Affiliate Marketing - White Paper: Five Simple Steps for Adding Effective CPL Advertising to Your Website

White Paper: Five Simple Steps for Adding Effective CPL Advertising to Your Website

by Jon Beardsley

The US Presidential candidates take on increasingly difficult tasks with each passing day -- but personally, I believe that the online publisher's job is also among the toughest in the world.

Online publishers work to meet the needs of a diverse spectrum of constituents such as writers, readers, and advertisers and the tough economic times have made an already difficult job even tougher. Pubmatic's May 2008 study showed an effective drop of 23% in eCPMs for April 2008 with large sites suffering drops of as much as 52%.

While these market dynamics present challenges for publishers, the good news is that they also present significant opportunities. Advertisers are still willing to spend but are increasingly focusing on performance based pricing models. For the first time, spending on performance based advertising has exceeded spending on display advertising, as shown by the 2007 IAB PWC Internet advertising report.

“5 Five Simple Steps for Adding Effective CPL Advertising to Your Website” explains how publishers can tap into advertiser demand for performance based advertising and integrate CPL advertising into their websites in fewer than fifteen minutes. For publishers that already offer CPL advertising, this white paper identifies additional opportunities and best practices to maximize online advertising revenue.

1. Monetize inventory within the existing site framework
Redesigning a site to incorporate a new advertising pricing model is unnecessary, not to mention costly, time consuming, and disruptive to the user experience. Publishers can easily incorporate CPL advertisements into an existing site in two ways.

First, they can monetize the registration path by offering co-registration advertisements. Co-registration advertisements take less than fifteen minutes to implement and are a fast, effective, and easy way to accomplish this objective.

Second, publishers can convert CPM inventory to CPL inventory using Pontiflex's AdUnit X CPL banners. With AdUnit X, visitors submit information to advertisers without having to click-through to a landing page. Eliminating the landing page improves website stickiness for publishers, as the user continues to stay on the page. It also results in a much higher conversion rate for advertisers. Given that industry average click-through rates for banners are in the 0.10% - 0.20% range, this can be an important move.

2. Avoid the exclusivity trap
Sometimes networks and vendors offer to implement co-registration/CPL advertising on a publisher’s website in exchange for exclusive representation of that site. Publishers should not enter into relationships of this nature, as they can inhibit a publisher's ability to maximize advertising revenue and publisher's lose control over their advertiser selection. Advertisers also don't appreciate the loss of editorial control. In a 2007 industry study conducted by ad network Collective Media, 59% of advertiser respondents cited this loss of control as the greatest factor for not using ad networks.

Technologies like Pontiflex PixelPost allow publishers to quickly implement co-registration campaigns while maintaining the opportunity to do business with the widest possible pool of advertisers. PixelPost is open, which means that publishers can even use it to manage their non-Pontiflex campaigns.

3. Price ads based on website demographics and number of fields
First Name, Last Name, Email Address, and Zip Code are the standard user data fields collected for each lead. These standard fields can command an excellent per-lead price, but publishers have an opportunity to charge an even higher price when advertisers require additional custom fields.

While publishers typically serve up to five co-registration ads on the registration page. If the offers are particularly relevant to the demographics of the website, up to ten co-registration ads can be served which often allows publishers to achieve average eCPMs in the $75 - $325 range.

4. Ensure secure data delivery
In a lead generation campaign, data must be transmitted to the advertiser in the format of their choice. Common formats include Email, FTP, HTTP Post and HTTPS Post. The latter two are the most secure methods. Publishers can automate the tasks of data delivery and translation by using services like Pontiflex PixelPost.

5. Connect with CPL advertisers
Publishers should use a push/pull approach to sell CPL inventory to interested advertisers. They should 'push' by using their sales force to actively sell CPL advertisements to existing customers and new prospects. Additionally, they should 'pull' by getting themselves listed on the Pontiflex GENList™ to give them exposure to the hundreds of advertisers who use the GENList to find publishers and set up campaigns. Any online publisher offering lead generation advertising may join the GENList and signing up is free.

Download this white paper and find out more details about the five simple ways publishers can tap into the advertiser demand for performance based advertising by offering CPL pricing models. The white paper also demonstrates how a leading online publisher, Hillclimb Media, integrated CPL advertising to maximize online advertising revenue.

As the bard once sang, “The times they are a-changing.” And they are changing fast. To the swift will go the spoils. Download this white paper now.

Jon Beardsley is Vice President, Sales at Pontiflex, Inc., the industry’s only open and transparent CPL marketplace.

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