Advertising on the Web - Part 6 - Do The Deals
A typical way to negotiate for Web advertising (once you know what you want) is to pick a price and stick to it. And remember, while sales reps are there to help you, they're also there to fill up all the unsold areas of their site with advertising at the best price they can get; don't let them steer you into something you feel strongly won't work.
If you're dealing with multiple sites in similar content categories, feel free to set a goal for them to meet, and let each of them know what the other's offering you. If news site A is twice as expensive as news site B, let A know that you're leaning towards B because of price.
There's one last thing that most people don't devote enough time to: the creative part of advertising. Tiny percentage variations in clickthrough can make an enormous difference in the efficiency of your buy. Make sure to spend a lot of time on the ads you're fielding, and ask the sites you're buying on to do a pre-flight test to find out which ones perform best from the outset. Also, check your statistics regularly and rotate fresh advertisements into your mix. You'll be happy you did.
And remember: Web advertising is far less of a science than most of what you'll read about in Webmonkey, and a few basic concepts will take you a long way.
