If you’re a victim of a PPC advertising company taking more than its fair share (or think you are) you may want to take a different approach to advertising: Eliminate the middle man.
Some people stay with PPC campaigns even though they are literally receiving pennies on the dollar. Rather than doing this, you should attempt to reach out to people that might want to advertise on your site in hopes of reaching a better deal. To successfully strike a deal, there are key components to address.
First, you will likely need to disclose your traffic. Publishers need to know what they are getting for their buck. Disclosing your traffic (uniques and pages views) helps accomplish this.
Second, if you do have a high Click through rate (CTR), mention that as well. This helps your bargaining position as you can give the publisher a better idea of how much direct traffic will result in their banner advertisement on your site.
Third, it very much helps if you know how much (generally) advertisers typically pay for their niche on Google Adsense. You can do this by attempting to sign up for an adwords account or by downloading SEO Quake and clicking trends while doing a search in Fire Fox. The trends will tell you a range advertisers typically pay per click.
Now, offer a price that dictates a PPC cost of somewhere between the two prices. You don’t want to get to close to what they pay on Adsense because they will figure the opportunity isn’t worth their time. For example, they have uncertainty in your ability to convert traffic for them, whether your traffic will maintain its rate, and they must take their time to analyze your offer which is part of the transactional costs.
I think a good price to offer is 25% of the low end of the usual cost for the publisher. For example, if the range seen on SEO Quake is usually $0.10 to $0.20 per click, try offering a $0.125 per click estimate. Thus, if you’re fairly estimating you can offer them 200 clicks a month, then this would result in a $25 price for advertising.
One caveat to this method of eliminating the middle man when advertising is you must have an amount of traffic worth their time. I would say 500 uniques is a good threshold to send an email over. Of course, someone may solicit advertising on your site without knowing your exact traffic. I have been approached in this fashion – for banner advertising – several times. However, offering deals based on eliminating the middle man don’t result in a deal unless publishers feel a deal is worth their time. This is not to say it can’t happen, though.
