Advertising & Affiliate Programs

I have been doing some research on advertising. The thing that advertisers and affiliates have in common -- both track the number of impressions an ad receives. Now that I have placed ads on each of my blogs, my affiliate program is reporting a lot of impressions (no sales).

I am relatively new to the advertising game and have had only one ad -- ran in October 2004. Terms like PPC and CPM are new to me.

Price Per Click - PPC

No Webopedia definition... I believe this is the premise on which Google's Adsense program works.

Cost Per Thousand or CPM quote - Webopedia

Abbreviated as CPM (the letter "M" in the abbreviation is the Roman numeral for one thousand). CPM is used by Internet marketers to price ad banners. Sites that sell advertising will guarantee an advertiser a certain number of impressions (number of times an ad banner is downloaded and presumably seen by visitors.), then set a rate based on that guarantee times the CPM rate. A Web site that has a CPM rate of $25 and guarantees advertisers 600,000 impressions will charge $15,000 ($25 x 600) for those advertisers' ad banner.

I want to ensure that my advertising rates are inline with current market rates. Based on some of the larger programs -- I am overpriced. According to the rate used in the definition example, I am inline if not cheap.

Scouring forums, I have learned that CPMs are between 10 - 29 cents per 1000 impressions, depending on the program. I also don't think you get a choice of ads. I am way to persnickety about what goes on my sites for this ad game.

Luckily for me neither my affiliate program nor my advertising agent prohibits the use of the other program in conjunction with their own so this is not an either or situation.

In summary -- you now know what I know about advertising. I will stay with my affiliate program for the time being, look for new ways to promote my sites, keep my advertising agent (BlogAds) and wonder why I never get any emails from my ad page. I plan on doing more research (Adsense will be one area) and in the meantime, I will not give up my daytime (hmmm) job... Software.