There are essentially two advertising goals on the Internet. Branding a product or service, or driving traffic to an Internet site. Often the advertiser's goal is both.

Internet Advertising Formats

Experimental advertising formats arrive on the Internet almost daily, making it difficult to cover all of the possibilities in this forum. There are however some standard formats such as the traditional 'banner' that you see at the top of many Internet pages.

There are 'buttons' that usually run down the left or right side of a page and are usually quite small.

A recent addition to Internet standard advertising is 'skyscraper' ads. These are like a 'banner' only vertical. These also run along a left or right column of the page and sometimes contain sound affects.

Lastly there are 'pop-ups' and other forms of 'creative' and 'rich' media, even live radio broadcasts running in the background.

You can expect the array of Internet advertising formats to shrink and grow over the next years until the most successful formats are sorted out.

You will find the types of ads that HAIROL sites can serve listed under ad products.

Payment Types

Cost Per Pop (CPP) means that you pay a set price every single time the ad is shown.

Cost Per Mil (CPM) means that you pay a set price for every 1000 times the ad is shown.

Cost Per Click (CPC) means that you pay a set price every time your ad is clicked on by a viewer, regardless of how many times the ad was actually shown.

Cost Per Unit (CPU) means that you pay either a set price or percentage commission every time the clicked on ad leads to a sale or user registration, regardless of how many times the ad was shown or clicked on.

The above list is also the usual cost spread with CPP's being the more expensive to CPU's being the least expensive. It also sets the ad priority run, which means that the most expensive ads run first all the way down to the least expensive.

On a site with a full ad inventory the best that you can hope for is a favorable CPM, and even then it may not run till 3AM unless you pay a higher price.

Purchasing Ad Space

You can either buy ad space yourself or hire an ad agency to do it for you. We recommend you hire an agency with professional media buyers. In the end this can save you money and they can help you design your ad too. The success of an ad depends very much on the design of the ad itself.

Ad space can be purchased directly from the site or you can purchase space from one of the Internet Ad Agencies such as MaxWorldWide, or 24/7 Real Media.

An agency sells space in three categories:

Premium: This is the most expensive and is reserved for very expensive ads such as rich media, or specific sites such as saying you want space on Hair-News.com. A company selling shampoo for example, would do exactly that as they can expect the best return on their ad dollar.

Targeted: Ad agencies carry an inventory of sites and break these sites down into 'channels' such as, Sports, Travel, Women's, Fashion & Style, etc. When you buy targeted ad space you can select the channel. HAIROL sites fall into the Women's and Style & Fashion channels. This would be an ideal buy for a pantyhose or cosmetics company.

R&E (Reach and Efficiency): This is the least expensive per ad unit and simply means that the agency will split the ad inventory up among all of its sites. This may be a good deal for a credit card company or branding a soft drink. This is also where the former DOTCOM's lost their pants.

Delivery and Accountability

There are a limited amount of reliable software applications on the market to accurately deliver and track ads and these applications are very expensive. If you cannot afford such software, make very sure that the site or agency that you buy with or from does have such technology. You need to know that your ads were actually delivered.

At HAIROL we use predominantly 'OpenAdStream' and have have access to specialized software companies for special applications such as 'Unicasts'.

DO NOT simply take someone's word that the ads were delivered.

Site Stats

Site Stats help define ad price, and they are the most abused and misreported numbers.

Hits: 'Hits' on a site means absolutely nothing and is not an indicator of the popularity of the site. One page can mean one hit, but can also mean 10 or more hits depending how many GIF's and JPEG's are on the page. These are called 'non-page hits' and unethical Internet sites rarely tell you that.

Unique Users: When someone comes to the site and are IP traced, they count as a unique user. This is a better number but hits are often reported as unique users and unique users is not an indicator of the popularity of the site, only how much traffic they were able to generate, even though the user may have left the site before the first page finished loading.

Page Views: Yup, this is the number you want and is an indicator of the popularity of a site. Your average web site serves .97 pages views per user, which means less than one page. Not a popular site.

Time Spent: This is an Okay number and helps to verify the page views.

Page views and time spent combined are what we call site stickiness. The more time people spend on the site and the more pages they view, the more apt they are to see and remember your ad.

Click Rate: This number is the total number of times users clicked on an ad, divided by the amount of ads served. This is another useless number. Most pages contain more than one ad and a user can only click on one ad at a time. The more popular the site is, the more pages that are viewed and again, the user can only click off of the site once.

If you design a good ad, people will click on it. If you design a poor ad, they won't. Its that simple.

Fluff: Some sites 'fluff' their actual numbers between 5% to 20%. On HAIROL sites we do no such thing. We monitor our numbers very carefully using Media House software and report these numbers as accurately as humanly possible.

If anything our numbers are under reported as many of our pages run on 'servers' where we cannot track them or on search engines that cache pages.

In our opinion, fluffing numbers is not only unethical, it is probably illegal. Please know who you are buying ad space from. Reputable sites will gladly share accurate information with you.
 

Supply and Demand

Last but certainly not least, what you pay for your ad run will greatly depend upon supply and demand. On HAIROL sites we have highly targeted but limited supply and high demand.

We hope this answered most of your questions and wish you a little luck with your media buys.

Sincerely:

HAIROL