Monetizing your blog or website part 2: CPM ads
Written by Nico on February 13, 2009 – 8:26 am -It’s nice to have a popular blog or website with many daily visitors and page views. Ultimately, most webmasters want to make money with their website. If you are not using your website to sell your own products or services, putting ads on your site can make you a nice return on all the hard work you’ve put into developing and marketing your website.
There are a number of different ad types you can use on your website and each has its own pro’s and con’s. I’ve discussed PPC ads before, today we’re taking a closer look at CPM ads.
CPM ads
CPM ads are ads that pay per ad view (CPM = Cost Per 1000 impressions) so it doesn’t matter if your visitors click on the ads. Your earnings are directly related to the number of visitors and page views you get on your website. A steady traffic stream will generate a steady income stream for you.
Different CPM programs offer different rates. A rate of, say, $2 CPM will not necessarily make you $2 for every 1000 page views on your website or blog though. The ad programs often pay different rates based on the location of the visitors. The $2 CPM offered might only apply to US based traffic, while visitors from the UK might only make you $1 CPM and Asian traffic could not be paid for at all.
If you want to optimize your ad income and the CPM ads you are running on your site are only paying for traffic from certain countries, it could be a good idea to only show the ads to visitors from the paying countries. The ad space could be used to display PPC ads to visitors from other countries. To do this you can use the free ip2nation database which lets you look up the visitors country based on their ip-address. A simple php program can then be used to display ads based on the visitors country.
Another thing to look into when selecting an ad publisher network to sign up with, is how exactly is the traffic measured. They might not count every page view, but only the unique visitors per day. A single visitor looking at 100 pages on your website could only count as a single view instead of 100. So, the ad network advertising with higher CPM rates might bring in less money than the one with lower rates. Have a good look at the details of the program you sign up with.
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Tags: ads, blogging for money, CPM, make money
Posted in make money | 17 Comments »
February 20th, 2009 at 11:56 am
Hello Nico,
From what source did you get your number?
What CPM agency/network do you recommend?
I am trying to get a baseline number for 1 impression for a single page view. Based on your $2 CPM that number is $0.002, but based on my research that number is highly unrealistic. I am seeing number in the $0.0005 and below range.
I would be very interested in reading your sources or seeing some hard statistics. Do you have any?
Best regards,
~David T.
February 20th, 2009 at 3:01 pm
David, thanks for stopping by!
yes, most CPM programs are in the $0.30 – $0.50 CPM range. One program I have been using for quite some time is Adversal, they are no replacement for Adsense ads however. Adversal serve pop-up and pop-under ads, which might not be a good idea to add to your site. Most people don’t like these kind of ads, so you will probably lose some regular visitors.
The site I’m using them on is getting mostly search engine traffic and quite frankly I don’t really care what the visitors to that particular site think about the pop-under ads or anything else for that matter! I would surely not use these type of ads on this site though.
Adversal also pays different rates based on visitors location, with a maximum of $1.40 CPM for US traffic.
High paying CPM programs are hard to find, but they do exist! The big problem is often getting accepted into the program as many only accept very high traffic sites (like half a million visitors a month)
I did recently sign up with one program that pays $2 CPM for all traffic, regardless of origin. But they do have quite some rules for their publishers. Nothing too ridiculous though, their rules guarantee a publisher network of very high value to the advertisers, which in turn is the reason they can pay these high rates to the publishers. Sorry, I can’t disclose which ad company I’m talking about here (they had me sign all sorts of non-disclosure agreements) but I can tell you that this is a program operating in a particular niche market.
I guess if you want to find the best paying CPM ads, you should try to find an advertising program that only serves the particular niche your site is in.
Sorry I can’t be more concrete, I could just list a bunch of CPM programs here, but I don’t believe in promoting or recommending things that I have not personally tested…
March 15th, 2009 at 10:11 am
Well… in my experience AdSense is the best at all. Why? You don’t have to generate eCPM of $5 on each page of your blog/site… Instead, write articles that attract people, and write articles that attract high paid keywords and clicks. For example, an article about SEO will NEVER generate as much as an article about security doors can. That’s simple rule; nothing more, nothing less.
Of course, it’s hard to write about hundreds of topics within one site.
May 7th, 2009 at 10:36 pm
Adsense is a complicated monster, and to say it is trumps everything else is a bit misleading. Adsense ads do not perform well on loosely themed sites. For instance, they will perform better on a site about New York attorneys as opposed to law in general. One specific thing that Adsense requires to perform well is organic traffic that is targetted. It will not perform well on social traffic, which may lead to smart pricing. Essentially, that means your EPC go from $.50 to $.05. Hence, in such a scenario, CPM ads might be the better bet.
July 15th, 2009 at 3:38 pm
It seems like a no-brainer after reading this, but how many of us really read the fine print of our CPM ads? Supplying ads to visitors based on location is a simple thing to add and WILL increase your ad revenue.
Getting the traffic to your site…not so simple…
July 28th, 2009 at 11:19 am
Nico, great post on CPM ads, something I have to confess I do not know much about. I will definitely look into monetizing my blog with them, maybe together with Adsense.
August 26th, 2009 at 8:31 pm
Great post Nico,
CPM is probably the biggest source of revenue for many PRO-bloggers. I mean the numbers may be small, but when you start ranking in hundreds of thousands of hits a month, you start generating a nice piece of change. Whats your favorite CPM network?
October 3rd, 2009 at 8:23 am
If you want to find the best paying CPM ads, try to find an advertising program that only serves your particular niche.
October 5th, 2009 at 5:35 am
Dear Friends
We have a Website containing few Banners, we need to add the CPM (cost per 1,000) to manage our Banners system.
But I don’t know how to do it, is there a stand alone software (CPM) or a script that we can add that can do the calculation.
I need CPM Program…
our website is done in PHP
If some one has a hint or can help me, I’ll be more than thankful
thanks a lot…
October 5th, 2009 at 6:24 am
Suzie, I’m not sure what you are looking for. What kind of banners are you showing on your site? Are you signed up with an advertising program?
October 6th, 2009 at 12:54 am
Thank you Nico for your reply
We are not signed with an advertising program.
Our Website is a newsPaper, and we add advertising to the site( simple one) like an advertising for a company or something like this.
till now we count on time basis, for example for one month (advertising appear on our site) we took xx$ rate.
from now on we need to count on click Basis (CPM) but I don’t have an idea on how CPM works.
Is it a simple code that we have to write? or it is a software that we have to download.
Our site is done in PHP.
Hope you got the idea now, if not I can clarify more..
Hope u can help me..
Thanks a lot
October 6th, 2009 at 1:50 am
Suzie, if you are going to sell your advertising on a per click basis it would be CPC (cost per click) CPM ads are billed based on the number of views (cost per thousand impressions)
For a newspaper CPM is probably the most logical choice of ads and it makes it a lot easier to plan your ad space sales: a per click ad could occupy an ad slot on your site for a very long time without making you any money (if nobody clicks the ad) The CPM ad, on the other hand, will expire after the paid for number of views. Looking at your site stats, you can make a pretty accurate estimate on how long a given ad will run.
There are numerous, ready to use, ad scripts available or you could write your own simple script. I have a simple php ad script tutorial available at phpinclude.net This script only handles the actual viewing of the ad and keeping track of the number of views, but it could easily be extended with additional functionality.
October 6th, 2009 at 3:49 am
Thanks a lot a lot for your help,
and yes you are right we need to work on CPM (cost per thousand).
I’ll check the link now..
Thanks for your advice and your help
December 24th, 2009 at 10:39 pm
I’ve been looking into these types of ads for a while now and with my blog the CPM networks I get accepted to the rates are too low and the ones that give good rates I get denied from.
December 28th, 2009 at 5:48 am
What about visitors who come purely for content and not to get bombarded by advertisements?
Won’t you lose such visitors?
Sorry for the silly question as I am fairly new to blogging.
Regards,
Ian.
January 3rd, 2010 at 6:27 pm
Yes, the high paying ones often require your site to be a pretty high-traffic site.
January 3rd, 2010 at 7:21 pm
I don’t think that has ever been a problem. As long as you don’t overdo the ads or use annoying pop-ups, visitors won’t mind some ads. Most don’t even see them.