The Pros and Cons of CPM Banner Advertising

Depending on how well you manage your online advertising, cpm advertising may be a great option for you and your web site. I’m not talking about selling you ad space on a per 1,000 views basis, but having it managed by an outside company like ValueClick Media or CasaleMedia.

When I had over 100,000+ uniques per day going through my myspace resource web site, I was able to generate over $100,000 within a few months using cpm networks to manage my ad space.

However, a lot has changed since then and if you have a website with a lot of traffic in place, you need to have better ad management in place as well.

A perfect example of this can be seen through the use of a solution like Finteza.com — which is an advanced webmaster analytics, to assists in project development, but also offers advert zone and payment management options.

No matter what type of website or blog you have, it’s extremely important to make sure you have the necessary stats, analytics reporting and ad campaign management in place. Without these, your site will never meet it’s full earnings potential.

And if you are trying to figure out the possible earnings for your own site with banner based advertising, be sure to consider using a CPM calculator.

Here are a few pros and cons on why CPM advertising might be good or bad addition for your web business.

PROS:

– Instant Advertisers
The continuing mission of having to find advertisers and continually bill or manage ad space sucks. Instead, you can simply place a line of code on your site and ValueClick Media or CasaleMedia will continually serve advertisers on your site as long as you generate traffic. No more “Advertise Here” spots or unpaid advertising.

– One Big Monthly Check
Instead of having to deal with multiple advertisers and making sure payments are always on time, you will be sent a check at the end of the month from each of your CPM ad serving networks. I highly recommend joining more then one CPM network, so you can leverage your default ad impressions when they may not be buying 100% of your traffic.

– Stress Free and No Ad Testing
It is likely you may be able to sell your advertising for a higher price if you sell directly, but it will also require more work and time. If you have a lot of traffic going through your web site and you have no idea what offers will convert, instead of throwing a bunch of banners on the site for testing, you can just let the CPM advertising networks display advertising for you. As much as you want to make money, so does the ad network, and they will pull out the non-performing ads and replace them with ones that are making money.

CONS:

– Lower Payouts
As expected, since you are not selling your advertising space directly, you are going to get a smaller cut. CPM advertising companies usually have a 60/40 or 70/30 revenue split with their partner web sites, but also a much larger advertiser network and budget.

– Advertiser Selections
Since advertising is being served by another company, you may not be aware of the advertisers being displayed on your site. While they may always be non-adult and safe for work, you may occasionally come across a competing ad banner or an extremely annoying flashy ad appearing on your sites. (For the advertiser, it’s all about getting the click!)

I’ve Been Using Casale Media and ValueClick Media for Years!

These are just a few of the key points on why you should or should not be using CPM advertising on your web site. I have had great success with both ValueClick Media and CasaleMedia and have been using them for both for many years now. In addition to ValueClick and CasaleMedia, there are a few other CPM advertising networks available like Gorilla Nation, Tribal Fusion and CPX Interactive… but they usually pay much less or only accept premier high traffic niche sites.

For best results, if you are going to use CPM advertising, try setting up a section on your site for CPA offers as well, using text links. Not only will you be getting paid for traffic views, but also any conversions you can pull from your CPA links.