All engine-less cars are equally useless

No matter how pretty the design of your Flash-only, single-page website is, it's just as useless at a 1994-era static, ugly website.

If you don't allow direct, internal linking, or image-copying, or text-quoting, your site is useless. If you build a website, assume someone is going to want to share it with their friends, and likely only a single part. If you don't think someone will want to do that, then why are you making it in the first place? Make it as simple as possible for someone to spread what you have to say and offer around. If you don't, if you force people to start at your splash page and proceed from there, you deserve no one's time or indulgence.

That website is no better than an ancient relic of the internet, a page with frames and manually-updated HTML. A useless site is a useless site, no matter how pretty.

A Ferrari without an engine is just as useless as a Chevette without an engine.

The only difference is that you could probably sell your useless Ferrari for more money.

A bad static website is just as useless as a dynamic, pretty, single-page Flash site. But you can probably charge your client more money for the latter.

Sell by the CPM

Seriously, don't try to get me to buy ad space on your website based on time. I'm just going to assume you're trying to trick me into paying more than the space is worth.

Internet advertising is measurable and trackable, so I'm going to buy based on measurable and trackable amounts. I'm going to buy based on how many impressions the ad actually receives. So if you insist on selling by the month or week, I'm still going to work out the effective CPM (cost per thousand impressions) and decide from there if it's a good deal. And I'm never going to buy space on a site that can't give me real data on how many impressions the ad is likely to receive. So save us both that trouble and sell on a CPM basis from the get-go.

Now, I understand that it might be a little more complicated for you. Because how do you decide how valuable those thousand impressions are?

Well, first consider supply and demand. If you have huge inventory, you don't want to risk it going to waste and not having enough advertisers buying, or enough impressions being purchased. So you'll want to set a CPM that gets most or all of your impressions purchased.

If you don't get a lot of traffic, you'd better have a great reason why those limited eyeballs are really valuable. Define a niche for your site that makes that small number of impressions worth buying. If you can justify it, you might even be able to set a reasonably high CPM. If you're selling out your inventory, then you're doing okay (if you're selling out your inventory really, really quickly, maybe you should up your CPM).

If you're in the mid-range, with lots of impressions but not more than you know what to do with, you don't necessarily need a mid-range CPM. Again, if you can justify why those impressions are more valuable than the next guy's (if you have a niche website, or serve a need that no one else is covering), then you don't have to charge a middle of the road price.

So if you're selling ad space on your website, those are a few things to keep in mind. And remember, the best thing you can do to get yourself on one of my buys is this: Make it painless. If I can call you up or fire you off an email and expect great service and great ROI, and provide a great experience for myself and my client, then you've got the best shot at getting on a buy.

At the end of the day it's about value for my client, and since they're getting billed based on how much time I spend on a buy, too, if buying on your website gets me valuable impressions without having to spend a lot of time on it, you're doing us all a favor.

Reach ain't everything - Tip #1

My last post on web marketing threw out an example of something that I sometimes need to explain to clients when preparing online campaigns for them: Reach vs. % Comp UV.

Reach ain't everything. Just because a certain site might hit a huge percentage of your audience (Yahoo!'s network of properties, for instance, reaches about 100% of internet users in Canada), that doesn't mean those sites are sufficient on your buy, or even the best way to spend your money.

Sites with huge reach often have prices to match. While Hotmail may have more impressions than they know what to do with and can therefore offer a low CPM (cost per thousand impressions), most sites with huge reach charge a big price for their valuable impressions.

So what do you do with a small budget, or a client extremely concerned with efficiencies? That's where % Comp UV comes in. It's the percentage of a site's unique visitors that are composed of your target demo.

So one site, say, Facebook, might hit 90% of your target demo, but their % Comp UV may only be 3%. However, a smaller, more targeted site might only reach about 5% of your demo, but it could be composed almost entirely of people in your demo. Find enough of those smaller sites with huge % Comp UV and you might be able to spend less over a bunch of sites and hit all the same people without having to dump all your money on one or two sites with huge reach.

Of course, if you're breaking your buy up into smaller chunks like that you'll want to make sure you're not hitting the exact same people over and over again on those sites.

Agencies use tools to measure reach, % Comp UV, and duplication, among many other metrics, but a good eye and intuition (and carefully worded questions to the people running the sites you're interested in) can still get you a long way. I can't really talk about specific tools I use at my day job, or go into detail about how we construct buys, but hopefully the little bit of information I've given will create a bit of awareness of what goes into buying media online.