How Advertising Works

All ads at BellaOnline are done on a CPM basis - Cost Per Thousand. You can choose up to 6 topic areas on which to run your ads. Most advertisers are best targetted to 1-2 topic areas as their primary audience. By giving you an additional four to work with as well, it lets you play with different ads in different areas to see how well they perform. Our traffic is so high at BellaOnline that a given ad campaign normally lasts 2-3 weeks. Because of this we don't have the system set up to handle randomly swapping sites around mid-run; that would get much too complicated to track.

Once your run is complete, if you choose to renew, you can then go with your best performing 1-2 topics as well as try out some other topic areas if you wish. Most advertisers find they settle on 1-2 topic areas that do really well for them and just focus on those.

Once you choose those 1-6 topic areas, you will then have access to an administrative interface on BellaOnline that gives you full control over your campaign. You can load up banner and newsletter ads to the topics you have chosen. You can run the same ad across all topics, or put a custom ad onto each individual topic. You can use a different URL for each ad for tracking purposes. You can activate and deactivate ads as you go, turning off the less performing ads and fine tuning the best performing ads.

Each time a webpage with your ad is shown to a visitor, a traffic counter for that particular ad increments by one. If for example the ad's rate is $4 CPM, then when that counter clicks through 1,000 ad views, your total deposit will have decremented by $4. Your cost for the ad is $4 for every thousand shown.

Let's say you despoit $50. BellaOnline will keep running your ads until your full deposit has been depleted. Our site is managed manually so we often let ads run for longer than the $50, but you are not "charged extra". You put in $50 at the beginning, and as a result you get at least $50 worth of advertising on the site. When we finally do take your ads down, it is up to you whether to deposit more money or not. If you choose to send us another $50, we turn your ads back on again.

We provide online reporting 24x7 of both impressions (the number of time each ad has been viewed) and click-throughs (the number of times each ad has been clicked on and followed to your site). You can see at any moment in time exactly how your ads are doing on each site you are working with. In addition to our site telling you how many people we send to you, your own site's weblogs will of course tell you where your traffic comes from. So you will see clearly in your own weblogs how many visitors come to your site from ours.

We begin with a $50, $100 or $500 initial deposit. This is your balance against which your ads are charged. You can apply that deposit to any type of ad you wish. You can use that deposit all for newsletter ads, all for top banner ads, or any other combination. You may change your ad mix during the campaign as you see what works for your particular needs. As your ads are shown to visitors, the "remaining balance" in your account slowly decreases until it reaches zero. When your balance reaches zero, your ad campaign is complete.

Ad Campaign Example
You want to run ads for your pet supply website. You choose to run top banner ads on the cats, dogs, birds, and exotic pets sites. You watch the ads run for a week and see that the ad does really well for cat and bird owners, but not for dog or exotic pet owners. You then deactivate the dog and exotic pet ads, and just continue to run the cat and bird ads for the rest of your campaign.

Visit our Media Kit for sample graphic sizes and ad text.