Run an Inventory Audit Before You Sell Anything
You cannot price what you have not counted, and almost nobody has counted. This is the hour that fixes it.
The short version
- An inventory audit is a written count of every ad position you have: where it sits, what size it is, and how many times it is seen a month.
- It takes about an hour and it is the step that turns a website into something you can put a price on.
- Count views of the slot, not views of the site. A slot that appears on one page in five is seen a fifth as often.
- Most audits find two or three positions that should not be sold at all, which is a useful result.
- The finished table is the thing you paste into a rate card, so write it once and write it properly.
An inventory audit is a written count of every ad position on your site: where each one sits, what size it is, and how many times a month somebody actually sees it.
It takes about an hour. It is boring. It is also the difference between telling an advertiser "I get about 80,000 views a month" and handing them a table that says exactly what they are buying, which is the difference between a conversation and a sale.
What you are actually counting
Four things per position, and nothing else. Anything more is procrastination.
| Column | Example | What the buyer does with it |
|---|---|---|
| Position | Top of article, above the headline | Decides whether they want it. This is the one they care about most. |
| Size | 728 x 90 | Decides whether their existing artwork fits, or whether they need new artwork made. |
| Monthly views | 42,000 | Works out what a month costs them and whether the numbers will be big enough to read. |
| Pages it appears on | Every article, not the home page | Works out whether their ad lands next to the content they want to be near. |
If you only ever fill in these four columns for every slot, you are ahead of most publishers selling their own space.
How to count it
An hour, in four parts
-
1
Walk your own site and write down every slot
Open your home page, an article, a category page and your busiest landing page. Note every position where an ad appears or could appear. Give each one a name a stranger would understand: Article Top, Sidebar Upper, Below Comments. Not zone_3.
-
2
Measure each one
Right click the slot, inspect, and read the width and height. If you are adding new positions rather than counting existing ones, pick from the standard sizes, because artwork the advertiser already owns is artwork you do not have to chase.
-
3
Get views per slot, not per site
This is the part everybody gets wrong. Open your analytics, and for each slot add up the page views of only the pages that slot appears on. A sidebar that is on articles only does not get your home page traffic.
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4
Write down what is already in each slot
Network code, an affiliate banner, nothing at all. You need this later, because whatever is there now becomes the fallback when a position is unsold.
The table to copy
Fill this in for your own site and you have finished. It is also, almost word for word, the table that goes on your rate card once you add a price column.
| Position | Size | Appears on | Monthly views | Currently |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Article Top | 728 x 90 | All articles | 42,000 | AdSense |
| Article Sidebar | 300 x 250 | All articles | 42,000 | AdSense |
| Home Hero | 970 x 250 | Home page only | 18,000 | Empty |
| In Article | 336 x 280 | Articles over 800 words | 26,000 | Affiliate banner |
| Footer | 728 x 90 | Every page | 100,000 | AdSense |
Five positions, and only three of them are worth selling. Working out which three is the point of the exercise.
What the audit usually tells you
Three things come out of this every time, and none of them are the thing people expect.
- You have fewer sellable positions than you thought. A slot needs to clear roughly 10,000 views a month before an advertiser can tell whether it worked. Anything under that is better used for your own promotions.
- Your best slot is not your busiest slot. The footer in the table above has the most views and the least value, because almost nobody scrolls to it. Views are the wrong measure on their own, which is what viewability is about.
- You have empty space you are not counting as anything. The Home Hero in that table earns nothing today. It is the single most visible position on the site and it is the obvious home for an Advertise Here card.
The quality pass
Before any of these go on a rate card, run down this list. It is short and it catches the things an advertiser will notice before you do.
Worth fixing before you sell
- Every position has a name a stranger would understand.
- Every position uses a standard size, so buyers can reuse artwork they already have.
- No position sits so close to another that a reader could click the wrong one.
- Every position is visible on a phone, or is marked as desktop only.
- Positions under 10,000 monthly views are on the rate card. Take them off and use them for house ads.
- The monthly figure is your site total copied into every row. Recount per slot.
Then price it
The audit gives you the left hand side of a rate card. The right hand side is one number per row, and the honest way to arrive at it is to start from what each slot already earns you rather than from what you would like it to be worth. That is a separate job and it is covered in how to price ad space on your website.
Do the audit first. Pricing a slot you have not counted is guessing with extra steps.
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