How to Sell Ads Online > Show Detailed Traffic Statistics (4/7)
December 28, 2009 – 2:14 pm How to Sell Ads Online > Show Detailed Traffic Statistics (4/7)
This is the fourth part of the How to Sell Ads Online series.
The product you are selling is your traffic so clearly, you need to describe it.
If you were buying a book on Amazon, you'll want see the full description, picture of the cover, reviews from other readers, and perhaps even browse through a few pages of the book.
Unfortunately, your traffic is not a book so you really can't show a picture of your audience. Well you could, I guess, but I’m not sure how effective that’ll be. However, what you can do is describe it through analytics.
By analytics, I’m not referring to all the bells and whistles site analytics you get on Google Analytics, Statcounter etc. I’m referring to just the stuff that matters to advertisers i.e. the metrics that describe who your audience is.
As explained in the "Have an outstanding product to sell" article, it is important to segment your audience and show advertisers the niches that advertisers can target.
Quick example – as an advertiser, I'll like to know how much of your traffic is relevant to me. Simply saying "I have 10 million hits" is not good enough.
If I run a restaurant in Downtown Boston, I'll probably be mainly concerned about the traffic in Boston, not Venice Beach, LA or in London or Bombay. You get the point.
How to segment your traffic
It is even way more valuable if you can segment your audience by their demographic makeup, or by their interests like Facebook does.
At the very least, start by showing advertisers where your audience come from. Show them the impressions, unique visitors and average time spent.
If you can show this information across all the niches, then you are onto a winner. Naturally, you’ll probably need some software to work out this information for you.
That’s where a good self-service system comes in. Ideally, your advertisers should be able to specify their preferences and see only the analytics that they care about. You can also include the metrics in a media kit but nothing beats interactive analytics.
One last thing, it is very important to let advertisers know the source of the data. It helps to give your stats legitimacy. Anyone can make up numbers and say "yeah, I do 5mm US uniques a month" but when it is reported by a 3rd party, then it feels legit.
It is similar to how the reviews on Amazon help you decide whether you should buy the book or not.
Action Points
- Get an analytics solution that can do this for you. It is even better if the analytics come with your ad server.
Effect
Giving advertisers the visibility into your traffic does two things:
- It helps them make intelligent decisions, and
- It makes them feel more confident that they’ll get a Return on Investment (ROI).
Both are essential for maintaining a sustainable long term advertising relationship.
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