So you are a new publisher trying to get your site off the ground. You’re doing some different stuff to get more and more traffic to your site. But what now? How do you start making money from your website?
Let’s start this by exploring the most common way – Banner Advertising
Most sites have banner advertising on the top or sides of the page. Most banner ad deals are set up as CPM (Cost per Thousand), CPC (Cost per Click), or CPA (Cost per sale). Which one is best? Well, on CPM as a publisher, you don’t take any risks on how the banner advertisment will perform on your page and you get paid simply by the amount of exposures you deliver. On CPC, you take a small risk as you’re banking on the banner getting a high CTR (click through rate) to acheive good results and make some money. On CPA, you’re taking a 100% risk as you’ll only receive compensation when your visitors click on the banner, and make a transaction on the advertisers site. Many publishers cringe at the thought of giving advertisers “free” advertising on their sites. But as we know, the larger the risk often means the higher reward as well.
For example, I’ll give you a real life example. I was running a CPM campaign for a poker advertiser at $ 0.80 CPM. The advertiser insisted we should try CPA instead of CPM and offered $150 CPA. Like most publishers, I didn’t want to take any risk and went for the risk-free CPM of $0.80. They ran 10 million impressions worth and costed them $8,000. The campaign was highly targeted to their core audience with good promotions and strategy in place, so the campaign delivered very well for the poker advertiser. In fact, we managed the campaign so well that 92 players signed up and deposited funds to play poker with them. If we would have gone with the CPA deal, that would have been worth $13,800 instead of the $8,000 we got from CPM.
So as you can see, things are never clearly pointing to CPM as a publisher. If you offer quality traffic that matches the advertisers target market, you stand a good chance of seriously profiting from CPA. Of course with CPA, the advertiser has to also offer a quality product that is supported by nice banners, good promotions, and an effective landing page to drive conversions.
Remember, test out a variety of CPM, CPA, and CPC campaigns with different advertisers to see which ones offer you the best eCPM rate.
Please click here if you’re a publisher and would like to monetize your traffic more effectively.