Affiliate Member FAQ ** Before Signing Up Questions ** How Do I Sign Up As An Affiliate? The steps for signing up as a BannerWomen Affiliate is explained in our Join BannerWomen document. Briefly, you will need to pre-submit which URL you wish to register to see if it meets our guidelines. Next you will need to read the Agreement and Guidelines (all the legal and policy stuff). Then you will need to make a banner to promote your site. Finally, you will add a small snippet of HTML code to your page and when we've checked that its been added correctly, we activate you! Which Page(s) Can I Register? The more pages you add to the network, the more banner exposures you earn for your own site to be promoted on the network for free. How Are Members Compensated? This is a banner exchange, so sites are "compensated" by accruing free banner exposure credits for their own banner to be delivered to other member (which are also female-focused) sites. It becomes a free way to advertise your site to a targeted female audience. The exchange is on a 2 to 1 ratio (for every two banner you host, you receive one credit for your own banner to go out). Your site may be hosting one of three types of banners: member site banners, PSAs (Public Service Announcements from non-profits), or Advertiser banners (which we do in order to offset the cost of providing you a targeted free banner exchange). We also "compensate" or benefit members by provide lots of additional monthly reward credits and all this helps build traffic to your site! Sites which have at least 200,000 pageviews a month or more to sell for advertising and want more individualized representation attention should consider the services of HerAgency.com. Sites interested in our HerAgency sales staff individually representing their site to advertisers can apply for site representation and account management. Minimum sellable volume is 200,000 views per month. Revenue-sharing can range from 50% to the site to 65%, depending upon the monthly traffic of the site. Can I Put Other Ads on the Same Page as BannerWomen? Yes. But not in the same screen shot. BannerWomen- for maximum banner effectiveness, requires the BannerWomen banner be placed in the first screen shot ("above the fold") and be exclusive within that screen shot (see the Terms for further details) of the page the Affiliate has registered with BannerWomen. Other banners and advertisements can exist on the same page beyond the first screen shot ("below the fold"). You can not place multiple copies of our code on the same page. I Already Have Ads on My Site, Why Would I Use BannerWomen? As the Internet gets more crowded, it becomes more and more challenging (and costly) to attract viewers to your site. BannerWomen helps you do this for free - and uniquely helps you attract not just anyone, but women - which is a compatible target audience for your site! Are There Any Membership Costs? There is no cost to join BannerWomen as an Affiliate. However, you'll probably have to invest a bit of your time in reading through our agreement and responding to questions. Additionally, we ask that you either create yourself or have someone else design a professional-looking banner (we want to keep the overall look of banners in our network pretty high so our collective will look attractive to users and to paying advertisers). And finally, you do need to add a small snippet of HTML code to the page you have registered with BannerWomen, so if you are unable to do that yourself, you may need to hire someone familiar with HTML to add it. That's all we can think of! Do You Limit Membership? BannerWomen manages maximum bannerview capacities for every category. If we have already hit capacity on the category in which your page would be assigned, you may be put on a waiting list. As the program is of a relatively manageable size, we do not anticipate implementing limits in the near future. HerAgency does limit membership of those sites individually represented to advertisers. Sites fill out an application, have a brief interview, and HerAgency runs a site performance test for a baseline. Accepted sites are then assigned a sales professional and account manager for operational and implementation issues. If I Can't Make a Nice Banner, Will You Do One For Me? BannerWomen is prepared to help people who have no other options, as we have graphic designers on staff. We can prepare a simple banner for you using the experience we have gained in what makes an effective banner. Simply prepay by check for $50 to: WWWomen Inc., 435 Geary Blvd Suite 2, San Francisco, CA 94118. Include a note giving us the URL of your website so we may leverage your current look and feel if that's appropriate. How Come the Banner Has to Be 468 x 60 Pixels? This is the industry standard and allows our banner exchange to comform to the standards of what is expected in the industry. Can I Control Which Banners Appear on My Site? Not through the free advertising you are earning as a member of the network, but you can buy a targeted AdPak and be able to target a campaign to 1 to 2 specific categories. How Can I Make My Banner Perform Better? See our tips for a more successful banner. Do I Get Credit for Every Barter Banner I Host? Yes. We calculate your credit system this way: for every barter banner your registered page hosts, you receive .50 banner exposure credit for your own banner. If this banner also is clicked on by the user, you receive another .25 credit. When you have collected one full credit from your page, your own banner becomes available to be delivered on another member's page as available "inventory" becomes available. So you are receiving credits for free promotion of your site. The main reason for the extra 2:1/4:3 credit is that the overall network needs to create pageview "inventory" in order to place paying advertiser banners, special public service banners for women's causes (like breast cancer, for example), and to promote the network itself so we can grow the success for all members. When another member site is asking to have a banner sent to their page, our system goes round robin and looks for the next available banner (remembering who went out last). It checks to see if there are enough credits to be delivered, then it goes out at that time. Then it is placed at the end of the list to give the next barter banner a chance. And so on. Because the network is on a 2:1 ratio, 50% of all the activity will ALWAYS be members exchanging banners. What is typical, though, is that 75%-85% of all activity is members exchanging banners. It fluxuates depending upon if we temporarily have an advertiser banner or two rotating (again, to help offset the cost of running a large free targeted banner exchange). What Does BannerWomen Do With the Private Information I Provide Them? BannerWomen will not- under any circumstances at all, sell, exchange, or give away private information we have collected about you. We may aggregate information for trend information, to say for example, that 60% of our member's sites deliver more than 1000 pageviews a day. We are very sensitive to privacy issues and will not even publish a list of our members anymore. This is because we found direct marketers and other less-than-ethical people using the list to send unsolicited email to our members and we didn't want to be a source of this kind of abuse. ** First Month of Membership Questions ** There is No Banner Appearing. Why? It could be for a couple of reasons- either your account has not been activated, there is something wrong with your HTML code on your page, or something unusual has gone wrong at our end with the delivery of banners. Check carefully to make sure your HTML code has no typos in it (sometimes HTML generator or helper programs do not seem to put hand-written code in very well). Check out our Common Questions and Add Code Tutorial pages. Why Do I See the Same Banner on More Than One of My Pages? This might be because an advertiser is running a campaign and your site matches their target audience. If you have multiple pages registered with BannerWomen, each time a user hits one of your pages, the BannerWomen program looks for a matching banner to deliver. If there is only one that matches, then that will come up each time. Paying banners are always delivered in priority to free barter exchange banners. BannerWomen also rotates banners promoting BannerWomen, as part of the banner exchange program. So you might see those once in awhile. We may also be running a bursted campaign for a Public Service Announcement for special and worthy causes. These are special cases and do not happen too often. The Same Banner is Appearing Every Day on My Site. Is Something Wrong? Again, probably not. Even in the banner exchange, Affiliate members receive credits for banners they host on their site (.50 credit for each barter banner delivery hosted and .75 for each barter banner hosted which gets clicked on). So high traffic sites will receive more credits and will likely have more banner deliveries than low-traffic sites. And again, a paying advertiser might be running a campaign for which your site is a match. The Banners Are Loading Slowly Today. Why is This? There are many reasons why the Internet runs slowly. Sometimes it is your Service Provider (ISP). Sometimes it's not just your ISP, but the whole section of the country or region you are connecting through. Other times it's the time of day, for example, traffic 9-5 in most of the U.S. is always higher than other times. And finally, it could be any or all of these factors which will affect the delivery or the receipt of matched banners. If it's consistent and you've confirmed that it is not at your end or your ISP, write us from our Contact Us page and we'll look into it. I Have A Question About My Activity Report. Who Do I Contact? Our Contact Us page has an email link for existing Affiliates who have questions. Your Affiliate ID number is required for us to process any questions. This is to ensure this link is only for members so questions get processed quickly. ** On-Going Membership Questions ** I Have Changed My URL Address. Do I Need to Tell You? Absolutely! The minute our database can't find your URL to send banners to, that URL is considered inactive and you would forfeit any due moneys earned from that page. This excludes downtime due to temporary problems. We recommend you tell us BEFORE you change the URL so we can coordinate this with our database and your activity will remain as smooth as possible. Can I Ever Change My Banner? Yes. You can at any time. Whether you need to change your banner depends on the trend of the response. If you are starting to see a significant drop-off, you might want to (however some of these drop-offs are seasonal, like around Christmas, so make sure you feel its probably due to your banner getting "stale"). There is a form on our Contact Us page. What is an "Impression?" According to BannerWomen, an impression is defined as each time the BannerWomen program delivers a banner graphic file to a member's web site. These are banner views and not page views. A percentage of surfers turn graphics off in their browser and thus our program does not deliver a banner for those cases, and does not count these as impressions. Any unusual burst of impressions will be audited in logs and if determined by BannerWomen to be artificially inflated, will be removed and not counted by BannerWomen (as we can not charge the advertiser either). What is a "Click-Through?" According to BannerWomen, a click-through is defined as each time a surfer actually clicks on a banner delivered by the BannerWomen program. When a user clicks on such a banner, it first goes to our program and logs the action and then sends the user to the referring URL supplied by the Advertiser. Any unusual burst of click-throughs will be audited in logs and if determined by BannerWomen to be artificially inflated, will be removed and not counted by BannerWomen (as we can not charge the advertiser either). What is an "Inquiry?" According to BannerWomen, an inquiry is defined as a submitted response form. In an inquiry campaign, a user clicks on the banner and reaches a special "bridge page" that lives at BannerWomen (but can contain the look and feel of the Advertiser). The user will have fields to fill out in order to request a free catalog or sample. When the user moves from the banner on an Affiliate site to the bridge, we track the Affiliate it comes from and credit that Affiliate with the inquiry. If the user clicks on the banner and goes the inquiry page, bookmarks it, and returns later to fill it out, we are technically incapable of tracking which Affiliate gets credited so it becomes an invalid inquiry. Home | Members | Advertisers | Join the Network | FAQ | Contact Us © Copyright 1996-1999. BannerWomen and WWWomen. All Rights Reserved. BannerWomen and WWWomen are trademarks of the WWWomen Inc. company. Can't Locate Something? Try the Site Map.