How to make a better ‘Advertise’ page for your website?

If you are like most people, you would not mind making some money out of your website through advertisements. Sadly, one of the most neglected pages on a majority of the websites is the ‘Advertise’ page. It is usually a last minute addition with a mail ID thrown in somewhere. The truth is, a good informative Advertise page goes a long way in making that first impression with a prospective advertiser. In this post, we take a look at what goes into making a good advertising page. We will be stressing on how to use data to make the page honest, informative and user friendly.

Visitor Numbers: Flaunt your vital stats

How popular is your website? Though there are 53 different ways an advertiser can ask you that question, they all want to know the same thing. So don’t be shy and give out the stats everyone is looking for.

• Number of monthly unique Page Views
• Number of monthly unique Visitors
• No of Page Views/Visitor
• Number of Subscribers

If you feel you have only started and have a moderate but growing number of visitors, chart your data in a way that stresses on how the number of visitors to your site is steadily increasing. A line chart like the one shown below is ideal for highlighting such trends.

Even if an advertiser does not find your current stats impressive enough, he will keep your website on his watch list. If you already have a handsome number of visitors coming to your website, you should put more stress on the number of visitors than on the trend. A column chart would be more useful in that case.

Demographics: Mature Latina beauty or young Italian lass?

Visitor Location

Does your website get visitors from all over the world? Or is it very popular in your city? Remember, a limited local readership is not always never a bad thing. If you have a website on food that many people in your city like reading, don’t be surprised to hear from your friendly neighborhood pizza parlor one of these days, asking for some screen real estate. Depending on your readers’ locations, have an interactive world or state map to start with.

Your advertisers can then click on the entities in the map – countries in case of a world map and cities in case of a state map – to get a more detailed break up of the whereabouts of your visitors.

This level of transparency will impress the stingiest of advertisers, and that in itself is an achievement.

Visitor Interests:

Make it a point to keep collecting the search keywords that visitors use to reach your site. They may act as good indicators of their interests. Try to classify the keywords into some Interest Groups. Plot them in a Pie Chart to give a prospective advertiser a rough idea of what visitors look for when they come to your website.

This will not only weed out a large section of misplaced advertisements, but will increase the chances of targeted ads being effective; which in turn will help you retain your advertisers on a long term.

Age/Sex:

If you have some way of collecting information about the age or/and sex of the visitors positively do so. If your site has a member login or you have a feedback form, use the information collected to give your advertiser a solid ground to base his decisions on. For example, if most of the visitors to your site are women mostly in their twenties, a women’s magazine may find your website a good place to advertise. Plus, this will ensure that you get only relevant advertisements that your readers would not mind either. A multi-level pie chart comes in really handy over here; first to break down your audience gender-wise and then as per their age groups.

If you are not looking at such a deep level of hierarchy and want to show the break up only by age, then a simple pie chart will do the job for you.

Rankings: How much does Google think you’re worth?

Social Media may be the buzzword at the moment, but the fact is, a large number of advertisers still want to know how you rank in Google’s Page Rank, Alexa, etc. Unless these ranks are comically bad for your website, you should display them on your Advertise page. A nice way of doing

Some other ranks that you should display are:

• Alexa
• Quantcast
• Compete
• Technorati

Testimonials: I’ve been told I’m good.

At the start of the article, we said that we will be talking about how to use data effectively to make a better ‘Advertise’ page. But as we are rounding off, we will talk about something that has nothing to do with data or its visualization. Testimonials. Good feedback from your fellow advertisers can give you credibility that nothing else can. To get good testimonials, it is always a good idea to maintain a good rapport with your regular advertisers and ask them for a testimonial/feedback. Putting these testimonials along with their organization name and URL makes them more real and adds more credibility. On this note we will shamelessly point you to our Testimonials page. It might not be very relevant, but we will flaunt it anyway. With that, we come to the end of the post. Do you think we have we missed out on something? Is there a better way of representing any of those metrics? Do let us know.