voice, it’s usually a percentage guarantee.
• ZAG Targeted ad (okay to bad). ZAG stands for Zip code, Age, and Gender. Most small websites don’t offer this, but some of the bigger ones do. It’s okay for those who have a very specific demographic they’re trying to reach. Maybe it’s a mammogram ad and you want to only reach 40 year old women. Great – it might work.

  What they won’t tell you: ZAG targeted ads depend upon the site visitor telling the website their zip, age, and gender. I know a few twenty-something guys who always answer this question that they’re a 65 year old woman. Oh, and you’ll probably pay a higher CPM ($25 to $50 or more) but you won’t deliver as many ads. I say pay the cheaper rate and just blanket it to everyone – it’ll probably end up the same price anyway.

• Behavioral Targeted ad (good). These are pretty complicated and not usually offered on any but the largest of websites. Basically, they take all kinds of stuff into account such as what articles a particular user typically reads to determine interest.

  Behavioral targeting is like “big brother” because many of the big remnant advertising companies like doubleclick, rubicon, etc. are paying attention to what you read on all the websites you visit and are delivering ads based on that. Want to see it in action? Go poke around http://www.allenedmonds.com or http://www.franklincovey.com then browse the internet. Suddenly, you’ll notice ads appearing all over the place trying to entice you back to those sites — especially if you put something in your shopping cart.

• Section Targeted ad (okay). Large news sites have “sections.” Like the sports section, or lifestyle section. They’ll tell you about the demographic that section caters to, and you can choose one that best fits with what you’re offering in your ad. This can be a pretty good deal for you if you get it right, because you can reduce the number of ads you need to display and reduce costs.

  There’s a flip-side, though. Women don’t ever go to sports sections, right? Wrong! Many sports sections are 55% to 65% women visitors. Say what? That’s right. Either sports players all have moms who keep up with them or their team, or all the 20-something guys said they were 65 year old women. Either way, the odds aren’t as good as you might think.

• High Creative is a term I use to identify any ad that doesn’t really fit in a standard banner space. You’ve probably seen these crawling across your screen, or taking over your screen, or stuck over content (like a sticky note), or an ad that pushes the page down (sliding billboard). Most of these will run you $25 CPM (two and a half cents each) or more, but they can be very effective short-term campaigns.

  If you want clicks, but all the site offers is CPM, this is certainly the way to go.

• Animated usually means animated GIF. These are pretty simple ads that have a few slides that snap from one to another. Simple, and should be included in the price of your advertising campaign.

  Animated ads are better than static (non-animated) ads.

• Flash or “rich media” ads = are usually smooth animations (like a slide show with transitions), video, or even interactive ads. These can be a little more if they’re intended for standard ad positions. Depending on the ad, you might have to pay a creative fee to have the ad built, or you might have to pay a higher CPM. It’s not always important, but sometimes you want to consider is how such an ad will display on non-computer devices, such as an iOS (Apple iPhone, iPad, etc) or Android device.

  Flash ads are better than simple animated ads – but won’t show up on iPhone, iPad, etc.

Got all that? To Recap:

• When talking to a website sales rep about advertising, basically you’ll want to know how much traffic their site receives. The right answer will include page views or unique visitors.
• Their target readership is another good question to determine if their site is a good match for your target market.

After you’ve figured out if the site is a good fit, you’ll want to get pricing.

• The most desirable ad placement is right next to the editorial content. Those ads are usually more expensive than a banner at the top or bottom of the page – but they’re worth it.
• While you’re negotiating, get them to provide a free, animated (at least) spec ad.
• CPM? Don’t forget to ask for your 10% over run.

So, what do you think? Have you tried banner advertising yet? Still think banner ads aren’t for you, or want to ask a specific question about your industry? Drop a comment below and I’ll be sure to get right back to you.