A Media Kit Page for Advertisers

Every sale starts with an email

A local business wants to advertise on a community website. It looks for a page explaining what is on offer, finds nothing, and sends an email asking what an ad costs.

The publisher writes back from scratch: what the site covers, who reads it, which spots exist, what they cost. The advertiser replies with questions about sizes and dates, and three more emails follow.

Some advertisers give up partway. Others never write at all, because a site with no advertising page looks as though it does not sell any.

A plain page answering the usual questions once, for everyone, fixes most of this.

What advertisers need to know

• Who reads it, described honestly, with the source of every figure.
• What is for sale: each placement, with a picture of it.
• Sizes and formats for the artwork.
• Prices, and what each one includes.
• Deadlines for booking and for artwork.
• Terms: payment, cancellation and what you will not run.

The first is the one publishers most often get wrong, usually by trying too hard. An inflated description sells one campaign and loses the renewal.

Describing readers honestly

Say who reads the site in plain words: where they live, what brings them, when they visit, and whether they read on phones or computers.

Give figures from Analytics and from your email list, rounded down, with the month they cover. Visitors and page views are different numbers, so say which is which.

Clean the figures first. This year's surge of referral spam, including visits that never touch the site at all, inflates the counts of many small sites.

Keep social followers on a separate line rather than adding everything into one large reach figure. Advertisers who have bought ads before know what that total hides.

Placements, with pictures

List each thing you sell: a banner on every page, a spot in one section, a mention in the email, a sponsored post. Give each a screenshot showing where it sits on a computer and on a phone.

Say how long each runs, whether it rotates with other advertisers, and whether it appears on phones at all, since some layouts drop sidebar ads on small screens.

A picture settles questions that a paragraph of description would only start.

Sizes, files and artwork

Give sizes in pixels. The common ones are 300 by 250, 728 by 90, and 320 by 50 for phones.

Add the file types you accept, usually JPEG, PNG or GIF, and the largest file size. Flash banners do not play on phones, and a print PDF from the advertiser's designer will not work as a banner.

If you can make artwork for advertisers who have none, say so and give the price. Many small advertisers have a logo and nothing else.

Prices and what they include

Publish prices, or at least starting prices. An advertiser who sees a price can decide before writing, and every quote you give stays consistent with the last one.

Say exactly what the price buys: how many weeks, which pages, how many emails. List any discount for longer bookings and any rate for charities.

A worked example

A website and weekly email listing classes, camps and family events in a mid-sized BC city is run by two parents from home. It pays its way with ads sold directly to local businesses.

For years every sale began with an email asking what an ad cost. Each reply was written from scratch, and the price quoted depended on which of the two answered.

Artwork arrived in the wrong sizes. A swim school sent a print-ready PDF meant for a magazine, and a day camp tried to book the spring camp guide a week after it had gone out.

The fix was one page, linked from the footer of the site and of every email.

It describes the readers in plain words, mostly parents of children under twelve in the city and its suburbs, with rounded monthly figures and their dates.

Each placement has a screenshot, its size, its price and its booking deadline. A two-page PDF of the same information sits at the bottom for advertisers who need to show someone else.

The emails did not stop. They changed: most now arrive naming a placement and a date.

Deadlines and the year's calendar

Give the booking deadline and the artwork deadline for each placement, and say what happens if artwork is late.

Seasonal features need their own dates. A guide to fall programs or a holiday gift list should be on the page months ahead, since that is when advertisers plan.

Late July is when fall advertisers start asking. A page that already answers them is worth more this week than in October.

Terms in plain words

Say when payment is due, whether ads run before payment, and how cancellation works.

Say what you will not run. A family site may refuse whole categories of advertiser, and writing that down saves an awkward conversation later.

Say how paid content is labelled. Posts marked as sponsored keep readers' trust, and their links should carry a nofollow attribute, as Google asks for links that were paid for.

The page and the PDF

Write the page as an ordinary web page, so it can be found, read on a phone and updated in minutes. Link it as Advertise in the site's footer and in every email.

Offer the PDF as well. The person reading your page is often not the one who approves the spend, and a dated one or two page summary is easy to forward.

Date both, and update them each season, so nobody books from last year's prices.

The counter-case

A site with two long-standing advertisers who renew by phone each year gains less from a public page.

Large sponsorships are usually negotiated one at a time, and a published price can box you in. Starting prices, with a line inviting larger proposals, cover that.

A site that sells only through an ad network has nothing to list, though even then a line for direct enquiries costs nothing.

For any site that sells its own ads, put the answers on one plain page before the next email asks.

Before fall bookings

1. Write down every placement you sell.
2. Take a screenshot of each, on computer and phone.
3. Clean your Analytics figures of referral spam.
4. Describe your readers plainly, with dated figures.
5. Publish prices or starting prices.
6. Add deadlines and terms.
7. Link the page from the footer and your emails.

Step three comes before any figure is published. A number inflated by spam visits is the kind of claim an advertiser checks once and remembers.

Publishing each article as its own page, with room for an ad beside it, is covered in a print magazine's flipbook edition.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.