Adsense on Your Site Versus Direct Pay-per-Month Advertisers?

Hi everyone,

We have several sites running well with google adsense, however one thing that has come to our attention is that a competitor to one of these sites has no adsense, but he does have advertisers paying him monthly rates which probably pays him more then he would make with adsense (given the rates on his website and his ranking in relation to ours).

We were wondering - does it sometimes pay more to have regular ads (where an advertiser pays a monthly fee for a banner or other ad) versus using something like adsense? Are there any criteria that you follow when making this transition or adding it as a revenue stream?

How about something like www dot adbrite dot com ? I notice some sites setting their own ad prices using their system??

Thanks!

Energizer

 

It really depends on what kinda people your site markets to. A lot of web savvy people on say a webmaster forum or tech site, won't necessarily click on adsense too much. But, advertisers for computer parts or electronics might be a good match for advertising on that site. It's relative to the kinda traffic you're getting.

 

Voasi,

Are there any ways to determine which is better, or do you sometimes just need to experiment?

 

You just need to experiment. Nobody can tell you. Doing some A/B testing on this is what needs to be done. Once you do that, then you'll know for show and then you can start raising rates to your advertisers as site builds and grows.

 

Voasi is 100% correct.

Regular paying advertisers are great IF you're generating not only traffic for them but paying customers. AdSense advertisers pay a lot less in general but they're aware they'll have to pay for many zero-income clicks for them.

AdSense is a great way to get your site to the level that you can sell sponsorship space to big names.

 

At least with regular paying advertisers you are guaranteed the income instead of hoping that Adsense will pull through for you.

 

In my niche many advertisers dont have the time or budget to deal with PPC so most of my advertising revenue is from banners. I try to provide great customer service, even design their banners for free, and it's paid off with some really long time sponsors. I've raised the price of advertising twice since the start of my site, and it's way more then I make with adsense.

 

Guys,

For advertisers that advertise directly on your site with banners and such, did you contact these advertisers directly or did you find them through a system like adbrite?

 

Put up an advertiser section on your site where people can contact you if they want to place Paid Advertisments.

I usually Offer a Discount rate if the Advertiser offers an affiliate program etc, theres lots of different ways you can negotiate

Then again, it also depends on how much traffic you get, the more traffic, the more you can charge.

 

Selling ad space is like selling anything else - you need to start at the beginning with identifying your unique value proposition, you need to put together a marketing package of some kind to present that proposition in a professional light to the potential advertisers, and you need to go sell that to the likeliest prospects.

You can sell it off a link on the site. I suggest having some kind of media kit put together that explains what kind of visitors you get and why people ought to want to reach them. Even if you want to be more active, you will get some incoming interest from people that are new or that are too small for you to have focused on, and some of those can grow into nice clients.

If you have enough traffic to justify the effort, you definitely will do better by affirmatively reaching out to the likely advertisers. Aside from looking around to see who is advertising elsewhere on the net on similar sites, magazines addressing similar subject matter can be a great source of leads. A company that is dropping $5k here and $3k there for full page ads in magazines every month has money to advertise online, and needs only to be persuaded that being online at your site is a better use of their money. It helps to meet the people buying the ads - usually a VP or director of marketing or advertising - and the most time efficient way to do that is to set up meetings at whatever trade show, if any, relates to your site.

Google makes setting the ad rates easier than it used to be. On a CPM basis, you need to get more from the people coming directly to you to make up for the time you will spend marketing and selling. You can do that and still find customers because Google won't be taking their cut. You could, for example, set double or triple the effective Google cpm as what you ask for, and see what happens.

I haven't used adbrite, but in general I never had much success with the ad networks. At best, they can deliver a little money for your excess inventory, but even then it's not clear they are a better deal than something like ad exchanges.