How Digital Advertising Works on gCaptain

In 2013, gCaptain visitors spent a total of 617,064 hours while browsing the digital pages (pageviews) of our website over 25 million times. Our clients who supported us via advertising were the beneficiaries of a considerable amount of global, or in some cases, targeted regional exposure in the following areas:

This year, a number of companies are looking to get a piece of this exposure and I thought it might help if I explained a bit about how to evaluate digital media such as gCaptain.com from an advertising standpoint.

The primary metric that any website can offer is a page impression.

A single impression is one view of a advertisement whether it be on a website, billboard, TV commercial, magazine etc.   On a website, the value of a page impression depends on a few variables:

a) Time on Site – The longer someone spends on a particular website, the longer that banner ad is in front of the visitor. Pretty simple.

b) Site Layout – If the site is cluttered, or if the banner ads are too small, you’ll still register an impression, however it’s unlikely your visitors will interact with your advertisement and thus provide any sort of ROI for an advertiser.

c) Audience – If you don’t know who is seeing the advertisement, it’s very difficult to put a value on it.

What sort of advertising campaigns are available?

gCaptain has three different methods for serving advertising.

On the homepage, gCaptain offers rotational advertising with pricing based on 20% blocks. With over 10,000 views daily, the gCaptain.com homepage is the launch point for all gCaptain content. Visitors to the homepage are nearly 80% return visitors and typically spend more 4 minutes and 45 seconds on the site. The homepage is your chance to reach thousands of gCaptain’s daily repeat visitors in the maritime and offshore industry.

On the content pages, gCaptain offers advertising based on a fixed CPM model (Cost Per One Thousand Impressions), with both above- and below-the-fold pricing. The content pages (i.e. articles) make up the majority of pageviews on gCaptain.com, and are typically what gets shared on social media, linked to from the daily e-Newsletter, and really what gets everyone talking.

For clients who only care about advertising in a specific region, this is the type of advertising we suggest due to the fact that we are able to target those banner ads to a specific geographic audience while only charging for impressions that reach those areas.  It’s a good deal if you’re a Europe-based company and you only care about marketing to the European market, or southeast Asian market, or the U.S. market for example.

Our third option is static banner advertising on our newsletter.

Every morning, gCaptain sends out an email to over 15,600 people that provides a link to the last 10 or so articles posted on our site.  Our metrics show that 44 percent of those people who receive our newsletter open it up on a daily basis, and thus register a banner ad impression to the advertisers on the newsletter.

According to our newsletter provider, the average open rate for most newsletters is 20 percent.

Popular questions:

I advertise on another industry website and my banner ad is seen every time I open the website, but gCaptain’s ads rotate and they are more expensive. 

Although our homepage ads are rotational, we priced our ads so that at the end of the campaign, the calculated CPM rates would be in the $30 range, or perhaps in the $20s.  If another company is offering more exposure (ie more impressions) at a lower price, let us know.  Chances are they aren’t and you’re paying a lot more for less true exposure.

I only have $2000 to spend, but gCaptain gets millions of page views, is there anything to fit my budget?

Going global with your marketing plan isn’t cheap, so if you’re looking for global exposure on a long term basis with $2000, your ads will get spread pretty thinly.  However, if you have a product launch and you want to saturate news pages of gCaptain over a two or three day period on a global scale, that budget might work.

Or, if in reality you only care about a regional audience on monthly time frame, $2000 will probably be all you need to get the exposure you’re looking for.

Want to know more?  Have specific questions about our audience? Feel free to email me at [email protected]

Special thanks to all our 2013 advertisers.

Update 26 February 2014 – our rates have changed! Please email [email protected] for more info.

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