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Treat your News Site like your House… and Protect your Investment

Newspapers must move beyond offering just standard inventory for online advertising opportunities, advises Zephrin Lasker, CEO and co-founder of Pontiflex, the cost-per-lead advertising marketplace. Instead, newspapers should treat their Websites and other digital offerings as if they were homes for sale, with “curb appeal” and interior amenities that sell the space.

There are certain features that most houses have in common. You can expect, for example, a kitchen, a bathroom, a bedroom or bedrooms and a living room. Some houses have bigger rooms, or are laid out differently, but for the most part, they’re standard elements. When you sell your house, especially in a tight market, there are certain things you’ll want to make sure stand out from your neighbor. You won’t receive a higher offer for simply having a kitchen. You’re supposed to have one. But, as anyone who watches HGTV knows, there are a ton of opportunities to increase the value of your home – in places that make total sense, but might not be currently on your radar.

The same thing goes for revenue opportunities on your news site. The obvious areas (leaderboards and skyscrapers) are only going to get you so far. These might be packaged as run of site, interstitial overlays, or homepage takeovers, or they might be plainly offered by size: 728×90, 300×250, 120×600. Either way, like a kitchen, this real estate on your site is standard. To increase revenue, you need to offer more than just the standard inventory. So, how do you make sure that when you sell either a house, or advertising space, you’re not leaving any money on the table?

Curb appeal matters. This is what people first see when they arrive. You need to make sure your driveway is nicely paved, that you have grass (instead of dry brown patches), that your front door is freshly painted. If you can add landscaping, do it. If you can replace your creaky garage door with a new one, do that too. In other words, show people right away that your house is a good investment.

Likewise, when you’re selling advertising on your website, you’ll want to make sure that marketers know that right from the start, there are opportunities to engage with the audience that comes to your site. This doesn’t mean how many unique impressions they’re going to get by doing a homepage takeover. This means offering advertisers the ability to connect with real users in unique ways that will stand out immediately. For example, the first thing that many engaged people do on news and content sites is sign in. It’s an active process that requires an actual person entering in a username and password. Are you currently running ads or offers during the sign in or sign up process?

You’ll also want to pay attention to the details that really make a house a home to people – the features that they interact with the most. Does your house have a space where people can entertain, spend time with family, have important conversations? This can have less to do with the architecture of the house and more to do with what you’ve done to make the most of it. Your kitchen might not be that unique, but have you designated an area where a family can eat together? This might be a breakfast bar with stools, or a built-in banquette (real estate nerds, that one was for you). Did you think about your yard? You might have the same acreage as the house next door, but do you have a patio, or an outdoor kitchen set up, that makes it easy for people to imagine their friends and family hanging out?

Now think back to your site. There are certainly areas where people are interacting with your content that provide more value to your advertisers. Take the comments section. It’s a place where readers react to articles, share opinions, dialogue with each other, and, sometimes, provoke each other. Are you making the most of that section? Why not provide pertinent ads to people in one of, if not the most, interactive parts of your site?

The same goes for “send to a friend.” When someone likes your content enough to pass it along, it’s not only a huge compliment, it’s an untapped monetization source. Are you taking advantage of the fact that users are distributing your content to their friends and families? This is the area on your site where people are sharing important or interesting information with their contacts. By serving contextually relevant ads here, you’re giving your advertisers a differentiated way of connecting with users, and creating a valuable revenue opportunity for yourself.

Real estate and news site ad sales, while seemingly different, are both extremely competitive. There is enough standardization in both industries to require innovation. You wouldn’t portray your house to prospective buyers as “four walls and a couple of rooms,” and you shouldn’t sell advertising on your site as “an HTML page with a couple of banners.” You optimize your house to make sure that it’s much more than a box with walls. Do the same with your inventory. Don’t commoditize your website. It’s not just a house, it’s a home.