A Blogger would just concentrate on his content, seo and traffic and reply on Ad Networks which would offer him low CPM because there are many people in this chain who would expect a share in this transaction, on the other hand iam going to show you a few examples which would prove that a direct sales team would be really beneficial.
Iam going to show you a example of a Automobile Blog owner who is a serious writer on the latest cars launched all over the world and who writes reviews, specifications and prices of different cars. His focus is to be one of the best blogger in his industry and achieve a million page views every month. This all sounds good and when he reaches this position he checks his income stats only to find the following stats :
Now if you break down the above report of the Publisher you will find that for a 4 days period he received a total of around 1.1 Million Ad Impressions out of which only 40% of the Ads were filled which means that he would have got paid for only 40% of the Ads Displayed and the balanced would have been a Blank Screen or else a Public Service Ad which does not pay. Next the overall eCPM was around 0.90$ and iam showing this report through the TribalFusion Network which takes away 45% of your Gross Earnings, leaving you with a 55% final revenue which comes down to around 0.50$ eCPM. Now if you see the above example again you will find that
11,00,000 Impressions Pays 220$ [rounted off]
Originally, the publisher got paid at 0.50$ CPM for 4,40,000 Impressions only. This means that for every thousand Page Views he gets paid half a dollar and since he does not work on these numbers, he has a limited growth and there is no better approach for this except staying happy at what he gets. Now lets say that the same guy would have went for a sales team then iam sure the revenue would have jumped upto 10 times and this is seriously possible. Lets try to understand how can this stuff work and what would the result be from this approach.
The above graph is via OpenX Sales Study which also gives you a idea that when Direct Sales Team is hired for monetizing your traffic, the results trend towards the north and this means that the same amount of visitors would make you more money and this is because of the following factors and how you should know if you should really hire someone or not.
Third Party Data : As per the example in this article, you do know that the 1.1 Million Impressions finally paid the Publisher a total revenue of 220$ and a professional sales person would charge the same amount of money for a weeks time, but still you would end up with higher profits. This is because first of all the Sales Guy would setup a Media Kit for your website along with Geographic, Demographic, Behavioral & Other stats which would help the advertisers understand your audience and if the visitors would help them in growing their own business or not. Offering the right traffic data providers information is really important because this could help the advertiser easily understand everything and get back to your offers even if charged very high. Here are a few third party providers which can help you in measuring traffic on different dimensions which can offer the advertisers targetted approach rather than just random advertising campaigns.
Targeting Dimension – Third Party Data Provider
Geographic – MaxMind, Digital Envoy
Demographic – Quantcast, Gemius
Behavioral – wunderloop
Other – PointRoll, Castfire, Google Analytics
A Sales Guy hired at 200$/week would still be profitable because he would contact all the advertisers in the same industry and offer them the Advertising Media Kit, send them offers with Targetted Campaigns at a minimum pricing of 2-5$ CPM rate and would fill all the ad space [inventory] and also get the website owner content related advertisements which would keep the site look good too. Now lets calculate the income at the lowest 2$ CPM rate and see how the returns would be.
1100000 / 1000 * 2 = 2200$ at 100% file rate which means that the income jumped to 10 times of the initial return and also the costs currently are at just 10% which is the sales guy’s salary. There are multiple advantages when opting for this approach which are –
Net Revenue Jumps to Many Folds
The Blogger gains a better brand value in the industry
Fixed Pricing and connection with the advertisers would help him grow his name
Professional Media Kit
Finally i would like to make you understand that there are both advantages & disadvantages of hiring a sales team for your website, instead of handling everything yourself but overall when calculating while taking the numbers in count you will find that there are more advantages. Do you handle the current advertisements and advertisers yourself or have you hired someone to handle this stuff?
RahulBuzz says
I saw that many monster blogs using openx. Still this information is valuable.
Ashish says
Hi Amit,
Interesting article..can you please help me
For eg, if i get 10,000 unique hits per month idle what should needs be my income.
Thanks in advance
Ashish
Amit Bhawani says
There are many factors which can be used to calculate the return on a fixed number of visitors and this mainly depends on the niche. Lets say you are having very targetted visitors then 10000 visitors would help you make money at even 5$ CPM.
Lets think that you have 3 page views on an average from every visitor, that would mean that for the asked 10000 visitors you would get 30000 page views. Now lets guess that you are using 2 Ad Networks to make money instead of hiring someone to handle the sales of ads, you can expect atleast an average of 3$ CPM from each ad slot.
Now 30000 Page Views * 3$ eCPM * 2 Ad Slots = 180$/month would be the possible income you can expect. As i previously told you this all depends on the network, CPM Rates offered, Ad Sizes, Type of Ads etc. Hope the calculations have made your doubt cleared.
Sanjai says
Excellent article.
As a publisher we are not concerned about our ad space.
These type of proffessional approach is required.
Amit Bhawani says
yes but try to implement it only when you have got a very good number of visitors and a level of income at which you can hire someone and find someone who can increase your current advertising revenues.