Advertising Information
March 19, 2008
The first question any potential advertiser asks is; Why should I spend my hard earned advertising budget with you? And in our case the answer is simple; The audience. First of all, the visitors to this site all have one thing in common, and it's not just a love of motorcycles. The vast majority of visitors will have passed the most crucial test of all, they have already proven they are willing to spend money . . . they own bikes. Not only that, but in visiting this site they are demonstrating they are active in their passion for their motorcycles, after all, they are here looking for a run. So aside from a gathering of one form or another, where are you going to find a group with this precision targeting. There is also the intangible factor that the visitors are already thinking about their bikes and the fun they have before they even see your ad, talk about the ideal mind set. It's not too hard to get a 'too cool' response when your audience is already this primed.
Then there is the layout of the site itself. The ads are large and few in number. They are in clear sight, not lost in the clutter, but don't interfere with the main purpose of the web site, getting run information. The size and layout of the advertising was of paramount importance from the very conception of the website. Check the overview page for some insight on why this site is laid out as it is.
AHHH The gory details
Advertising on FindBikerRuns.com is split between to groups of advertisers, national and regional. The national advertisements are displayed on the website opening page and the run listing page. Regional advertisements are displayed on the individual run detail pages.
Only two sizes of display ads are used. A vertical ad with a layout of 200 pixels wide by 600 pixels tall, and a horizontal ad 600 pixels wide by 200 pixels tall. There are always two ads per page, a vertical ad on the right and a horizontal ad between the body of the page and the footer. The ads rotate with every page view.
The ad rotation is sequenced so that every time a page containing ads from that page's specific group, a region for example, is loaded the ads incrementally switch, whether it be the same visitor or not. The order of the ads is arbitrary, being set by their order in the database containing that specific ad group. In the beginning a list of the ads is built from the database, then as the ads are displayed they are deleted from the list until there are none left. Then the process repeats itself. Using this technique guarantees equal time for all the ads in the group.
Ads are purchased in sets of two. At this time advertiser has the option of two vertical ads, two horizontal ads or one of each. The advertiser also has the option of a single ad being displayed twice as often. (In reality we just have two copies of the same ad in the rotation.) If at sometime the ratio of the ad orientations becomes too lopsided these options may change. Existing ads will be grandfathered of course.
All the ads displayed can be linked to other websites. Both ads in a set will be linked to the same site. The only format accepted for the ads is jpg. This is dictated by the physical size of the ads. And as previously stated the ads are only available in two sizes. We do not have the time or the resources to resize and/or convert ads, thus ads that don't meet these simple criteria will be rejected. We are considering adding a specialized graphics person to the staff to prep ads if the demand is there. There would be some additional charge of course, dependent on the client needs. We would love to have your thoughts on the subject.
Since this site just launched, the advertising rate and number of ad sets accepted for each group have not been settled. The first order of business is to get visitors to the website. Once we have an idea of the website's traffic and the pattern of that traffic we can start soliciting and selling ad space. Until then we can not in good concience sell ad space, but if you would be interested in hearing from us when we do start selling ad space please feel free to drop us a note and we will contact you when the time comes.
Thx
FBR