Thread: Selling available Ad Inventory directly

Hello

Since I started to monetize my Websites with AdSense I
also started to sell my available Ad Inventory directly to
Advertisers. But there was a learning curve involved.

At first I simply contacted Advertisers via Email after
seeing them advertise on competitor pages.

I emailed them, introduced my website(s) and asked them
if they were interested in advertising on my sites as well.

That did not turn out very well and was very work intensive.

I then took a more professional approach and created a Mediakit
for my main websites which looked (and still looks) much more
professional. I created a "advertise with us" website outlining
the idea of my website(s) and linked to my Mediakit.

It is in German but if you want to have a look:
((login for URL)) ( pdf, 0,4mb)

I also contacted a lot of Advertisers directly again but still
very little return on the work invested.

With time my website(s) got bigger and more interesting to Advertisers.
I was contacted by a few Advertisers for direct Ad sales.
However those were still very few.

I decided to not put any more work in direct advertising sales
but knowing the big CPM price differences payed for direct Ad
sales I did not want to leave this topic be.

So I searched for direct advertising marketers who would
do the work I didn't want to do anymore and sell my Ad
spaces for a percentage of the revenue. I found one direct
advertising marketer who looked the most promising because
he had the biggest health vertical for Germany. In fact they
contacted me to recruit me as publisher.

Because I know my way around the advertising market I had
a few weeks of negotiations with them where I dictated a few
additional terms to their contract which later proofed to be
very valuable to me.

Even though they would and could not guarantee me any earning
results (which is of course understandable) I saw the risk
of them selling my Ad Inventory for lower CPM then I would earn
with AdSense. This is why we added a minimum CPM to the contract
for each single Ad unit and an option to increase this minimum CPM
if necessary in a 30 day notice.

After talking to several of their employees and CEOs I
got quite some more insights into the Advertising market
then I had before. Talking to really big players (I am talking
about monetizing millions of unique users each month)
was very informative.

What I learned was (even though it seems obvious I never
spend a thought about it) that Advertisers with a big budged
(the once willing to pay 15-40$ CPM prices) rarely do business
with single sites (unless you are the top dog and have a great
impact on the market). They turn to 1-3 of the biggest
Ad Inventory sellers (and be assured that they use AdWords too)
and spend their budget with them. So my initial plan of selling
Advertising directly by Contacting Advertisers was doomed from
the beginning .

After implementing their leaderboard and a skyscraper into my website
for single or combined (Wallpaper) advertising I also gave them
my best performing AdSense spot and they set up my AdSense Code
as fallback.

With my first status report from them I saw that my minimum CPM
precaution clause was a real money saver. They firstly sold my
Ad Inventory way below value so I wrote them a bill with them
ending up paying more to me then they earned with me in total.
After that they learned the "lesson". Currently and mainly because
I am constantly working on increasing my AdSense earnings they
are unable to deliver any Ads to my AdSense Ad Units because
they simply can't keep the minimum CPM. Currently I am serving
their skyscraper and their leaderboard on my site which I don't normally
use for AdSense. This way I get additional pay to my AdSense earnings.

Do you sell your Ad Inventory directly as well?
What is your approach to it?

#1 Take care that your aquired clients do not book on "target on these adsense sites" for a fraction of your current cpm
#2 Make sure you are not exclusive, there are lots of agencies and each agency provides you with more banners
#3 Ad agencies do look for the CTR for the ad agency campagins. So make sure even if they pay you only by cpm, it's the clicks that give them the following contracts.

Originally Posted by unicorn ((login for URL))

#1 Take care that your acquired clients do not book on "target on these adsense sites" for a fraction of your current cpm
#2 Make sure you are not exclusive, there are lots of agencies and each agency provides you with more banners
#3 Ad agencies do look for the CTR for the ad agency campaigns. So make sure even if they pay you only by cpm, it's the clicks that give them the following contracts.

If you want to be contracted by the important direct sales agencies
then you will have to make an exclusive contract with them. I first
thought I'll try it non exclusive and contacted about 6 of the biggest
player in the German market. They all wanted me to sign an exclusive
contract which I declined. I said I want to try them out first if they
can deliver what they promise. Because I know the market I am in and
the value of my Ad Inventory I had some very open and honest discussions
with some CEOs and most of them openly admitted that their health
channel is to small to deliver what I expect.

However I signed non exclusive contracts with about 3 of them.
Non of them could deliver one single Ad Unit to my website matching
my needed CPM prices.

When I finally signed an exclusive contract I signed it with the biggest health
vertical for Germany which makes them the most promising agency to
deliver high value Ad Campaigns for my websites.

Also for professional Agencies contracting a new Publisher involves costs
like for adding your website to be listed by AGOF a German Working Group
for Online Media Research.

Regarding #1. I don't think that blocking all customers that serve Ads
on your site which booked Ads via your Agency or on your site directly
is beneficial for you. On the contrary I think you are blocking another stream
of income from this advertiser. I know your thoughts behind your argument.
You think if an Advertiser can placement target your website via AdWords
for much less then it can book Advertising on your site directly then they
wont book Advertising directly. However most of the big Advertisers that
are paying 2 digit CPM prices run big campaigns on AdWords which are not
micro managed to a single website. But that is just an educated guess.

I am not that big in selling direct advertising yet so this would require
extensive testing when I reach this point. If you did test this for yourself
before and not just guessed like I do right now I really would like to see
some statistics on your results of these tests.

In regards to #3. The CTR always depends on the advertising banner that
is used and how targeted it is to your websites. The Ads I am getting from
my Agency are mostly not as targeted as AdSense Ads are so they have
a very low CTR. However that has no influence on the booking behavior
because these campaigns are branding campaigns which primarily focus
on making a brand or product known to a brought audience and don't
focus to much on CTR.

Regarding #3: You can put targeting channels (like forum titles) in Doubleclick, and when integrating the click-through urls in the banners you get from your agency, you not only can track the CTR in Doubleclick itself, you can check in which areas (forums) on your forum which usergroup from which age etc. (all the targeting values you give Doubleclick) is clicking. So you can optimize them on your own.

That goes for direct sold inventory.
Like I said my Agency is doing most of the direct sells so I
just implement their DoubleClick AdServer Tags into
my website and they handle the targeting. If I sell
Ad Inventory to an Advertiser for an Ad Unit my
Agency is currently serving I'll put their DoubleClick
AdServer Tag into my DoubleClick account as Creative
and they run as fall back for the campaign. And my Agency
has my AdSense as fall back if they can't deliver Ads.

That sounds complicated but in fact it isn't

Point 3 is what I am doing for campaings from agencies. As an example, Coca Cola has a budget of 20 million / month, your agency gets 2 million and you get a 50.000 € contract for this month. Coca Cola is overlooking the CTRs of all campaigns, as is your agency. If your agency does not provide good enough results, Coca Cola will look at better resulting agencies. So not only your agency is looking, but mostly Coca Cola! It may be that in the health channel things run differently. However this is the process in my area. If my results are to bad, I get less booking the next time. In the worst case, my agency looses the contract. I know it's tempting to just being happy about the CPM and do not having optimizing these areas. But better CTRs are nicer for your agency. If you are not sure, I'd definitely talk to your agency and ask them about if CTRs will have an effect on your current earnings.

They are responsible for optimizing the campaigns for better CTR.
I have no influence on this what so ever because they serve their
Ads via their Ad Server which I have no access to.

I am optimizing my Ad Units for AdSense and this optimization benefits
my Agency as well. However if they display a campaign for a deodorant
on my health forum where someone is looking for infos about headaches
the visitors of this thread wont be much interested in clicking on the deodorant
Ad. But they see it and that is what branding campaigns are all about.

My Ad Inventory set up allows a very grained down targeting for my
Agency. They can target each sub forum with a specific topic separately.
So the possibility for very narrowed targeting exists.

But I think we talk at cross purposes and mean the same

I always optimize the campaigns from my ad agency by placing them on the best positions and user target them. A deodorant campaign for women is then only displayed female users, or at least is not displayed male users (so include guests, but not display it to users with a male profile field). Because of this several agencies are rather happy with me and increase their booking volume

Do you use DoubleClick DART or DFP Small Business?
How do you target your Ads to demographic criteria like gender?
I could not figure this out even though I searched a lot.

I Use DFP Small Business. You submit target criteria to DFP by giving this to DFP:

GA_googleAddAttr("status", "registered user");
GA_googleAddAttr("gender", "male");
GA_googleAddAttr("income", "10-20.000$");

You have to preenter this in DFP so you can check it. Doubleclick tags are recognized by DFP and so DFP tracks your clicks. In the delivery reports you can search for "target criteria". And voilá: You see how old your members are that are clicking, their income, everything. Nice for optimization.