A customer asked me if it was worth advertising on a particular website. Here is the essence of I wrote them.

I checked the number of visitors on the website on which you are intending to advertise. According to Compete.com they get 160,000+ per month, which is a great number.

Lets say 1 out of 1,000 of their visitors click on your ad. That would be 160 visitors to your website per month. If you have a 2% conversion rate, then you would get about 3 customers per month. A 2% conversion rate means 1 in 50 people become customers. With these assumptions, if you make an average profit of $200 per customer, then you can pay some amount less than $600 per month or $4 per click.

If you are looking to implement a paid advertising campaign,
you should look at Google and Facebook ads, as they are highly targeted.

All paid ads should be closely measured, because minor changes can mean big differences in results. You would need to create landing pages for the ads to track the ads and increase conversion rates.

Is it worth advertising? You only know if you test. My feeling is yes if you are going to monitor the ads closely. If you are just going to throw money at them, then no.

You would need to estimate all the numbers I used above and then see how the actual numbers compare to the estimates. Then you tweak the ads to improve the actual numbers. In this way, you can run a profitable advertising campaign.