One of the biggest concerns that newspapers new to the web have is advertising rates. For so long they have been honing their print advertising rates, that they have become experts in the field. When it comes to the web, though, confusion ensues.

Being web savvy, most people understand that websites have statistic programs that show website owners all sorts of information about their site: number of visitors, where they come from, how they found the site, how long they were there, etc. etc.

Statistics are great. But like anything else, they should not be overdone when it comes to deciding your web advertising rates. The old saying, just because your can, doesn't mean you should comes to play here.

Yes, you can probably figure out which advertiser is getting the most hits from your website. You can probably find out how many clicks that advertiser is getting per day. But this should not be used when marketing your site to advertisers.

If you tell an advertiser that some of the ads on your site get 100 clicks per day, this is much less effective than telling a potential advertiser that your site gets 10,000 unique visitors per day.

Let's weigh the effectiveness: 100 clicks vs. 10,000 views.

Yes, ads get clicked on. But not always. Maybe it took someone 25 times of seeing an ad before they clicked it. There is value in that. No newspaper can tell their advertisers how many times their print ad will be read (or much less, how many instant phone calls they will get from someone reading the ad and immediately calling a phone number in it).

Or what about non-effective ads? Say on the front page of your website you have 10 ads. One gets 50 percent of the clicks and another gets just 1 percent of the clicks. It is time to rethink the ad in that case, not the placement of it.

Here is what you should consider when creating an online rate card:

1. How many unique visitors does your site get per month? (This can be adjusted as more traffic comes to your site)
2. What are the most popular pages on your site? (The more visitors to a page, the higher the ad rates)
3. How many ad impressions does your site get (This is probably the most important)
   • This can be done per page or per site
   • Take the number of hits a particular page gets and divide it by the number of ads on that page

Armed with those statistics, you can get a strong feel for the value of your website and the amount you should charge. I would also recommend a free statisitcs program from Google (Google Analytics), to help monitor your site. The program is becomming the industry standard for gathering statistics.