How to Build an Ad Rate Card That Closes

There are two kinds of rate card. One is a starting point for a conversation. The other is a price list.

If you do not have a salesperson, you want the price list, because the conversation it opens is one nobody is available to have. A buyer who has to negotiate with a publisher who answers on Thursdays will buy somewhere else on Tuesday.

The four things a rate card has to contain

Column	Example	Why it is there
Placement name	Article Sidebar	They have to be able to say which one they want in one word.
Size and position	300x250, top of the sidebar, every article	Answers "where will it actually be" without an email.
Price	$240	One number. Not a range, not "from".
Period	per month	Month is the easiest unit to buy and the easiest to renew.

Four columns. A fifth column is usually something you wanted to say rather than something they needed to know.

What to leave off

Most rate cards fail by including things that raise questions instead of answering them.

• Ranges. "$200 to $400" is read as $200, and then the buyer feels cheated when you quote $400. Pick the number.
• "Contact for pricing". This is the sentence that loses the most deals of anything on this list. It tells a buyer the price depends on who they are, which is a reason to distrust it.
• CPM, when you are small. A CPM commits you to delivering a volume. See why selling time is safer.
• Your traffic sources, bounce rate and time on page. Nobody buying a $240 banner reads these. They are for a media kit, and mostly they are for you.
• Every size you could theoretically support. Three placements that exist beat nine that are hypothetical.

Structure that works

Where the card should live

On your site, at a URL, linked from your unsold ad slots and from your contact page. A rate card that only exists as an attachment you send on request is a rate card that requires you to be awake, which is the whole problem.

The strongest version has the price and a way to pay on the same page. At that point it has stopped being a rate card and become a shop, which is what you actually wanted.

When not to publish prices

There is a real exception. If most of your revenue comes from a handful of large negotiated deals, publishing a low self-serve price can anchor those buyers down.

The answer is not to hide prices. It is to publish the self-serve tier and describe the larger one separately, the way every software company does: three named packages and a fourth that says talk to us. The published prices do the volume, and the conversation is reserved for deals large enough to be worth a conversation.