Making Banner Ads Work for You

As an ISP, you probably own some prime advertising real estate. Are you putting it to full use?

by Jason Zigmont HowToSell.net [October 11, 1999]

For an ISP, there are two sides to banner advertising. Buying and selling. This week we will take a brief look at banner ads, how you can make money off of them, and how you can get new users through them.

Packaging codes
While many methods of packaging banner ads have been designed, the two most popular are CPM (Cost Per Thousand impressions) and CPC (Cost Per Click-through). If you are selling advertising, most often you want to sell CPMs, whereas if you're buying ads you're best off paying CPCs.

As an ISP, you have multiple places you can display banner ads. If you set up your users with your homepage as the default start-up page, you will inevitably end up with a decent number of impressions. Within your homepage, you can put multiple web banners such as 468 x 60 banners at the top and bottom and 125 x125 banners on the side. If you offer web-based mail, you can place banners on each message to defray the cost of providing that service.

The goal is simple: to provide occupation for eyeballs that would otherwise be idle—without being obtrusive or obnoxious. NetZero has gone the next mile and is using banner ads to completely cover the cost of Internet access.

Inside or outside?
So now that you have placed the banner ads on your web site and web mail, what can you do with them? You can use them for your own internal promotion, you can sell them direct to an advertiser, or you can sell the space to an ad network (or multiple networks) and let them sell and serve the ads.

If you decide to handle ads in house, you will have to take on the task of ad management and sales. A benefit of this route, however, is that you can target ads towards your users and sell the banners to local companies that may receive a higher click-through ratio. Also, you can use any unsold inventory for affiliate programs and to promote your own services.

If you go with an outside agency, in most cases they will sell your banner ads in a run of the network rotation at a rate of $3 to $7 CPM. The agencies will also take a portion of the ad revenue ranging from 15 to 40 percent. In most cases, agencies also require a certain minimum number of impressions, but in return they do all the work.

Online ad agencies include:

• Adsmart Network
• DoubleClick
• Flycast Network

Regardless of which method you use to sell the ads, the more demographic information and targeting you have, the better rate you will get. For example, NetZero gets $10 additional CPM for each demographic. While you may not get an additional $10, if your viewership represents a specific demographic—such as filtered access or affinity programs—you can expect a significantly higher CPM.

Tips for buying advertising

• Buy CPC wherever possible.
• Target ads towards your demographic
• Ask for full audited reporting
• Track your results

In the end, the key to both buying and selling banner advertising is the numbers never lie.

—End

(For more information on tracking, read
Does Advertising Work? by Rachel Luxemburg.)

Read other articles by Jason Zigmont

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