Both Advertisers and Website Publishers are interested in what ads perform best. While this changes over time, here is a snapshot of what is currently the best performers. We recommend that both advertisers and publishers read over this information and use it to their advantage to increase the performance of their ads and ad spots.

Size Matters

The best performing ad size is the Leaderboard (728 x 90). Coming in a close second is the Medium Rectangle (300 x 250). Both advertisers and publishers should see good performance from these banner ad sizes.

Location Matters

Where a banner ad is placed is perhaps the most important factor for maximizing the rate that visitors click on it. The best performing ad zones are placed at the top of the page. Following the top of the page is placement close to prominent content, such embedded within the text of an article. Placing ads in sidebars or away from prominent content has only mediocre performance. Finally, ads placed at the bottom of pages is the worst performing spot – we don’t recommend placing ads at the bottom of your pages.

Advertisers: Use Low Inventory Banner Ad Sizes

The most popular ad size in use by publishers is the Leaderboard (728 x 90). On the other side of the spectrum is the Rectangle (180 x 150). Create a Rectangle ad and you’ll be greatly increasing your exposure since there is currently a very low inventory of this banner ad size.

Advertisers: Support All Banner Ad Sizes

There is no penalty for submitting multiple banner ads for a specific campaign. We recommend that advertisers submit one banner ad of every size for each ad campaign. This will ensure that your ad campaign is considered for display in every ad spot across our network. If you only submit a single banner ad for your ad campaign, your ad campaign will not be considered for display for any ad zone that is not of that size! You’re losing out on impressions in this case.

Website publishers: your earnings will now appear in the Funds section. Click on the Funds tab to view your earnings. Earnings are updated once per day. Any earnings that available for withdrawl (any earnings over $25 after each calendar) will be shown as part of your “account balance” which can be withdrawn at your request.

Advertisers: your remaining account balance will now appear in the Funds section. Click on the Funds tab to view your current account balance. Your account balance and charges for clicked banner ads are updated once per day.

If you have clicked banner ads for a day, you will see a charge listed once per day shown as a payment transaction deducting money from your account balance.

There was a short outage tonight from about 9:30 pm – 9:40 pm CST. As soon as we were notified by our monitoring system within minutes of the outage we resolved the issue with one of our servers and were down for no more than 10 minutes. We apologize if this short outage caused any issues.

Are you a company trying to reach out to faithful Catholics? If so, our online advertising network will get your message to your target audience.

We are now accepting banner ads to run across the Catholic websites who are members of our Catholic ad network.

Best of all it is super easy - you can submit your banner ads using our website. The payment process is convenient. We use PayPal. The approval process is quick and once approved, your ads start running across all the websites in our ad network within minutes. It’s all automated to ensure the process is efficient.

We offer reporting on your banner ad performance that is updated every hour. You’ll be able to see the number of banner ad impressions, clicks, your average cost-per-click, and more.

Introductory Pricing

We are offering special introductory pricing for all ad campaigns created before the end of April 2010.

Concerned about spending too much? Our pricing model is a “pay-per-click” model where you pay only when your banner ad is clicked on. We have 3 tiers of prices and our introductory rates range from 24 cents per click to 30 cents per click. The difference in price determines the frequency your banner ad will be considered for display in any one ad spot on a website.

You control your budget! You select a daily maximum number of clicks. Once your ad campaign hits this number of clicks, your ad campaign will automatically stop running for the day. This lets you set a maximum budget you want to spend each day.

Your price is locked in for the life of your ad campaign. If prices go up while your campaign is active, don’t worry, you pay the same per-click price you specified when you created your ad campaign.

What Happens After the Introductory Pricing Expires?

After April 2010 our pricing will change to automatically adjust based on demand. When demand goes up, our prices will rise. When demand falls, our prices will be reduced. This automated price adjustment based on demand allows us to price our advertising at fair market prices.

Your ad campaign prices are always locked in! This rising and falling in price only affects new ad campaigns. Once you create an ad campaign, the price you choose is the maximum price you will ever pay for the life of the ad campaign. If our prices fall below your ad campaign’s price, you will pay the lowest price.

Questions?

If you have any questions, simply contact us.

We recently launched the ability for website publishers to view the performance of the ads running on their websites. When viewing the list of your websites you will notice a new link named Stats. Click this link to view advertising performance metrics about each of the Ad Zones on your website.

Even though the advertising statistics feature was just recently released, the statistics data goes back to the date your Ad Zones were created. Statistics for the current day are updated hourly.

Please note that these statistics do not include any free charity ads that have run on your site. Since we are just beginning to sign up paying advertisers, your site will show zero views for each day that statistics are available for. Once paid ads begin running (see below for more information), you will see numbers going up.

This roll out of advertising statistics also paves the way for us to allow advertisers to submit their paid ad campaigns. The ability to report on ad performance was the last major feature to implement before accepting paid banner ads from advertisers.

We are hoping to begin accepting submissions from advertisers the week of March 29, 2010. It has taken us a little longer than desired to get to this point, but we’re very happy to be at this point and excited for the future of our Catholic advertising network.

A big thanks goes out to all of you who have been patient and supportive of this effort so far. We’re almost there!

Starting today we are opening our doors to Catholic website publishers. Join us in creating an outstanding, faithful online advertising network!

Paid Catholic ads won’t start running until April 5th, but in the meantime you will be able to run non-paid ads for promoting faithful Catholic organizations and the ad network.

We are limiting the number of Catholic websites that are allowed to sign up, so don’t delay signing up if you are interested!

Have questions? Contact us!

Starting this Friday website publishers will be able to sign up to run Catholic ads on their websites from Catholic Media Group’s online advertising network!

Many of you have been waiting for this for months, so thank you for your patience as we built up the best behind-the-scenes systems we could and reached out to as many Catholic advertisers and Catholic website publishers as possible.

We will send out an email to all website publishers who are on our email notification list on Friday with more specific details.

Software development and testing is coming along nicely for our first round of features for our Catholic Online Advertising Network. We are targeting February 2010 for our initial launch. Contact us if you are interested in joining as a charter website publisher or charter advertiser. We have special deals for each that we’ll let you know about if you get in touch.

What Type of Advertising Can I Expect?

With our first release we will be focusing on Exclusive Ads. Exclusive Ads are where a website publisher sells all impressions for a specific ad spot to an advertiser for one month for a flat fee. The ad runs continuously for one month. The website publisher earns a flat fee per month for each ad spot an advertiser purchases.

What’s in it for Website Publishers?

The first release, tentatively scheduled for February 2010, will feature the ability for you to sell these Exclusive Ad spots on your website to advertisers. And you have complete control over the size of the ads, the positioning on your website of each ad, and even the amount you want to earn for the ad to run on your website. After all, we’re just the ad network. We aren’t trying to control your website. You know better than us how to position ad positions within your content to produce great results (if not, we’re working on some great material to help you learn).

Each publisher that runs Exclusive Ads through our network will be listed in our Website Directory for potential advertisers to review. Instead of you trying to seek out advertisers, your site will be in front of advertisers looking to promote their company, product, service, or mission on a Catholic-focused website.

What’s in it for Advertisers?

Advertisers can target the specific website and ad spot they want. For our Exclusive Ad option you purchase one month of ad space for a flat fee. There is no variable cost such as charges per click or per thousand impressions to worry about blowing your budget. Instead, you get a month of impressions for one rate.

Can You Help Me With…?

We’re also planning the following services to assist our website publishers and advertisers.

Services for Advertisers

• Custom Advertising Plan for Advertisers – you want to advertiser to faithful Catholics on the websites in our network but don’t have the time to sift through all the options to decide which site and ad spot fits your target? No problem! Describe to us the goals of your marketing campaign and we will do the research for you and map out a few different options for you.
• Custom Ad Creative for Advertisers – if you are placing an ad online you will need the creative to go with it (the ad image, Flash movie, or video). We will help you create custom ad creative for your online campaign.
• Custom Landing Pages for Advertisers - if you want a targeted message for the service or product you are marketing, then a custom landing page is what you want. We will create and host custom landing pages for your marketing campaigns.

Services for Website Publishers

• Ad Placement Advice – we will assist you with choosing the correct type and placement for your ads to maximize your revenue. We use our existing data on advertising metrics to determine what types of ads and placement of ads produce the best results for our website publishers.
• Exclusive Ad Pricing Advice – based on our existing ad network data on the best performing price targets we will assist you with choosing how to price your ads to create the most demand for a site with your target audience, number of visitors and subject matter.

How Can I Help?

The best way is to spread the word about our Online Advertising Network for Catholics. Talk with website publishers and advertisers who may be interested. Tell them about our website and our blog. Follow us on Twitter. Email us. Interact with us. We’ll talk back.

After all, behind all these machines are real, live humans bringing Christ’s light to the world one person at a time.