Internet Advertising Costs: How to Get the Best Deal for Your Website
By Aline Heller
There are a lot of strategies for generating traffic to your Website. Some of them would entail generous investments of time and effort. For example, you can improve the link-worthiness of your site by offering quality articles that your niche market would deem useful. However, if you”re just offering products on your Website, and your Website just focuses on your products and their features, then, the easy way to course traffic to your site is to advertise your Website. It is easy because you save yourself the headaches of managing content on your site. Most of the time, all you would need is a Website link and some kind of a graphic or banner. You don”t even have to create catchy animated video advertisements as what you see in some brand name products advertising on news sites.
However, going the easy way has its costs, literally. To generate traffic for your Website, you need to advertise on high traffic Websites. For example, if your product line is about sports paraphernalia, you will have to advertise on popular Websites related to your sports equipment. How do you know which Website yields the most amount of traffic? That’’s simple. Find out which Websites show up on the first page of search results on the dominant search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Advertising on these sites can cost around $300 a month. You might actually get a lower rate from other Websites which do not show prominently on search results. However, the difference in the amount of traffic they generate is huge. You can probably get around a hundred hits from a moderately popular Website, compared to thousands of hits from Websites that are highly ranked by search engines.
So, let’’s take a close look at the pricing of advertisements. Different types of advertisements will have different rates. Some Websites charge using cost per impression or CPM. Impression refers to any time your banner is showing on the screen of an Internet user who is categorized within the specific market niche that you specified. You pay a fixed rate of around $30 to $50 for every one thousand impressions, regardless of whether the Internet user actually looked at your banner or followed through on your ad. The rate varies depending on the specific group of people you are targeting.
The next method of calculating advertising costs is alternatively called CPV, meaning cost per visitor, or PPC, which means pay per click. In this method, you only pay for the times when your prospective visitor actually clicks through your banner ad. You don”t have to pay a fixed monthly advertising cost. This type of advertising is very popular since you only pay for the times when you get actual visitors. However, the rates per click ranges from as low as ten cents to a few dollars. As has been mentioned earlier, the more prominent a Website is on search engine results, the higher the rates they charge for advertisements on their site.
Coursing traffic to your Website is essential to the survival of your online business. You need to determine which Websites attract your specific target market. From there, find out which would give the most returns for your advertising budget.
About The Author
Aline Heller writes about Internet marketing and advertising. To learn more about Internet advertising, go to FreeAdBoard. Another resource is Corner Ads.
