Joining your Ad Network

I often receive inquiries asking me to have one of my sites join an ad network, since I get from 1 to 2 million impressions per month. Most ad networks pay on pay-per-click. Some will pay on CPMs (cost per thousand pageviews,) some on pay for performance (cost per sale.)

Right now I use Google Adsense as my primary network. It uses pay per click. However, they also tell you what your CPM is and let you break it down over pages and areas of your site.

However, the question I have for any ad network that wants to attract sites is what sort of CPM might I expect? And they usually try to avoid answering that question, at least on the first round. "We don't pay CPM" they say. Neither does Google, but they show you what it is.

"We can't predict your CPM" they say, and I ask, "well, give me some rough ideas of the CPMs that other sites that are even vaguely similar to my sites have been getting. What's the best they do, what's the worst, what's the average? Whatever you've got."

Now many of them stop there. Either they don't want to tell, which leads me to think they are embarrassed, or they don't know, which means they really don't understand their business very well because it's a pretty simple number to calculate.

You see, all a site publisher cares about is CPM. We may take money on a per click or per sale basis, but what we really want to know is what range of money we might make for putting an ad up 1,000 times. We don't know the advertiser, we don't understand their business, and we don't want to understand their business or judge how good their ads are at selling or getting clickthroughs. We don't control the ads. All we care about is the rough CPM.

The next stage is tougher. Once the ad network gives me some sense of the ballpark CPMs other sites have been getting, I have to judge if that's enough to give them a try. While many ad networks will let me run both their ads and the Google ads on the same page, the truth is that this produces "ad fatigue" and will reduce the payments I get from Google or other networks. (As Google pulls ads that get poor clickthrough from your site, this fatigue will last long after the trial is over.) And sometimes networks are not compatible, so I can only run one, in which case I must, even for an experiment, forgo money.

That's what makes the next step tougher. Because to try out a new network is going to cost me time -- the time to recode my web pages to use their network, the time to evaluate its performance and the time to undo all that if it doesn't work out -- and it's going to cost me lost money from the other network.

So to do it, I ask a network to put their money where their mouth is. Say they are getting a $3 CPM with a typical site. (That's enough to get me interested on netfunny.com but is well below what I get for templetons.com or ideas.4brad.com.)

I will ask them to guarantee me some number less than that. A number at which -- if they have any confidence in the CPM numbers they told me -- they should have very little, if any, to lose. Even if their network performs below average on my site, they still will make the minimum. And if the network performs way below average -- well, they weren't very good at predicting, were they? (Or worse, they were misleading about the average in their efforts to recruit sites.) Why should I be the one to take the monetary bite for that? That's what putting your money where your mouth is means. And it's not even a lot of money. They might be guaranteeing $500 a month and have the site really earn $300 if it truly underperforms, leaving them paying me an extra measly $200.

Usually, however, the networks balk if I talk about that. I've had networks that say they will pay $3 balk even at $1 minimums. When they do that, it screams that they have no confidence that the ads they run will generate clickthroughs or sales. And I ask them why, if they don't have enough confidence in themselves to risk a small minimum, should I have enough confidence to sign up with them?

(And to top it off, some of these nets want much more obtrusive ads than Google or Yahoo or banner networks use, with animations, pop-unders or other nasties. You need to really deliver the goods to get me to consider those.)

Frankly, if you do have a really good ad network, you should not be afraid to offer generous minimums, because in fact they will rarely cost you a dime, and they'll get a lot more premium sites to join the network. And then, the stories will spread and you won't even have to offer minimums. But when you're starting out, it's the right course.

So,

Regardless of how you charge or pay (CPM, click, results) what sort of range of CPMs are sites similar to mine netting out by joining your network?
While I don't expect you to guarantee the high or even the average result, what level of result can you guarantee to cover my costs in giving you a try?

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