分析阐述决定网站广告CPM的5个要素

作者：Andrew Chen

我很喜欢看跨站点广告盈利数据，如果你不是为广告网络工作的话，很难得到这样的数据。

如何推测CPM——5个要素

以下是我所使用的几个要素：

1、网站具有“粘性”，还是用户只会访问1次（游戏邦注：如参考资料网站）？

2、站点包罗万象，还是属于某个特定的类别（游戏邦注：如汽车类信息网站）？

3、使用站点的人群是谁？全球范围内的所有人还是只有美国人？

4、与吸引人们回访的社区站点相比，该网站在谷歌SEO上的独立程度如何？

5、网站拥有多少页面访问量（PV）？很多还是只有一点点？

Effective-CPM(from crunchynow.com)

最容易盈利和最难盈利

最容易盈利的是：

属于某个特定类别的单次访问站点，站点位于美国，有大量的搜索流量

当人们进入“交易”模式时，你的网站很可能会拥有很高的CTR。如果你拥有了以上所有条件，而且有大量的页面访问量，那么你会赚到大笔金钱。

最难盈利的是：

不属于特定类别的高粘性站点，位于美国、欧洲和日本之外，有大量的页面访问量

对于这类的网站，不仅用户购买产品的可能性较低，即便他们确实购买了，商家赚的钱也不多。

类别范例

根据个人经验，我列举出了部分站点的CPM，这些都只是近似值：

1、无直接广告销售团队的社交站点（游戏邦组：如论坛和聊天网站等）：CPM <0.25美元

2、大型国际网站：CPM <0.5美元

3、使用条幅广告网络的中型网站：CPM <1美元

4、属于特定类别的参考资料网站：CPM >5美元，有时会更高，这取决于所属类别，我们见过CPM为20美元的家居装饰参考网站。

因为我们主要针对所谓的“剩余”广告，所以这些数值低于这些网站的平均数值。比如，社交网络可能开出的CPM价格为20美元，但这部分只占1%，其余99%的售价<0.25美元。

正如你所看到的那样，网站资产可以分为以下两个类别：

1、横向网站是用户每日必访之处，有着较低的CPM和庞大的页面访问量

2、纵向站点的目标在于满足用户的目标和意图，往往是间歇性使用（游戏邦注：大量流量来源于搜索），有着较高的CPM和较低的页面访问量

当横向站点扩张出足够大的范围时，可以利用直接广告销售团队大幅提升CPM，但是整个过程都受需求限制。

谷歌很幸运地成为了双向站点，既是日常使用的网站，也能够俘获和满足用户的意图。

社交网站盈利性较弱

当然，有着大量页面访问量的网站往往是一般网站和粘性网站，拥有大量的社交内容，导致社交网站盈利性较差的原因有很多，但这并非本文所述内容。

小网站与大网站的比较

Techcrunch上有文章指出，小网站的盈利性要优于大网站。我认为，网站的大小与盈利确实存在联系，但并非因果关系。目前有大量小网站的多数流量来自谷歌。相比人们偶尔通过搜索引擎访问的网站，构建人们每天都会访问的功能性社交网站要更为困难。

我想，这种差异主要取决于一般用户的思维方式，这包括他们访问网站的意向。

游戏邦注：本文发稿于2008年4月7日，所涉时间、事件和数据均以此为准。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

5 factors that determine your advertising CPM rates

Andrew Chen

I love seeing this cross-site ad monetization data, since it’s rare to get your hands on it unless you work for an ad network. For people outside the ad industry, advertising CPMs seem like black-boxes.

How to guess CPMs – 5 factors

At Revenue Science, a regular game of mine was to eyeball a site and guesstimate the CPMs.

A couple of the factors that I’d use:

Is the site “sticky” or is it a one-hit wonder (like a reference site)?

Is the site pretty general, or is it in a particular category (like cars)?

Who uses the site? Everyone (including international) or just US?

How dependent is the site on Google SEO versus a community site that draws people back?

How many pageviews does the site have? Is it a lot? Or is it a small amount

Easy to monetize, hard to monetize

For the people who are curious, this is the easiest to monetize:

One-hit wonder site that exist in a particular category, are based in the US, and have lots of search traffic

In particular, your site is likely to have high CTRs since people are in a “transactional” mode. If you have all of those, and have a ton of pageviews, then you’ll make a ton of money.

The hardest to monetize?

Highly sticky sites that are general (like communication), based 100% outside of the US/Europe/Japan, with lots of pageviews

In a setup like this, not only are people unlikely to want to buy anything, even if they did, there’d be no way to make money off of this group.

Example categories

As a rough rule of thumb, I’d typically guess the following – these are very rough approximations, just to illustrate a couple points:

Social sites (forums/chat/etc) without direct ad sales teams: <$0.25 CPM

Largely international sites: <$0.50 CPM

Medium-sized sites that use banner ad networks: <$1 CPM

Reference sites in a specific category: >$5 CPM or sometimes much higher, depending on category – we ran into home improvement reference sites that did $20 CPMs

Because we were mostly dealing with so-called “remnant” advertising, these numbers are likely to be at the bottom of the range for these sites. That is, social networks might quote a CPM of $20 CPM, but what they really mean is that 1% of their inventory is sold at that, and the rest of the 99% is sold at <$0.25 prices.

As you can see, as a website property, you fall into either of two categories:

Horizontal sites used daily which command low CPMs with huge pageviews

Vertical sites that capture user intent – often used intermittently (with lots of traffic from search) with high CPMs and low pageviews

Horizontal sites, when scaled up to a large enough site, can employ direct ad sales teams that raise the CPM by a significant amount, but the entire process is demand-constrained.

Google is lucky to be both horizontal and vertical – it’s used everyday by people, but also captures user intent.

As stated before, social networks monetize poorly

Of course, sites with lots of pageviews are often ones that are general, are sticky, and have lots of context-less social content. I’ve written up a broader discussion of social network monetization at “5 things that make your social network monetize like crap.”

Back to small sites versus large sites

Now, the Techcrunch article discusses the idea that small sites monetize better than large ones. I think that’s actually a correlation rather than a causation. There are a ton of small sites out there, and much of their traffic comes from Google. It’s much harder to build a functioning social site where people coming back daily than a site where people occassionally stumble on it through their search engine.

As a result, my guess is that the mindset of the typical user includes intent – and that makes all the difference. ( Source: andrewchenblog.com)