Before considering advertising your business on a website there are a number of terms that you should understand and some questions you should ask to dermine whether you are spending your marketing dollars wisely.

Traffic: Obviously for your advertisement to be successful this site needs to have traffic. Terms used to define traffic are: vistors, unique visitors and hits. The definitions below were found on www.marketingterms.com

Visitors: a visitor is counted each time an individual loads pages from a site

Unique Visitors: Individuals who have visited a Web site (or network) at least once in a fixed time frame, typically a 30 day period.Most measurements of unique visitors are estimates. Sites often calculate unique visitors based on the IP address information found in the log files, and sometimes through cookies. However, many factors may skew the results. Traffic rating companies typically calculate unique visitors by monitoring actual usage of a group of volunteers, then applying the results to to the Internet population. Results fluctuate considerably for small sites due to their small sample sizes.

Hit: request of a file from a web server. The term "hit" is perhaps the most misused term in online marketing, mistakenly used to mean unique visitors, visits, page views, or all of the above. A hit is merely a request for a file from a Web server. A request for a Web page counts as a hit, but so does a request for a graphic on a Web page. Since the number of graphics per page can vary considerably, hits mean very little for comparison purposes.
Don't use the term "hit" unless you really mean it. ;-)

Demographics: depending on where your "target audience" is, is an important factor in web advertising. If the people that you are hoping to reach are British, then a website that has mostly Canadian usage probably wont bring you the clients you are looking for. Most website's can provide this information in percentages from the United States, International and Other (unfortunately Canada falls in the 'other' category).

Is the site 'Sticky'?: Site stickiness refers to whether or not the site has sufficient content to keep visitors browsing for a long period of time and/or returning to the site. This is acheived through unique interesting content and things like community calendars, bulletin boards, etc. The average (length) time per visit is a pretty good measure of how sticky the site is.

Click Throughs: Once you've decided to advertise with a site you should continue monitoring your investment every so often by asking the website to provide you with the number of click throughs on your advertisement. (click through: the process of clicking through an online advertisement to the advertiser's destination). A quick rule of thumb could be that the dollars you spend per month should result in at least that many click throughs.

I hope this newsletter will help you make informed decisions about website advertising. For more information you will find a wealth of information available on the internet to help you - and don't be afraid to ask lots of questions.