Hi guys,

I have a website which generates about 90,000 hits a month and 5000 visits per month.

I have had an advertising enquiry in asking for the following

1) on your homepage only
2) your content pages
3) banner + text on homepage
4) banner + text on content pages

How much should I charge? Or better yet are there guidelines available for this sort of thing?

Best

Julian Hall

Hits? Or Unique Visitors?

90,000 hits a month and 5000 unique visitors per month.

well the hit's are irrelevant, but if they're dumb enough to believe that this is worth money......

Guess, I've never charged for advertising space, so I'm not sure what to say besides "Try to get as much money as you can" hahahha

First off, is their site the same theme as your's (roughly of course)?

Second, are you going to use a no-follow and will they pick up on that?

If it were ME crunching the numbers, and this isn't the greatest breakdown, I would do the following.

5000 divided by 30 = 167 people a day.

167 times 5% = 8 people that might click on the ad (thats probably WAY high, but it's an example)

8 people times 30 = 240 people per month I would get from ya.

240 times 2% = 5 total people that converted into a sale.

Depending on the products sold and profit margin, you can figure out how much it's really worth.

In you're case tho, do the same, but then add more ad dollars to it. They will inevitably try to chew you down. Looking back, that 5% is probably way high, but this also depends on where their add is going to be. Also, are they buying actual advertising, or are they trying to buy a text link to boost their rankings?

Keep your visitors in mind too... No matter how much money you get paid, don't let them rape your site.

By no means am I an authority on this subject, but I've just finished a rather expensive ad campaign and found that advertising just doesn't pay... not in terms of sales, but in terms of visitors. But if they don't know that yet, then go ahead and take 'em for all they're worth.... they'll just learn the hard way like I did. hahahah

different industries give different conversion rates at each level.

If an ad is well designed one can expect a 10% CTR (banners, flash, pop ups and flashing things get a lot fewer ~0.1%)

I'm fortunate in my industry that there's about a 5% conversion rate sales:unique-visitors and we get 1000s visitors a day.

So, look at your market place metrics (eg how many clicks do you get from your advertising based on impressions of your ad? and what is your conversion rate)

once you've worked out a base price for a month add a mark-up (anything from +10% to +50%) and a setup charge (because you will have to alter your site to accommodate their ads)

Also think about:

Are they direct competition?
Billing frequency? - bill for one month in advance then rework your figures in case your numbers go up or down
Billing plan? - a flat rate for the month, or pay per click? (look at someone like hypertracker for click management). A flat rate is probably better for you and PPC is probably better for them. Unless you go from 5 000/month to 5 000/day in month 1
get-out clauses, displutes and refunds - get a lawyer to draft up a contact for you

I'm with Northie....it's really going to depend on the subject matter of your site

have you tried contacting any of your direct and reputable competitiors (maybe an industry leader) to get their stats and how much they charge?