Advertisement prices and tips

Theoretically you can sell duration, impressions and clicks. Practically you will offer only duration.

Invision Community counts page loads with the ad instead of real impressions of the ad. If you place your ad into location Just above the page footer, IPS count the impressions even if the user does not scroll down. So every time the page is rendered, one impression is recorded. Normally ad networks count only impressions for the ads visible on the user screen device. Nobody would like to pay for something that is loaded in background but never seen by the user. If you would like to sell impressions, you must use Google AdManager or another ad server platform.

Selling clicks does not let you predict running time for the ads. It depends on the banner message, design, ad location, etc. whether the user will click on it. Remember, there is no click fraud protection in IPS.

The only sane option is to sell duration. Define start and end date. Deliver stats of impressions and clicks for the ad after the campaign has finished, only if you understand how impressions and clicks are counted. 

Direct advertisers would like to know some metrics from your community like:

• monthly impressions
• monthly unique users
• geographical location of your audience
• average age and gender (male / female) of your users
• traffic sources

These stats are not available in IPS itself. To get the metrics I strongly recommend to use web analytics platform like Google Analytics. You can even give your advertisers guest access to your Analytics account so they can pick the stats they need themselves. 

Unfortunately, there is no default answer to this question. The prices depend on what your community about, user activity, guests numbers, geography, audience, etc.  There are two strategies you can run to answer this question individually.

1. Let advertisers decide what they are ready to pay. Create a page (if you use Pages) or topic (if you use Forums) and describe what ad locations for what duration you offer. The advertisers can contact you by email and suggest a price depending on their budget.

2. Find out what you earn in each location with AdSense. Integrate AdSense ads and gather stats on every individual ad location. Double your AdSense earnings and set them as a price for direct advertisers. 

There is a 3rd-party application called AdBlock Blocker. This app detects some browser plugins like AdBlock Plus, AdGuard, uBlock, Ghostery that block your community ads. It depends on your audience of how extensively they use AdBlock plugins. The best way to figure it out is to install the app and compare your earnings.  

The author of the application promises: 

Quote

This plugin is tested by many customers and assured to improve your ads income.

It displays a message that disable all website features until user disables his AdBlocker. Because of different settings in the app, you can set up the message less aggressively. E.g. allow to dismiss the message, remember the selection, totally hide the content of the website, adjust the message size, place it in header or footer area and so on. The price of the app is pretty fair and you as of today there is no renewal fees. Buy once, use forever.

They produce a lot of impressions and are a kind of "blind". They do not click. They worsen your CTR (click through rate) and are often annoyed. Displaying ads to them can have a negative impact on their community engagement.

Identify your power users and automatically promote them to the Power User group using promoting members feature of IPS. E. g. your promotion rule can have following criteria:

• members with last visit in the last 30 days
• over 100 content items
• over 10 reputation points
• last posted within last 7 days
• joined over 60 days ago

If all of them are true, move the member to Power User group and excluded it from in the ad settings.

As side effect, it can even increase engagement in your community if you make this promotion public and promise ad-free experience for those who push your community.