Having a real estate website allows you the opportunity to sell adverting space on your website. When you decide to host 3rd party advertisements your site you are making a big decision. It will take up more space on your website, alter the look of your site, and take eyeballs off of your site and put them on somebody else’s. So the decision to sell advertising space on your real estate website is no small one.

If you are thinking about opening you website up to accept advertisers you need to know a few rules of the game.

1) you need to decide how you are going to price your ads.

You need to know if you are going to sell ad space to affiliates and earn a per sale commission, if you are going to charge per click, or if you are going to charge per impression.

2) Are you going to sell the ads yourself or use a broker to sell adspace on your site.

If you chose to sell the advertising space yourself you will keep 100 percent of the profits but you’ll also have to put the work in to sell the ad space. So if you have 10 advertising spots available on your site (called your ad inventory), it’s your responsibility to sell those spots. Considering most of the people who visit your site are there looking for real estate and not to buy advertising space, this may be a difficult job. If you were to sell your advertising positions yourself you would need to work on some type of an ad campaign to make people aware about your real estate website advertising options. However, if you don’t’ mind putting in the work, this is the better and more profitable method for selling ads.

Your other option is to use an ad broker such as link Adage or Google Ad sense. These companies will place advertising on your website in return for a split in ad revenues. So if an advertiser is willing to pay $1 per click, you may only receive 50 cents of that. So while you may not make as much money, you also don’t have to do as much work to find advertisers.

Our real estate websites allow for a seamless integration of advertisements into your site, whether you choose to use a third party such a Google or sell advertising yourself. Click here to see how you can integrate advertisements into your real estate website.

3) How much to charge for your real estate website advertising space

if you’re going to be selling ad space yourself you will need establish a “rates card” which informs possible advertisers what your ad inventory prices are. There are no set rules at what price to sell your ad space at because many factors such as relevancy, niche, supply, ad placement, ad type and ad design all alter how much you can charge. Likewise if you charge PPC (Pay Per Cick) you can charge more per click than you could charge for an “Impression” through the CPM (Cost Per Impression) method. The main difference between the two is.

CPC – The advertiser only pays you when someone clicks on their ad. This means you will require some type of ad acticity tool which monitors their ad performance.

CPM – the Cost Per (1000) Impressions method means that you will charge the advertiser a small amount every time someone visits the page their ad is located on. For example, if you are charging $20 / CPM, your advertiser will pay you $20 everytime you website gets 2000 impressions. If your website gets 4000 impressions in any given month, you advertiser will owe you $40, if you show their ad 10,000 times, your advertiser will owe you $200. So the next question is, what will you CPM charge be? There is no set rule, some websites charge, $2, some charge $100. It really depends on the quality of the site, the ad placement, relevancy etc. A reputable company known as AdKnowlege recently published that the average CPM is $30, but this statistic was based off rates sheets and didn’t take into consideration negotiations. When most people buy advertising space on sites, they negotiate either a little more of an offering or a little less of a price. So to answer this question the best that can be offered in a range. We would say you should expect to pay between $10 CPM and $60 CPM for ad space on related sites.

So before you sell advertising space on your real estate website, make sure you do your research first and decide which method of selling works best for your time limitations and your financial expectations.

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