Advertise

Since our launch we have built PisteHors.com into one of the leading specialized ski and snowboard sites. Although our main focus is French backcountry and off-piste skiing and snowboarding we have visitors from all over the planet. Last year half a million winter sports enthusiasts from 189 countries viewed over 2 million pages.

PisteHors.com offers a mix of insider and industry news, reviews, resort information and routes. The website is trusted by its visitors for its scope, accuracy and independence. Our visitors hail principally from the United Kingdom, United States, Canada and Europe. Over 50% of our visitors buy ski and snowboard equipment in the countries they visit.

Advertising Basics

Banner advertising lets you build brand awareness and introduces people to your website via click-thrus. In general click through rates for our advertisers are between 2.5% to 7.5%. Unlike printed adverts you only pay if someone visits the page where your advert is displayed. We currently support advertsing via Google Adwords and our agency Sports Syndicator.

We run adverts on three properties: left menu (160x600), in line 336x280 and bottom 300x250.

    * 160x600 - Home Page (Google and Sports Syndicator)
    * 300x250 - Gear Pages (Adify Only)
    * 336x280 - Inline on News pages (Google only)

Designing your advertisement

In our experience well designed and attractive banner adverts are the most successful. To give you an idea, images of skiers or snowboarders or winter scenes such as chalets attract most attention. Plain text on a coloured background is generally the least successful although “Google” style text adverts allow advertisers to maximize the amount of information and can work very well.

On graphical adverts text messages should be kept short and animated adverts can work well. Optimize the image size as far as possible.

If you are advertising a product link the banner advert to the part of your website that sells the product rather than your homepage. You should use user tracking software to see what a visitor does when they reach your website, for example Google Analytics. Important

We accept adverts related to skiing and snowboarding, travel, accommodation and holiday packages as well as general lifestyle advertising. Basically stuff that could be useful to our readers. We do not accept anything related to gambling or adult content. We reserve the right to refuse any particular advertising campaign.

Sports Syndicator

We accept adverts via our agency, Sports Syndicator. Please contact their sales team for more information.

Google Adwords

There are a number of advantages to using Google Adwords.

1. You are using an established and trusted advertising network
2. Many options for targeting adverts
3. Google has extensive reporting to monitor the effectiveness of your campaign
4. Integrates with your other Adwords campaigns

The disadvantage is that you are paying a commission to Google and you are in direct competition with other advertisers.

To create an Adwords campaign targeting 'PisteHors.com log into your Adwords account (or create a new account if you don't already have one).

1. Go to the Campaign Management Tab
2. On the right hand size of the screen click on the site targetted link. This starts a wizard. Give your campaign a name and group name and select a language (probably English).
3. Select a list of countries and territories where you want your advert to appear. For example only display to North American visitors.
4. Create your advert in the normal way. You can also upload an image advert. PisteHors.com currently supports the 160x600 wide skyscraper and 336 x 280 Large Rectangle formats . Any other types of adverts will not be displayed.
5. Select List URLs and enter PisteHors.com then click the "List Available Sites" button. Google will select Pistehors and give you a list of similar websites.
6. Enter you budget and save your campaign. You will want to monitor how many hits you get and adjust your budget accordingly.

Current Advertisers

The following companies already advertise with PisteHors.com

    * Backcountry.com
    * REI.com
    * US Outdoor
    * Oregon Mountain Community
    * Millets
    * Blacks
    * British Airways
    * Pierre et Vacances
    * Neilsons Adventure Holidays
    * Thomson Ski Holidays
    * Facewest
    * Opodo 
    * PMGear

Last year we helped Backcountry.com and Facewest to sell an additional 50,000 € of gear as well as building awareness of their brands.

Search Engines

Although a large proportion of our visitors are by direct access and referrals PisteHors.com is well referenced by the leading search engines including Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Search. We are in the top ten for many ski and board related keywords especially in our target area of off piste and backcountry skiing and boarding.

This is a of the top 500 keywords typed into Google, Microsoft Network Search and Yahoo! between the 23 August and 31 August 2006 which resulted in a visit to this site.