Choosing an advertising partner

The largest challenge involved when choosing a site to advertise on is distinguishing between the truth and sales talk. Many sites will provide you with the hits their site receives as if it is unique visitors. It is important that you ensure they give you the amount of unique visitors they receive. Hits is the highest possible amount that the log stats will display. It is the figure of all the files and images loaded for every page opened and can be at least 10 times more than the unique visitors the site actually receive.

Making use of Alexa is also dangerous as it primarily indicates the amount of visitors with the Alexa toolbar installed visiting the web site. In my experience the more webmasters visiting the site the better the chance that the stats might be skewed as many of them have the Alexa toolbar installed in their browser. Another important thing to remember is that there are free tools available to improve your Alexa ranking without providing real traffic.

Besides obtaining traffic stats for the site you want to advertise on you will also need to profile your prospective customer (demographics), in order to ensure that you advertise on a site that mainly attracts visitors that you target. Therefore you need to find out about the following.

Geographic location

Income group

Age groups

Interests and hobbies



There are many other factors that can be supplied by the site that you wish to advertise on. Make sure you profile your customer properly in order to know who you need to attract and where you should advertise.