For starters, there’s really no industry standard or expected amount that webmasters charge for paid placement or CPM banner ads on a website. Sure, there are metrics like impressions and visits, but it would be unrealistic to think that a dollar sign should be attached to each one of them. Here are several attributes that typically determine a site’s “worthiness” for being a good advertising venue:

1. Your SERP rank: If you’re in the top three of Google for a competitive one or two-word keyword, there’s no doubt that niche advertisers out there are aching to be featured on your site. When you’ve achieved ranks like these, they might even be sending you emails to ask for your advertising rates.
2. You’re an authority in a niche market: If your site is synonymous with a niche market (i.e., Edmunds.com for “car appraisals” or Zillow.com for “real estate”), then it would only make sense for your site to be part of an advertiser’s portfolio within that niche.
3. You have a solid niche following: If your site is niche oriented and has a faithful following of people who are interested in that niche, then your site is a good fit for an advertiser. Many of these sites are typically seen in the form of blogs or social networks. An example of this would be Cafemom.com for the “mothers” niche.
4. You have a premium domain name (or a high-profile exact keyword domain name): If you own Trucks.com, Pencils.com or Laptops.com, the worthiness of advertising on your site for people who sell products in those niches goes without saying.

How Will You Display Their Ads?

If you’ve fulfilled any of those attributes, the next step is to determine what kind of advertising you’d like to offer. Static, rotating or CPM?

• Static ads are just that: it’s a box that someone pays for on a time-limit — usually per month. The box, banner or link ad will just sit there for the duration of the advertising terms. It’s then up to you to remove it once the full term is up.
• CPM ads, however, incur a “cost per mille” or 1,000 views. So, your advertiser will pay you $X amount per 1,000 views, which is set at your discretion.
• Rotating ads can be handled either way. You can charge advertisers to be included in a “rotating banner ad” that will show a new ad in the rotation with each page refresh. Some webmasters attach a CPM payment scale to these. Others may choose to simply have ads get placed in a queue and be shown until the payment cycle is up.

How to Determine A Fair Price for Advertising

If you’ve gotten a clearer picture as to how you’d like to offer up your ads, it’s now time to determine what a fair price is. The way I’ve typically done this in the past is with a series of Google searches. For instance: if I’m looking to see how much I should charge for a site about NY car rentals, I’d do a Google search for NY car rentals and throw in additional keywords like “advertise on this site” or something to that effect. Hopefully, it will result in a few niche sites’ “advertise” pages, outlining their pricing structure.

Do this for a handful of sites in your field (aka, your competitors) and see what they’re charging. If they’re smart, they did not include this information publicly and require customers to call and inquire about demographics and site stats. Many others, however, publicly state this information.

Note that there is a standardized ad size guideline. Ads come in many shapes and sizes, but they’re uniformly sized in pixels and controlled by the IAB: an organization that oversees internet ads. Make sure your ad spots conform to these guidelines, and that you don’t invent new and obscure ad sizes on your own :)

Make a list of your competitors, what they’re offering in terms of advertising options, and what each one costs. Note the similarities and determine your price based on them. Remember one thing: advertisers like to know what they’re getting into, and that all comes down to demographics: gender, age, HHI (house-hold income), number of children, education level, etc. They’ll also be interested in site statistics like daily and monthly visits, pageviews, average time on site, bounce rate, and everything else on your main Analytics dashboard. If you don’t want to make any of this public, at least put something together in Word or Excel and export it as a nice looking PDF for them to have.

To see a nicely done advertising offers page, check out the one on DigitalPoint Forums. It has it all: an explanation of what you get, how it works, screenshots of statistics and more.

You’ll find that paid placement advertising is where the REAL money comes in. No longer will you toil over penny and nickel clicks from AdSense – it’s time to look into committed $300, $400, $500/month paid placement box and banner ads. After all, that’s what separates the newbie at-home income crowd from the bigger fish!

Brand Awareness Through High-Brow Brazenness

My favorite campaign at the moment is that of the Motorola Droid smartphone, which I wrote about not too long ago in my article “How the Motorola Droid Takes On a Giant.” What a launch: it started with “viral” commercials that were vague and flat out bizarre. If you’re a nerd, you already knew about the preliminary talks about the Droid, and were able to identify the product in those vague commercials within seconds. If you weren’t, then you were fed a URL called “DroidDoes.com” at the end of them. Hopefully your curiosity led you to fire up your Blackberry, iPhone or laptop and see what was there. Otherwise, those marketers weren’t done with you yet…

Flip on the football game or a rerun of the Simpsons, and you’d see the commercial again. Visit tech sites like Mashable, Engadget, Gizmodo or Boy Genius Report and the PPC ads for the Droid were assuredly there, somewhere on the page.

Perhaps you’ve come across press releases, tech articles, or have visited community-run article sites like Digg or Reddit to read about Droid’s brazen approach to not only take on the iPhone, but make fun of it for its lack of testosterone.

Open up the latest issue of Wired Magazine, and there’s a full page spread for the Droid right in the middle of the magazine.

Regardless if none of these things prompted you to buy the Droid, they made you aware of it. I read a statistic stating that it takes 9-12 repetitions of a product, brand name or anything else to become ingrained in someone’s mind. To me, that’s exactly what happened here: me, the male age 26-34 with a household income of — hey, I’m not giving that away ;) — was hit from all angles in all of the places I frequent with the ad for this phone, which happens to target people just like me.

Getting a Share Of Voice

The mistake many marketers make, especially in big corporations, and even more so for service-based businesses not in retail, is to ignore image ads in PPC and placed banner ad marketing. Most complain that the conversion rate is too low, or that they don’t get many clicks. What they’re not keeping in mind is that those image ads are an important part of their brand awareness campaign.

Yes, people see text links on SERPs, but an image and logo showing in front of their face will remain in their cognitive memory to a much higher degree. It also complements the print ad for that same product they saw in that trade journal that your company advertises in. Or, the booth you had at the last trade show. Multiple ad exposures ingrain a brand name, image, and emotion in the mind of a web visitor…there’s even a term defining the rate at which an ad is seen on a site: SOV (Share Of Voice).

I never clicked a Droid ad, but I’m interested in the product. I didn’t need to click the ad – but it did help remind me to think, “I really need to get around to replacing my LG Dare.” Since I already like the Droid and have heard nothing but positive things about it, that ad does help serve as a reminder for times when the other ten million things going on in my life have forced me to forget about that purchase.

Just imagine if an un-clicked ad led to a conversion…who would have known?

With that being said – close up your total brand awareness campaign with some captivating image ads, and make sure they have the same exact look & feel (logo, colors, tagline, image shots or stock images, etc.) as your print ads. Perhaps you’ll remind a customer to contact you before they decide on your competitor!

Seriously, this is a joke...right?

The Obvious Issues

1. Sex sells: yeah, we get it. Hot chicks = clicks. But what’s the reasoning behind getting some generic stock image of a model which pans back and forth? It’s completely un-related to the internet game. It’s stupid on so many levels. This stock photo would have been better for an advertisement for women’s underwear. Or, mail-order Russian brides.
2. God-awful sales talk: to say “everyone’s talking about” it is extraordinarily lame. I’m not talking about it…are you? I don’t even know what the hell it is. Even if everyone was talking about something, I don’t care, and neither does anyone else. Given the awful advertising, I’m highly doubting 11 million people play this game.
3. I don’t know what the hell it is:  It has a logo in the same fashion of the World of Warcraft logo, so I’m guessing it’s a role playing game. However, they don’t mention this. They don’t captivate this subculture whatsoever. I’m not sure if this is some kind of R-rated sex game, or what.
4. Engrish: “It’s obvious why they are: It makes you feel like King!” What is this supposed to mean? Who proofread this? Who thought this made sense? I don’t care if English isn’t your native language. Find someone who can tell you how stupid you’re about to make yourself look before you get the chance. It was too late for this guy. “Makes you feel like king?” What is this, 3rd grade? Even if it were written properly: “It makes you feel like a king,” even that makes no sense whatsoever. Take a tip from Samuel (work warning for language).

For the sole sake of this article, I had to visit this site. I spared them the three pennies, and typed in “Evony game” in Google, and got to its home page. I must say, it has a cool splash screen. They seem to have invested money in some great graphic design, but they can’t write a sentence of ad copy to save their own mother.

Once again, there are more flat out BAD issues with this screen. Beyond the eye-rolling attempt to shove more breasts in your face, there’s some of the worst bullet points I’ve ever seen right on the splash page: “Free to play forever!” – really? Forever? I think there would have been a better and more sensible way to re-phrase that, specifically by removing the nonsensical word “forever.”

False Claims, Dead Credibility

To claim that it’s the “world’s best web game” is absurd and breaks the cardinal rule of marketing: if you say your product is the best, that means you’re an awful salesperson and don’t know that the customer has to make that distinction – not you. Besides, I’m pretty sure that reigning champion of online gaming, Zynga, would really embarrass you in that regard.

I also laugh at their “global community of MILLIONS.” Wow, millions? Care to back that up with some hard data? It’s just super lame. Also, note that Farmville – proclaimed as the world’s biggest social game at present, has 11 million subscribers…the same number that this game claims to have. What a coincidence! (yes, that’s sarcasm).

What Is It?

The most obvious of all is that I still don’t know what the hell this is. I can draw a conclusion: a maiden + a guy in armor with a sword = some kind of role playing game.  Why can’t they say what it is, though? Why is anyone going to register until they find out this one simple, vital thing? It’s completely ineffective. Nothing says “…comprehensive turn-based role playing game” or “multi-player strategy game” or anything of that nature. You have to click through to another section in order to get this information. It should simply be there.

Sorry if I’m coming off as bitter. I started my career off in graphic design, desktop publishing and advertising. All I ever did was approve ads that went in magazines. I still never cease to be amazed at bad ad copy…especially in the post-production and advertising phases. This LLC deserves recognition for materializing a classic case study on awful internet advertising campaigns.

Hahaha...no seriously. Wait...you're not kidding?! D:

Holy crap almighty…where do you even start? Just look at that headline, it’s being gang banged by two full AdSense banners and two link lists. It’s so horribly done that it’s comical, and I laughed the first time I saw the page load.

To follow up, there’s a horizontal AdSense link bar above this mess, and a 250×250 square on the upper right. That’s one, two, three, four, five, SIX AD PLACEMENTS on a single screen page that has no content beyond a headline and a “recent posts” feed!

Webmasters like this just embarrass the rest of the community. There’s a fine line between subtly using PPC banners, and this site took a big steaming crap on that line.

If you’re going to place ads, please don’t annoy your users. Use your brain, and know the right places to put ads (looking at an industry-standard heat map gives you the answer). Don’t force it down the user’s throat. If you plan not to follow that advice, at least make the ads blend with the rest of the page.

Placing ads to force accidental clicks is so 2004, just don’t do it. Google doesn’t like it, the visitors get angry, and the internet marketing community will usually chastise you for it, too – especially if they are paying AdWords customers and and fed up with flipping the bill for useless clicks every month.