1. Hello Guest!

    Thank you for visiting the ClubRunner Community website, you can login using your ClubRunner account information by clicking the login link on the top of every page.
    Dismiss Notice

Club Website Advertising Costing Methods

Discussion in 'General' started by John Borst on Mar 21, 2019.

  1. John Borst

    By:John BorstMar 21, 2019
    Well-Known Community Member
    Beta Tester

    Joined:
    Jun 25, 2018
    Messages:
    215
    Likes Received:
    52
    Gender:
    Male
    Occupation:
    Retired Education Administration and Teacher
    Location:
    Education - retired
    I am going to pose this topic as a short survey:

    Does your club use advertising to offset the cost of ClubRunner? YES ___ NO___

    What method of cost does your club use?
    a) flat rate per month
    b) flat rate per year
    c) a pay-per-click rate (PPC)
    If a flat rate per month please indicate the range:
    a) $10.00/mo. or less
    b) over $10.00/mo. but less than $50.00/mo.
    c) $50.00/mo. or greater
    If a flat rate per year please indicate the range:
    a) $100/yr. or less
    b) $ over $100.00/yr but less than $300.00/yr.
    c) $300.00/yr. or greater​
    If a PPC rate please indicate the range:
    a) $1.00/click or less
    b) over $1.00/click but less than $3.00/click
    c) $3.00/click or greater
    Please share any other information pertinent to this issue.


     
  2. John Borst

    By:John BorstMar 21, 2019
    Well-Known Community Member
    Beta Tester

    Joined:
    Jun 25, 2018
    Messages:
    215
    Likes Received:
    52
    Gender:
    Male
    Occupation:
    Retired Education Administration and Teacher
    Location:
    Education - retired
    Now I am going to answer my own questions as an example.
    Yes, we have ads. We use a flat rate per year method. The cost is a flat $100.00/yr. for an ad 100 pixels in height and goes up in increments of $10,00 for each group of 10 pixels.
    We only bill once per year, at the end of October. It is done by the treasurer. If a person takes an ad mid-year the cost is pro-rated at $10.00/mo. unless at a dividable point such as 3 month, 6 month or 9-month points. The selling of ads is done by the secretary and the web editor. In most cases, the web-editor designs the ad at no cost.
     
  3. Zach

    By:ZachApr 15, 2019
    Moderator
    ClubRunner Team

    Joined:
    Jun 5, 2017
    Messages:
    592
    Likes Received:
    80
    Gender:
    Male
    Occupation:
    Product Specialist
    Location:
    ClubRunner
    Hi John,

    Great questions, I hope others will share as they have time. One thing I've always encouraged clubs to focus on is that the person who getting the ad space is "sponsoring" the club, and not buying just adspace. Adspace and ads on websites are a whole different kettle of fish.

    Reframing the idea of the ads as a sponsorship to the businesses, at least in my opinion, is a much more straight forward discussions. In part of the organization sponsoring the club, the club makes sure that the public knows who sponsors the club by showing a block on their website/bulletins as they go out!

    I hope that helps.
     
    Les Walsh likes this.
  4. John Borst

    By:John BorstApr 15, 2019
    Well-Known Community Member
    Beta Tester

    Joined:
    Jun 25, 2018
    Messages:
    215
    Likes Received:
    52
    Gender:
    Male
    Occupation:
    Retired Education Administration and Teacher
    Location:
    Education - retired
    Zach, although we have not framed the question as "sponsoring" the club, the majority of our advertisers are club members. A few are not, however. We also try not to have competing ads. The ads are very good value. The price is low, to begin with. The real value is in the Click-through rate. Given the number of impressions, the number of Click-throughs is out of proportion to the norm. For example, a car dealership is getting a real bargain. I can hardly believe it myself but my calculations show they are getting 1 click-through for every 22 impressions. I have historical data for Statcounter. It has been installed since 2010 and we have just passed 61,000 pageviews which I equate with impressions. Those include impressions caused by me and google bots so it is by now quite inflated. Google Analytics does not count me or the bots because I turned them off. Wordstream reports that "The average cost per click in AdWords across all industries is $2.69 (USD) for search and $0.63 (USD) for display." So we are talking over $3.00 and about $1.00 Canadian. See https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2016/02/29/google-adwords-industry-benchmarks
     
  5. John Borst

    By:John BorstApr 20, 2019
    Well-Known Community Member
    Beta Tester

    Joined:
    Jun 25, 2018
    Messages:
    215
    Likes Received:
    52
    Gender:
    Male
    Occupation:
    Retired Education Administration and Teacher
    Location:
    Education - retired
    I have been thinking about your distinction between sponsor and client. If I compare two Rotarians: one is a dentist and he has an ad on the site. It has no link. I would consider him a sponsor. The other is the manager of a GM Dealership. He gets over 400 click-throughs a year and still pays the same price as the dentist. If even one of those click-throughs cause just one sale he has made the cost of the ad back and more. So I consider that a business arrangement.

    On the other hand while I was doing a search I think on backlinks I found this at a Construction site. Dryden Blooms is one of our fundraising activities
    exercises where we sell flower hangers on behalf of the City and get a handsome commission for doing so. I wish I had more like this especially if they have a link in them.

    Blair construction backlink eg. 800px.jpg

    Before I found the above I had actually made a badge for sponsors websites. It looks like this:

    Badge revised v-1.png

    I haven't convinced anyone to do it yet but I want to see where it leads.

    Regarding bulletins. I haven't got our Newsletter editor to use the ClubRunner bulletin yet. He has tried it out and leaves a mess behind. He doesn't want any instruction but he does a really good job with Word and making a PDF to distribute. He has put out over 900 issues. I can't argue with that.
     
    Zach likes this.
  6. Zach

    By:ZachApr 24, 2019
    Moderator
    ClubRunner Team

    Joined:
    Jun 5, 2017
    Messages:
    592
    Likes Received:
    80
    Gender:
    Male
    Occupation:
    Product Specialist
    Location:
    ClubRunner
    The biggest reason I focus on the "sponsoring" the clubs line of thought is to help avoid some of the questions that you are able to answer, but I suspect most clubs would not or could not answer directly. At the end of the day, I also feel like the businesses have a better idea of the "true value" for what they're doing for the club!
     
  7. Jim Goit

    By:Jim GoitApr 29, 2019
    Active Community Member
    Beta Tester

    Joined:
    Jul 7, 2017
    Messages:
    51
    Likes Received:
    38
    Gender:
    Male
    Occupation:
    Retired
    Location:
    Education Development
    This is the 13th year that the Rotary Club of Truro has been running website sponsorship ads. We charge $125/year for an ad that is up to 140 pixels tall and $150/year for an ad that is between 140 to 300 pixels high. They appear on every page (rotating randomly on the front page) and are included with our emailed bulletins. All have links to websites.

    We invoice once a year. The webmaster generates the invoices and the treasurer sends them out in April for a May start date for the year. We'll prorate on a monthly basis for ads that begin during the year. We have about a dozen consistent ads running. A few have dropped off and we add new ones. The business provides the ad image and we change them on request.

    Generally the sponsors are club members. There is a steady click thru to the websites but it not something we emphasize or that they seem to worry much about about. It just shows they support the work of the club. The funds generated offset the expenditure on technology for the club and that's how we started and continue to position it. Works for us.
     
    Zach likes this.
  8. Carl Dierschow

    By:Carl DierschowAug 30, 2019
    Community Member

    Joined:
    Oct 26, 2017
    Messages:
    12
    Likes Received:
    3
    Location:
    Consulting - Small Business
    Yes, we completely offset the cost of ClubRunner (and Meetup) through our website ads. All our advertisers (90% are club members) opted for the more expensive ad, which is US$150 per year. I provide a monthly report to show them their clickthroughs and the overall website traffic, but I don't know if they're basing any decisions on that. We limit it to 10 advertisers and have been maxed out for the last year. The ad rates were picked: (1) based on your advice and a few other Rotary sites; (2) so we could cover the costs of the website with 10 advertisers. Our club is now looking at a significantly more expensive "yearly sponsorship" option for the club as a whole, but it's not fully defined yet.
     
  9. Mickey

    By:MickeyAug 30, 2019
    Moderator
    ClubRunner Team

    Joined:
    Jun 10, 2017
    Messages:
    219
    Likes Received:
    43
    This is just fantastic to hear, I'm very glad you have leveraged your website so that it can pay for itself. You certainly make a great example to our other clubs, and I hope you don't mind if we direct some of our users to this message thread so they can also read about your successes.

    Thank you for posting!
     
Top