Why Advertise on the Irish Dancing Exchange?
If you’re selling dresses, shoes, wigs or any other type of merchandise or service specific to Irish step dancing, you’ve come to the right place. Due to the nature of the service our site provides, virtually every visitor is a potential customer for you. But you don’t have to take our word for it—weekly status updates are provided to our advertisers via e-mail at no additional cost, so you can see exactly how your ads are performing. And because we offer “click-through” pricing (see below), you pay only for those times when your ad actually works.
If you’re interested in placing an ad with us, contact our advertising department directly at ads@irishdancingexchange.com, or read on to see how you can get started immediately.
Banner Size and Format:
- We support two standard banner sizes—120 pixels wide by 60 pixels high, and 468 pixels wide by 60 pixels high.
- Banners should be no larger than 20K in size, in order that they do not affect the speed at which our site’s pages load.
- Banners may be supplied to us as JPEG or GIF files, or as Shockwave/Flash files (.swf). Animated GIFs are OK, as long as they meet the 20K size requirement. We can also create a banner for you if necessary.
Sample Banners
Here are examples of the two supported banner sizes to use as a guide:
Advertising Rates
Banner ads are billed based on the number of “click-throughs,” or times that a visitor actually clicks on your banner and is directed to your Web site. Unlike time-based billing, which typically involves a pre-determined charge for a week, month or year, our system enables you to pay only for those instances when a visitor actually reaches your site based on seeing your ad. This seems to us to be the fairest way to charge, and makes advertising with us an extremely low-risk proposition.
Our click-through charge is only $0.20 per for large banners (468x60) and $0.10 for the smaller format (120x60), and our minimum payment is just $20. Using this minimum payment as an example, your 120x60 banner would be continually displayed until 200 visitors clicked on it. Once your payment balance reaches $0.00, you’ll be notified regarding whether you wish to end the campaign, or continue by providing another payment. If you would still prefer a time-based advertising option, let us know and we’ll work out an appropriate fee based on your requirements.
Note: Rates effective as of 1/15/06. Rates are subject to change without notice; however, once a campaign is started, your rate is locked in until your payment balance is exhausted.
Getting Started
Ready to begin advertising with us? To get started, just send an email to ads@irishdancingexchange.com containing the URL (website address) to which the banner should link, some brief descriptive text for the banner, your contact info (including your email address), and the actual banner ad—in GIF, JPEG or Flash format—attached to your message.
Once we receive your banner ad info, we’ll contact you to arrange payment, and we’ll place your ad in the rotation appropriate to the banner’s size (both rotations appear at the very top of each page on our site). You’ll receive weekly notifications via email on the status of your banner(s), including total impressions, number of actual click-throughs and your ad’s click-through percentage.
Q. What exactly do you mean by “rotation”?
A. Well, in our case we only have two spaces for ads, so ordinarily that would limit us to a total of two ads, which is less than ideal for all concerned. So we simply set up a rotation, which allows for an unlimited number of banners to appear in the same place on our site in a random fashion. Each time a particular page is visited, a banner is chosen at random to be displayed. This has the added advantage of attracting greater attention to the banners themselves, in that the ad display is constantly changing.
Q. How do I know your click-through figures are accurate? Is there a way I can keep track of that myself?
A. Sure is. When you send us the link for your ad, add a referral identifier to the end of the URL. For example, if your site address is:
http://irishwigswarehouse.com/
just add “/?ref=IDX” to the end of the address, like so:
http://irishwigswarehouse.com/?ref=IDX
Then your own site stats will be able to show the number of visitors that come from our site, simply by tracking all the visits in which “IDX” appears in the logs.
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