[epub] Inflating Subscriber Numbers and setting ad rates

[Sharon Tucci <sharon@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

From: Sharon Tucci <sharon@listhost.net>


As many of you may know from my previous posts looking for pubs to advertise in, we handle ad bookings for clients, among other list-related services. I wanted to share some insight on one aspect of this - hopefully it will help some of you who sell advertising (or plan to) and others who may buy advertising.

One of the most frustrating things we need to deal with is that a good number of publishers inflate their subscriber numbers. How can we tell this? There are a few ways:

1. Response rates. 

This is the obvious first signal that something is amiss.

We track the response of every single ad we place. We don't just track clickthroughs, but also the uniqueness of responses based on IP address or email address (depending on whether the call to action is clicking through to a URL or to an autoresponder address).

Since with most campaigns, we make anywhere from 25-100+ bookings, we can get a pretty good idea looking at the results to see what type of responses a publication SHOULD have had. Sure, some anamolies can result in a skewing of data. However, there are still reasonable ranges.

Take for instance a campaign that resulted in an overall response rate of 8.5%. Three different publications claimed subscription numbers in excess of 10,000 and fell into the same categories as other publications and were comparable content-wise. However, these 3 publications resulted in 0.01%, 0.02 and 0.022% response rates. A fourth publication claimed a subscriber base of over 20,000 yet resulted in one email response and one web response. ALL of these with lower responses were sponsorship ads at top of issue.

2. Pricing and Response Rates

When I used to be active in publishing, I had a fairly low CPM for reaching a good target market. I preferred selling out 100% of ad space in advance rather than trying to fill space last minute. Besides, with a large circulation, I was still making very good money even with a low CPM.

However, under market CPM without selling out inventory is often a signal to me that something is amiss when the response rate is below average. (I'm not referring to extreme cases such as outlined previously, but 50% or so deviation from the average.) 

What are typical rates? Or what should you be charging? This depends on you. However, I've noticed a trend -- oddly enough for the majority of publications that underperform on a percentage basis, the cost per response still works out to be around the same UNLESS there appears to be gross inflation of subscriber numbers. It's relatively easy to work backwards using the cost per response and overall budget for reasonably performing ads to see what CPMs should be for a primary sponsorship ad (when no more than 1-2 other ads are available). Here's what I see....

Daily tip sheets or shorter issues that carry only 1 ad should be in the range of $15 CPM. 

Moderated discussion lists seem to have best performance for center of issue ad with a $15 CPM.

Longer newsletters have best performance with top sponsor ad (of no more than 3 ads) with a $12.50 CPM when there are NO classified ads and $5 CPM when there are classified ads.

IF there is a good level of targetting, these numbers should be anywhere from 30 to 200% greater. For instance, a discussion list geared to webmasters is worth $15 CPM, but if the ad is geared directly to webmasters, it could be worth anywhere from $20 CPM to $45 CPM.

Changing any of these factors will dramatically change the numbers. For instance, I have never seen a single case where a sponsor ad in two comparable publications  content wise produced the same results when classified ads were included. It's usually around 1/3 of the response rates without the classified ads. [With recent discussions on many lists about setting ad rates, I'm really curious about where people are getting the numbers from. Realistically, what you should be basing your ads rates on is how you are positioned against other publishers in terms of getting results for your advertisers. Want a clue to see if you're on the right track? Easy enough - consider how many repeat advertisers you get. There are a LOT of publications we've advertised in we'd never touch again. Simply no performance.]

Anyhow, back to the point of this... ads that have CPMs that fall well below these numbers (including any targeting factors) typically end up with the same cost per response, if not lower, than ads with higher CPMs. 



--------------------------- ONElist Sponsor ----------------------------

GET A NEXTCARD VISA, in 30 seconds.  Get rates as low as 0.0 percent 
Intro APR and no hidden fees.  Apply NOW.
<a href=" http://clickme.onelist.com/ad/NextcardCreativeCL ">Click Here</a>

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Epub is sponsored by http://New-List.com/
Subscribe to New-List: mailto:join-new-list@new-list.com

To subscribe to Epub, mailto:epub-subscribe@onelist.com
To unsubscribe, mailto:epub-unsubscribe@onelist.com
Digest version: mailto:epub-digest@onelist.com
Epub archives: http://EzineSeek.com/archives/