Advanced ad placement and pricing guide for bloggers
Our proprietary Blogads unit has been helping people make money blogging since 2002, and it’s still the most popular unit we sell. But as online advertising has evolved, so have we. Today, we offer 10 different ad units to meet the needs of advertisers and bloggers alike.
In general, we recommend that you run as many of these different units on your blog as you can fit, so you can provide options to all sizes of advertisers. Also, don’t forget to put the ad code on every page. The more ad impressions you can offer, the more money you can ask for.
In this post, we’ll break these ad units into three categories, Blogads, banners and adverposts, and show you how to place and price each for maximum attractiveness to advertisers.
1. Blogads
Placement:
As we showed you in the guide to placing Blogads units, the topmost leftmost placement is the best place to attract advertisers. If you don’t have a left sidebar, then the top of the right sidebar would be the most effective placement for your blog.
You can also customize Blogads adstrips to fit extra-wide sidebars by enabling double-wide (or triple-wide or bigger) ad placements using our multi-column feature. It’s as easy as clicking a drop-down list in your blogger dashboard, as illustrated in this video:
Pricing:
Blogads are purchased as a time sponsorship, which means that an advertiser is purchasing an ad on your site for a specific amount of time. You can sell Blogads for: 1 week, 2 weeks, 1 month or 3 months.
We generally recommend pricing these ads around $.50-$1.50 CPM (cost per thousand impressions). So if your blog serves 100,000 weekly impressions, you price your ads at $50-150 per week. This CPM calculator is a great tool for pricing your Blogads.
Another way to price your Blogads is to look for comparable sites on our Buy Ads page and try to set competitive prices for your ads.
2. Banners
When advertisers are purchasing ads across many sites, they sometimes create them in IAB standard sizes. Sometimes advertisers don’t have the resources to create separate Blogads for their campaigns, so it’s good to be ready for IABs.
Placement:
As with the Blogads units, advertisers like to see IAB placements “above the fold,” which means visible when the page loads without scrolling down. Wider units such as the leaderboard and marquee are designed to be at the top center, and will usually fit nicely just above or below your blog’s header.
Half page ads, rectangles and square buttons should go in your sidebar, depending on the width of the sidebar. Remember, if you have a left sidebar, this would be preferable to the right. Don’t have room in your sidebar? Rectangles also work well between posts. We recommend putting them between the second and third posts, or higher.
Pricing:
As you’ll see when you set up these units in your blogger dashboard, these ads are sold differently than Blogads. Rather than setting a sponsorship price for a week to three months, you’ll need to figure out what the ads would cost per day. Because these ads are sold by SOV (Share of Voice, i.e. 30% of all impressions over a period of time), you will set the price based on one advertiser buying 100% of one day’s impressions.
This might sound a little confusing, so we’ve added a built-in Price Calculator that you can access by clicking “help.”
Square buttons are great for advertisers on a budget, so we suggest you price those between $.25-50.
For leaderboards (728×90) and rectangles (300×250) we suggest a CPM of $2.00-$6.00.
Half-page ads, which draw more attention and take up more space, can usually fetch about $8 CPM.
For the marquee unit, which was designed to give big advertisers a big splash, you can ask for $10 CPM.
3. Adverposts
Once they realized the impact and reach of bloggers, advertisers began asking us if they could advertise “outside the box.” So we created a better box: the adverpost. Think of them as mega-Blogads. Larger image and more html-friendly text.
Placement:
The ultimate for integrating into the context of blogs, these ads will do best just below the first post on each page.
Pricing:
Because of the premium placement, size and format of these ads, you should ask for a premium price. We recommend a $10-20 CPM.
Ideal Combinations:
Having trouble deciding which ads work well together on your blog? Here are a few combinations that we’ve seen work well for bloggers:
1.) Rectangle (300×250) top right sidebar, leaderboard (728×90) top, Blogads adstrip in sidebar, adverpost within posting
2.) Rectangle (300×250) top right sidebar, Blogads adstrip in right sidebar, square buttons (125 x 125) between posts, adverpost within posting
3.) Marquee (728×270) top, Blogads adstrip top left, square buttons (125 x 125) left sidebar, adverpost within posting
If you have any other questions or need a recommendation, please let us know!
And if you’re interested in joining our network, you can apply to be one of our publishers here.