How to Establish Web Advertising Rates
Placing advertisements on your website is one way to earn money online and grow your online business. Many large and well-known Internet companies are almost completely supported by revenue generated from web advertising. Web advertising rates are established through a variety of indicators used to measure a website's traffic.
1. Decide the type of ads you wish to display on your website. Standard sizes and shapes are used by the web advertising industry, as it allows for seamless ad swamping and integration. Advertisements include banner ads, rectangular squares and various sizes of in-laid content ads. This is an important step, because your website should be setup or redesigned with advertisement space in mind, as to allow seamless and non-distracting ad placement.
2. Determine how much you can charge for each advertisement space. One factor considered is search engine page rank. Certain search engines use a formula to calculate a website's relative worth, by looking at indicators such as site age, in links, back links and traffic. Traffic is a metric that can contain many different numbers, such as unique page views per day, raw page loads and repeat visitors. You can place a traffic counter on your website that will analyze these numbers for you to have them at your disposal to present to potential advertisers. Page rank is available through a number of free tools available online.
3. Calculate how much you can realistically expect to charge potential advertisers on your site, based on its traffic and page rank. There is no real standard set of rates, as each advertising niche is highly variable. So, it may be useful to investigate what competitors are charging others, by contacting them asking how much they would charge for you to place an ad on their site. Some large sites even post the going rate for their advertising slots in a freely available location. Combine this information with your known traffic stats to evaluate your page's worth to an advertiser.
4. Set your traffic rates based on a standard percentage, such as cost per thousands or millions of views. Another way to set costs if you do not yet have a large amount of traffic, is a set cost charged per week or month.