Revenue Development

Advertising products that sell

You are planning a new commercial website or perhaps you have one that has been running fairly well for a number of months or years. Have you ever wondered if you are maximising the revenue opportunities the website and your business presents.

Online advertising revenue can depend on a number of factors. Here are just some of them:

• Your visitors and your page impressions (page views)
• The size of your opt-in customer database
• The content on your website
• The ability of your sales team to sell online
• The ability of your customer to comprehend the ad products
• The health of your market
• The ability to easily implement the advertising
• The ability to managed the advertising schedule
• The platforms you own and operate
• The reach and health of 3rd party ad networks
• Your brand strength in the traditional media space

Not all of these factors will be influencing your existing revenue just like not all of them will be representative of the ‘new’ revenue opportunity. What this list indicates is that there are probably a number of improvements and a number of additional revenue streams that could be modelled, tested and put into plan.

Blaze Online can work with you to analyse your existing revenue streams and determine what opportunities there are for more revenue more often.

Sales team, client and visitor friendly advertising products

Your advertising products must match across 4 key areas. They must be easy to understand, easy to sell, easy to implement and easy to click. This sounds like it would be a no-brainer for publishers, but often the four just don’t go hand in hand.

Not all sales teams can sell all ad products, it depends on their knowledge of online, their ability to feel confident talking about the products and whether or not the sale is part of an ad on at the end of the print sale or a standalone sale.

Not all customers are going to be comfortable with all of the ad products. The likelihood of them purchasing the products depends on the collateral, the messages from the sales team, the pricing, their level of understanding of what the ad product actually is and the likely return on investment.

Publishers of varying sizes don’t always have access to much ad serving and reporting technology or in a lot of cases, they only have what their content management system provides. The types of advertising products are therefore limited by the platform the publisher owns.

Things like podcast platforms, video management systems and multimedia streaming in general can be implemented at great cost and mostly little return. Smart decisions need to be made and all avenues looked at in order to get the balance of risk and return right.

A baffling and often forgotten capability is click reporting. No matter what the cost of the ad/s the advertiser will think the advertising is NOT working unless they can get hold of regular and accurate click reports. You must have click reporting available on all of your products.

Visitors to your site are also entitled to see, hear and feel advertising that resonates with their line of thought. There is no use matching some advertising types with certain audiences and no use having any advertising at all if the call to action is not clear, the click is not clear or things like browser compatibility is an issue.