Since I started to monetize my Websites with AdSense I also started to sell my available Ad Inventory directly to Advertisers. But there was a learning curve involved.
At first I simply contacted Advertisers via Email after seeing them advertise on competitor pages.
I emailed them, introduced my website(s) and asked them if they were interested in advertising on my sites as well.
That did not turn out very well and was very work intensive.
I then took a more professional approach and created a Mediakit for my main websites which looked (and still looks) much more professional. I created a “advertise with us” website outlining the idea of my website(s) and linked to my Mediakit.
I also contacted a lot of Advertisers directly again but still very little return on the work invested.
With time my website(s) got bigger and more interesting to Advertisers.
I was contacted by a few Advertisers for direct Ad sales.
However those were still very few.
I decided to not put any more work in direct advertising sales but knowing the big CPM price differences payed for direct Ad sales I did not want to leave this topic be.
So I searched for direct advertising marketers who would do the work I didn’t want to do anymore and sell my Ad spaces for a percentage of the revenue.I found one direct
advertising marketer who looked the most promising because he had the biggest health vertical for Germany.
In fact they contacted me to recruit me as publisher.
Because I know my way around the advertising market I had a few weeks of negotiations with them where I dictated a few additional terms to their contract which later proofed to be very valuable to me.
Even though they would and could not guarantee me any earning results (which is of course understandable) I saw the risk of them selling my Ad Inventory for lower CPM then I would earn with AdSense.
This is why we added a minimum CPM to the contract for each single Ad unit and an option to increase this minimum CPM if necessary in a 30 day notice.
After talking to several of their employees and CEOs I got quite some more insights into the Advertising market then I had before. Talking to really big players (I am talking about monetizing millions of unique users each month) was very informative.
What I learned was (even though it seems obvious I never spend a thought about it) that Advertisers with a big budget (the once willing to pay 15-40$ CPM prices) rarely do business with single sites (unless you are the top dog and have a great impact on the market).
They turn to 1-3 of the biggest Ad Inventory sellers (and be assured that they use AdWords too) and spend their budget with them.
So my initial plan of selling Advertising directly by Contacting Advertisers was doomed from the beginning 
.
After implementing their leaderboard and a skyscraper into my website for single or combined (Wallpaper) advertising I also gave them my best performing AdSense spot and they set up my AdSense Code as fallback.
With my first status report from them I saw that my minimum CPM precaution clause was a real money saver.
They firstly sold my Ad Inventory way below value so I wrote them a bill with them ending up paying more to me than they earned with me in total.
After that they learned the “lesson”. Currently and mainly because I am constantly working on increasing my AdSense earnings they are unable to deliver any Ads to my AdSense Ad Units because they simply can’t keep the minimum CPM.
Currently I am serving their skyscraper and their leaderboard on my site which I don’t normally use for AdSense. This way I get additional pay to my AdSense earnings.
Do you sell your Ad Inventory directly as well?
What is your approach to it?
I first thought I'll try it non exclusive and contacted about 6 of the biggest player in the German market.
They all wanted me to sign an exclusive contract which I declined. I said I want to try them out first if they can deliver what they promise. Because I know the market I am in and the value of my Ad Inventory I had some very open and honest discussions with some CEOs and most of them openly admitted that their health channel is to small to deliver what I expect.
However I signed non exclusive contracts with about 3 of them.
None of them could deliver one single Ad Unit to my website matching my needed CPM prices.
When I finally signed an exclusive contract I signed it with the biggest health vertical for Germany which makes them the most promising agency to deliver high value Ad Campaigns for my websites.
Also for professional Agencies contracting a new Publisher involves costs like for adding your website to be listed by AGOF a German Working Group for Online Media Research.
Regarding #1. I don't think that blocking all customers that serve Ads on your site which booked Ads via your Agency or on your site directly is beneficial for you.
On the contrary I think you are blocking another stream of income from this advertiser.
I know your thoughts behind your argument.
You think if an Advertiser can placement target your website via AdWords for much less then it can book Advertising on your site directly then they won't book Advertising directly. However most of the big Advertisers that are paying 2 digit CPM prices run big campaigns on AdWords which are not micro managed to a single website. But that is just an educated guess.
I am not that big in selling direct advertising yet so this would require extensive testing when I reach this point. If you did test this for yourself before and not just guessed like I do right now I really would like to see some statistics on your results of these tests.
In regards to #3. The CTR always depends on the advertising banner that is used and how targeted it is to your websites. The Ads I am getting from my Agency are mostly not as targeted as AdSense Ads are so they have a very low CTR.
However that has no influence on the booking behavior because these campaigns are branding campaigns which primarily focus on making a brand or product known to a brought audience and don't focus too much on CTR.
If I sell Ad Inventory to an Advertiser for an Ad Unit my Agency is currently serving I'll put their DoubleClick AdServer Tag into my DoubleClick account as Creative and they run as fall back for the campaign.
And my Agency has my AdSense as fall back if they can't deliver Ads.
That sounds complicated but in fact it isn't :)
As an example, Coca Cola has a budget of 20 million / month, your agency gets 2 million and you get a 50.000 contract for this month.
Coca Cola is overlooking the CTRs of all campaigns, as is your agency.
If your agency does not provide good enough results, Coca Cola will look at better resulting agencies. So not only your agency is looking, but mostly Coca Cola!
It may be that in the health channel things run differently.
However this is the process in my area. If my results are too bad, I get less booking the next time.
In the worst case, my agency looses the contract. I know it's tempting to just being happy about the CPM and do not having optimizing these areas.
But better CTRs are nicer for your agency. If you are not sure, I'd definitely talk to your agency and ask them about if CTRs will have an effect on your current earnings.
I have no influence on this what so ever because they serve their Ads via their Ad Server which I have no access to.
I am optimizing my Ad Units for AdSense and this optimization benefits my Agency as well. However if they display a campaign for a deodorant on my health forum where someone is looking for infos about headaches the visitors of this thread wont be much interested in clicking on the deodorant Ad. But they see it and that is what branding campaigns are all about.
My Ad Inventory set up allows a very grained down targeting for my Agency. They can target each sub forum with a specific topic separately.
So the possibility for very narrowed targeting exists.
But I think we talk at cross purposes and mean the same :)
How do you target your Ads to demographic criteria like gender?
I could not figure this out even though I searched a lot.
GA_googleAddAttr("status", "registered user"); GA_googleAddAttr("gender", "male"); GA_googleAddAttr("income", "10-20.000$");You have to preenter this in DFP so you can check it.Doubleclick tags are recognized by DFP and so DFP tracks your clicks.
In the delivery reports you can search for "target criteria".
And voilá: You see how old your members are that are clicking, their income, everything.
Nice for optimization.