Home topics small-business-resources growing Growing Marketing Growing The Cost of Online Advertising Andrew Lockwood June 20, 2010 Advertising pricing is where online advertising really gets interesting. There are three distinct categories of online advertising: Search and directories … such as PPC (Pay Per Click) key word buys on Google Display advertising (our company specialty) … such as banner and video ads Classified advertising … such as real estate sites Pricing models vary but the most common are: Search such as Google’s auction which determines a pay per click rate based on how popular or generic a search term is – with something like “home loans” being very popular and therefore expensive. With this rate you need to monitor very closely whether you are paying too much for the position you have been given or whether or not you are paying too little and your placement is so low you are not getting many clicks. Keyword rates vary from $0.10 c to as high as $7-8 for some keywords ! Display advertising charges mostly on a cost per thousand basis (CPM ) … per thousand page impressions that is. The cost to advertise on a site or group of sites is largely determined by the following factors: The number of page impressions ( or traffic) a site or group of sites achieve on average in a month or a week, for example. The number of Unique Browsers (approximate visitors) per month The category the site falls into – eg Travel, Finance