Monitizing my website with Ad Spots, How Do I Determine Prices

If I wanted to offer banner ads on a website of mine instead of Adsense, how could I determine a good price to start for various ads?

I probably will advertise it here on DP and of course don't want to get flamed right away,

 

I have a site that's a informative directory of my local city and I charge £50 per banner ad. This work's out at about £5cpm but I have a few on rotation. I'd say look at your adsense earnings and aim a bit higher than what you're earning and lower them till you get interested folks.

 

Here's the Magic Formula -

what-your-competitors-charge (+/- your traffic) +/- what-your-customers-will-pay = what you should charge

use a service like keywordspy or estibot to find out the competition and what they're paying for ppc.
compare their traffic to yours and adjust your pricing accordingly until you sell some space.

Best of Success,
S.

 

If you already have Adsense running, setup custom channels for your various spots so you can see how much each spot is generating each month. Divide that number by 68 (here's why), then multiply that result by 100 to find out what Adsense has been charging for ads showing in that spot.

 

oh wow, I've been using adsense for years and never knew they reveled how much they gave up. thanks for the info. i also just went and created custom channels as you mentioned. i had thought of that before, just never had the ad code consolidated enough to update it.

i've now changed my ad code to just be included from a file, so I can easily update an ad spot across the whole site, instead of modifying a bunch of pages.

I think I'm going to take this a step further and try to make 3 more custom channels to track homepage, category pages and single post pages.
I'll have to make some extra ad units in adsense to support this, and then some kind of logic on my include file.

Do you think if I reverted to the old adsense code that has each parameter in the JS script if that would be easier to accomplish this?
I think could just do the logic to include the right channels on my side, instead of creating a bunch of different ad units. Does that sound right?

 

It goes by your site's traffic, page views, and visits - you determine a price, or ask the advertiser what they're willing to pay.

 

Hi again, just a quick update. I hunted down the old adsense code. I found the correct way to include multiple channels is to separate/delimit them with a + (plus sign). I used the # (pound sign) in the code below to show the values that need to be replaced.

With this snippet, you should be to create some logic with PHP to fill in the google_ad_channel value, and be able to track different pages on your site.

The logic I used makes use of the SWITCH() function and looks at $_SERVER['SCRIPT_FILENAME'] to see what page the visitor is on and sets a variable accordingly. I then simply echo the value of this variable in the snippet.

This particular site is a fairly simple strait php/html. So this method works for me, if you have a more complex site you might have to have your logic look at the actual full URL.

Hope this helps someone else.

<script type="text/javascript"><!--
google_ad_client = "pub-################";
google_ad_width = ###;
google_ad_height = ##;
google_ad_format = "###x##_as";
google_ad_type = "text_image";
google_ad_channel = "##########+##########+##########";
google_color_border = "FFFFFF";
google_color_bg = "FFFFFF";
google_color_link = "000000";
google_color_text = "333333";
google_color_url = "333333";
//--></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </script>

Code (markup):