How to Advertise on The Economic Times Digital Platform and What It Actually Costs in India

Few advertising decisions feel as immediately credible to a boardroom as placing your brand on The Economic Times digital platform — and yet, most brands that approach us have never seen an actual rate card, have no idea what CPM to expect, and are genuinely surprised by how accessible ET digital advertising has become for mid-sized budgets.

The Economic Times, published by Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd. under The Times Group umbrella, is not simply a newspaper with a website; it is one of the most visited business news websites in India, sitting within the Times Internet network which aggregates hundreds of millions of monthly users across properties. For any brand targeting decision-makers, investors, or business professionals in India, the conversation about digital advertising in India almost always circles back to ET.

Why Should Brands Choose The Economic Times for Digital Advertising?

The honest answer, based on what we have seen across hundreds of digital ad campaigns at SmartAds, is that The Economic Times earns its premium positioning because of who is reading it — not just how many people are reading it. A platform with fifty million monthly active users drawn primarily from the C-suite, senior management, and financially literate urban professionals is a fundamentally different media buy than a general-interest portal with three hundred million casual browsers. The buying funnel logic is straightforward: these are people who are already in the mode of evaluating financial decisions, career moves, and business investments when they open the ET app or website.

What a lot of people miss is the depth of the Times Internet ecosystem that sits behind economic times digital advertising. Times Internet — the digital arm of The Times Group — operates one of India's largest first-party data networks, which means that when you advertise on Economic Times online, your campaign benefits from audience intelligence built across ET Prime, ETBrandEquity, ET Now, and dozens of affiliated properties. This is not incidental; it is the structural advantage that separates ET from standalone business publications. The Pitch Madison Advertising Report has consistently flagged premium publisher networks as commanding a disproportionate share of brand-safety-conscious digital advertising budgets, and Times Internet's scale is a large reason why.

We worked with a BFSI client — a mid-sized asset management company based in Mumbai — who had been running performance marketing campaigns on search and social for two years without meaningfully moving brand recall among high-net-worth investors. When we shifted roughly thirty percent of their digital advertising budget to economic times website advertising, the brand recall scores in their next quarterly survey jumped noticeably, and the quality of inbound leads improved in ways their sales team described as "a different conversation altogether." The platform's audience does the qualification work before the click even happens; that is the real value proposition here.

What Are the Digital Ad Formats Available on The Economic Times Platform?

The range of ad formats available when you advertise on Economic Times is considerably wider than most brand managers assume, and the format choice matters enormously for both performance and cost. At the broadest level, the platform supports display advertising in standard IAB sizes, video ads in pre-roll and mid-roll configurations, native ads that integrate into editorial content streams, and sponsored content packages that carry the weight of ET's editorial credibility.

Within display advertising, the leaderboard banner — typically running at 728x90 pixels on desktop — remains one of the most booked formats for brand awareness campaigns, while the medium rectangle banner at 300x250 pixels tends to perform better for click-through rate optimisation because of its placement within article bodies. The skinning banner, which wraps the entire desktop page in brand imagery, is reserved for high-impact launches and tends to command a significant premium; we have seen automotive and luxury real estate brands use it to remarkable effect on Budget Day and during IPL season. On mobile, the interstitial and the expandable banner formats dominate, which reflects the broader shift in ET's traffic toward mobile-first consumption.

Video ads on ET deserve a separate conversation, frankly speaking. Pre-roll ads that run before ET Now video content carry high completion rates because the audience has specifically navigated to watch financial news content — they are not passive scrollers. Mid-roll ads, placed within longer-form video content, work particularly well for brands with a story to tell rather than a simple call to action. The recommended video ad specification for pre-roll is fifteen to thirty seconds, with file sizes typically capped at what the platform's ad server can handle without buffering degradation; our team always recommends keeping pre-roll under twenty seconds for non-skippable formats. Native ads on ET, including the listicle ad format which embeds branded content within numbered editorial-style articles, have become increasingly popular with B2B advertising India campaigns because they generate dwell time that banner ads simply cannot match.

How Much Does It Cost to Advertise on Economic Times Digitally?

This is the question every client asks first, and the honest answer is that economic times advertising rates exist on a spectrum that is wider than most rate cards suggest. For standard display advertising on a CPM basis — meaning cost per thousand impressions — the rates on ET's premium inventory work out to somewhere between ₹250 and ₹600 per thousand impressions depending on the format, placement, and targeting parameters applied. To put that in context, the CPM for a leaderboard banner on the ET homepage is in the ballpark of ₹350 to ₹500, which is a number that surprises many first-time advertisers when they compare it to what they might be paying for broad-reach programmatic inventory elsewhere; the premium reflects the audience quality, not just the brand equity of the publication.

CPC-based buying, which is available for certain formats and is particularly common for performance-oriented campaigns, typically runs somewhere between ₹15 and ₹45 per click depending on the vertical and the competitiveness of the targeting segment. BFSI sector campaigns tend to sit at the higher end of that range because the audience segment — investors, HNIs, senior finance professionals — is heavily competed for by mutual funds, insurance brands, and banking products simultaneously. Real estate and automobile campaigns tend to find cost per click rates in a more comfortable mid-range, while FMCG brands running on ET often do so for brand visibility rather than direct response, making CPM the more logical buying metric for them.

What we tell our clients at SmartAds is that economic times ad cost should not be evaluated in isolation — it should be benchmarked against the cost of reaching the same quality of audience through any other channel. When you run the numbers on reaching, say, fifty thousand senior business professionals in Delhi and Mumbai through targeted LinkedIn campaigns, the cost per thousand impressions can easily exceed ₹800 to ₹1,200; economic times website advertising at ₹350 to ₹500 CPM for a demonstrably similar audience suddenly looks like a very efficient buy. The minimum budget to run a meaningful digital ad campaign on ET is roughly in the range of ₹1.5 lakh to ₹2 lakh for a short burst campaign, though we generally recommend a minimum of ₹3 to ₹5 lakh for a campaign that runs long enough to generate statistically meaningful performance data.

Who Is the Audience of Economic Times Online — and Why Does It Matter?

The audience profile of The Economic Times digital platform is, in our experience, the single most compelling argument for the platform's advertising premium — and it is also the most frequently underestimated asset by brands that dismiss ET as "just a newspaper website." The monthly active users of ET online number in the range of sixty to seventy million across app and web, but the demographic composition of that base is what makes it genuinely unusual in the Indian digital advertising market. The IRS and various independent audience studies have consistently shown that ET's digital readership skews heavily toward urban, English-literate, economically active adults — a disproportionate share of whom are decision-makers in their professional and household financial lives.

Business professionals India-wide who consume ET are not passive readers; they are active in the buying funnel for financial products, business services, technology, automobiles, and real estate in ways that general-interest digital audiences are not. The concentration of investors India-wide on the ET platform is particularly significant — the ET Markets section and ET Prime's premium content draw readers who are actively managing portfolios, evaluating mutual funds, and making insurance decisions. For BFSI brands, this is not a nice-to-have audience; it is the primary target audience, and reaching them on ET is often more efficient than any alternative.

Geography matters too, and this is something we have found to be underappreciated in media planning conversations. While ET has PAN India reach, its audience is disproportionately concentrated in Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, and other metro cities India — which is precisely the geographic profile that most premium brands are targeting. That said, tier-2 cities India have been showing meaningful growth in ET's digital readership over the past two years, driven by the expansion of the aspirational business class in cities like Pune, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, and Surat; this makes ET an increasingly interesting platform for brands that are expanding their geographic footprint beyond the top four metros.

How Do You Book a Digital Ad on The Economic Times Platform?

Booking a digital advertisement on The Economic Times can be done through two primary routes, and the choice between them has real implications for pricing, flexibility, and campaign control. The direct booking route — working through Times Internet's sales team or through an authorised media buying agency — gives you access to premium inventory, guaranteed placements, and the ability to negotiate custom packages that include sponsored content, branded content integrations, and high-impact formats like skinning banners. This is the route we recommend for brands that have specific placement requirements, seasonal campaign windows, or budgets above ₹5 lakh.

The programmatic route, which we will discuss in more detail in a later section, allows advertisers to access ET inventory through DSP platforms without going through direct sales — but it comes with trade-offs in terms of placement certainty and access to the most premium ad positions. For first-time advertisers who want to test ET digital advertising before committing to a larger direct buy, programmatic can be a reasonable entry point; the CPM rates are often slightly lower than direct, but the inventory quality and brand-safety controls require careful attention.

At SmartAds, the campaign booking process for a client typically begins with an audience brief — who are we trying to reach, in which cities, across which devices, and at what frequency — followed by a format recommendation based on the campaign objective. If the goal is brand awareness, we lean toward high-impact display formats and video ads with frequency capping to avoid audience fatigue. If the goal is lead generation or performance marketing, we structure the campaign around CPC buying with strong retargeting layers. The creative assets need to meet ET's technical specifications, which include file size limits, animation restrictions on certain placements, and brand-safety guidelines that are more stringent than open-exchange inventory; our creative team handles this briefing as a standard part of the booking process.

What Targeting Options Does Economic Times Digital Advertising Offer?

The ad targeting capabilities available through ET digital advertising have evolved considerably over the past few years, and this is an area where Times Internet's investment in first-party data infrastructure pays real dividends for advertisers. Audience targeting on ET goes well beyond basic demographic slicing; the platform's data layer allows for targeting based on content consumption behaviour, which means you can reach readers who have been actively consuming content about mutual funds, electric vehicles, startup funding, or real estate — effectively targeting by demonstrated interest rather than just age and income proxies.

Geographic targeting is granular enough to isolate campaigns by city edition, which matters enormously for brands with region-specific products or distribution footprints. A real estate developer in Bangalore running a campaign for a new residential project in Whitefield has no business paying for impressions served to readers in Chennai or Kolkata; the city-level targeting available through ET's platform eliminates that waste. Device-level targeting — separating desktop from mobile app from mobile web — is also available and is strategically important because the user behaviour, dwell time, and conversion patterns differ meaningfully across these environments. ET Prime subscribers, who represent the most engaged and premium tier of the ET audience, can be targeted as a distinct segment for campaigns where advertiser-audience alignment is paramount.

The integration of AI-enabled targeting through Times Internet's audience graph is a more recent development, which allows for lookalike audience modelling — essentially finding ET readers who share behavioural and demographic characteristics with a brand's existing customer base. We have used this for a B2B software client whose product was aimed at CFOs and finance controllers; by building a lookalike model from their existing customer list and applying it to ET's audience graph, the campaign's click-through rate was roughly double what we had achieved on the same creative through standard demographic targeting alone. Retargeting capabilities are also available, allowing brands to re-engage users who have previously visited their website or interacted with earlier ET ad units — which is particularly valuable for high-consideration categories like insurance, automobiles, and real estate where the purchase decision cycle is long.

How Can You Measure ROI from Your Economic Times Digital Campaign?

Return on investment measurement for economic times digital advertising follows the same fundamental framework as any digital ad campaign, but there are some ET-specific nuances that are worth understanding before you set up your measurement architecture. The platform provides standard impression, click, and click-through rate data through its ad serving infrastructure, which can be reconciled against your own analytics platform — Google Analytics or any equivalent — to track post-click behaviour, conversion rates, and attribution. For campaigns running on a CPM basis, the primary ROI metric is typically brand awareness lift, which requires a separate brand lift study methodology rather than simple click tracking.

What we have found, across multiple ET digital advertising campaigns, is that the platform's ROI story is strongest when you measure it at the right level of the buying funnel. ET is not a direct-response platform in the way that search advertising is; the audience is in a reading and information-gathering mode, not an active purchase mode, which means that last-click attribution models will systematically undervalue ET's contribution to conversion. Multi-touch attribution models that credit ET for the awareness and consideration it generates — even when the final conversion happens through a search click or a direct visit days later — tell a much more accurate story. We have seen campaigns where ET's contribution to conversions was essentially invisible under last-click attribution but accounted for roughly twenty-five to thirty percent of assisted conversions under a linear multi-touch model.

The Dentsu e4m Digital Advertising Report and the FICCI-EY Media Report have both highlighted the growing importance of view-through attribution in premium publisher environments, which is directly relevant here; a reader who sees your ad on ET, does not click, but searches for your brand name three days later is a conversion that ET influenced but that last-click models will credit entirely to search. Setting up proper UTM parameters, configuring view-through windows in your analytics platform, and running periodic brand recall surveys among your target audience are the three measurement practices we consider non-negotiable for any serious ET digital ad campaign.

What Is the Difference Between Economic Times Website and App Advertising?

The distinction between economic times website advertising and economic times app advertising is more strategically significant than most media plans acknowledge, and conflating the two often leads to suboptimal campaign performance. The ET app — which has been downloaded by tens of millions of users and consistently ranks among the top news apps in India — serves an audience that is more habitual, more engaged, and more likely to be consuming content in a focused rather than incidental manner. App users have made an active choice to install and regularly open ET; this is a fundamentally different level of intent compared to a user who lands on the ET website through a search result or a social media link.

From an advertising format perspective, the app environment supports certain formats that are either unavailable or less effective on the desktop website — in-app interstitials, push notification-adjacent placements, and app-native banner formats that are designed for the mobile viewport rather than adapted from desktop specifications. The medium rectangle banner, for instance, performs differently in an app scroll feed than it does in a desktop sidebar; the interaction patterns, thumb-scroll behaviour, and screen real estate ratios are all different. Video ads, particularly pre-roll ads before ET Now content consumed on the app, tend to show higher completion rates than their desktop equivalents, which we attribute to the more intentional viewing behaviour of app users.

On the cost side, economic times app advertising and website advertising are often packaged together in direct buys, but when bought separately through programmatic channels, app inventory can sometimes be acquired at a slight discount to premium desktop placements — though this gap has been narrowing as mobile-first consumption has become the norm rather than the exception. The IAMAI (Internet and Mobile Association of India) has consistently reported that mobile now accounts for the majority of digital content consumption in India, which means that any ET digital advertising strategy that is not primarily optimised for the app and mobile web environment is, frankly speaking, fighting the traffic patterns rather than working with them.

How Does Programmatic Advertising Work on The Economic Times?

Programmatic advertising on ET operates through the Times Internet supply-side infrastructure, which makes ET inventory available to advertisers through major DSP platforms — meaning that brands can access ET ad placements through their existing programmatic buying workflows without necessarily going through a direct sales relationship. The mechanics are standard: an advertiser sets up a campaign on a DSP, defines audience parameters and bid floors, and the system automatically purchases impressions on ET when a qualifying user visits the platform and the bid clears the floor price. The CPM rates in programmatic environments tend to be somewhat lower than direct-sold inventory, often in the range of ₹150 to ₹300 for standard display formats, though premium placements and audience-targeted segments can push that higher.

The trade-off with programmatic buying on ET is placement certainty. In a direct buy, you can specify that your leaderboard banner appears on the ET homepage or on the ET Markets section; in programmatic, you are buying the audience as they appear across ET's inventory, which means your ad might run on any section of the site. For brand-safety-conscious advertisers — and this is particularly relevant for BFSI sector brands — programmatic buying on ET should be configured with strong inclusion lists and content category exclusions to ensure that your financial services ad is not appearing adjacent to politically sensitive content or market crash headlines. We always configure these parameters carefully for our clients rather than running on open settings.

The emergence of private marketplace deals (PMPs) on ET has created a middle ground that combines the efficiency of programmatic with some of the control of direct buying; through a PMP, a brand can negotiate a deal ID with Times Internet that gives them access to specific inventory segments — say, ET Prime readers or ET Markets section visitors — through their DSP at a pre-agreed floor price. This is, in our experience, the most sophisticated and efficient way to access ET's premium inventory programmatically, and it is an option that is often not discussed in initial media planning conversations because it requires a slightly more involved setup. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 (DPDPA) has added a compliance layer to programmatic buying that advertisers need to be aware of; audience targeting based on personal data now requires explicit consent frameworks, which Times Internet has been building into its first-party data infrastructure.

Is Economic Times Digital Advertising Right for B2B and BFSI Brands?

To be honest, this is the question we find ourselves answering most often, and the answer is almost always yes — but with important nuances about how the campaign is structured. The BFSI sector is arguably the most natural fit for ET digital advertising, given that the platform's audience is self-selected for financial literacy and active engagement with investment, insurance, and banking topics. A mutual fund brand running a campaign during the ELSS investment season in January and February, a bank launching a new fixed deposit product, or an insurance company promoting term life plans will find that ET's audience is not just large but genuinely pre-qualified for financial services messaging in a way that general-interest digital platforms cannot replicate.

B2B advertising India has a particular challenge that ET addresses quite directly: the difficulty of reaching senior decision-makers at scale without the cost and friction of LinkedIn's premium targeting. Business professionals India-wide who are reading ET are, by definition, engaged with business and economic content; a B2B software company targeting CFOs, a logistics firm targeting supply chain heads, or a commercial real estate developer targeting corporate real estate decision-makers will find ET's audience profile a much better fit than most digital advertising options available at comparable CPM rates. We ran a campaign for an enterprise HR technology brand that had previously relied entirely on LinkedIn for B2B lead generation; by shifting thirty percent of their budget to ET digital advertising with intent-based targeting around HR and workforce content, their cost per qualified lead dropped by roughly forty percent compared to their LinkedIn baseline.

The platform also works well for categories that benefit from the implied credibility of the ET editorial environment — which is why luxury automobile brands, premium real estate developers, and wealth management firms consistently renew their ET digital advertising commitments year after year. ETBrandEquity, the marketing and advertising vertical within the ET ecosystem, is particularly valuable for brands targeting marketing professionals and CMOs; it is a niche but high-quality audience segment that is difficult to reach efficiently through any other digital channel. Short-form video advertising on ET Now's digital properties has also opened up a new format avenue for brands that want the reach and engagement of video with the audience quality of ET's readership.

India's Digital Advertising Market and Why ET Holds a Distinct Position

Digital advertising in India has been growing at a pace that most traditional media categories can only observe with a mixture of admiration and concern. The Pitch Madison Advertising Report and the FICCI-EY Media Report have both documented the sustained double-digit growth in digital advertising India-wide, with digital's share of total advertising expenditure crossing fifty percent in recent years — a threshold that would have seemed implausible a decade ago. Within this expanding market, premium publisher inventory like ET's has been capturing a disproportionate share of brand-safety-conscious budgets, as advertisers who have experienced brand adjacency problems on open-exchange programmatic inventory migrate toward environments where editorial standards provide a natural quality filter.

What makes ET's position in the digital advertising India market particularly durable is the combination of scale and specificity that it offers; very few digital properties in India can claim both sixty-plus million monthly active users and an audience that is demonstrably skewed toward high-income, high-education, decision-making professionals. The business news website India category is relatively concentrated — ET, Moneycontrol, Business Standard, and Mint account for the majority of premium business content consumption — but ET's lead in terms of both audience size and advertiser demand is substantial. Times Internet's investment in content verticals, video, and the ET Prime subscription model has deepened the platform's engagement metrics in ways that purely ad-supported models cannot match.

The omnichannel advertising opportunity that ET represents is also worth noting: a brand that advertises on ET's digital platform can extend its messaging to ET Now on television, to ET's print editions, and to the broader Times Group print and digital portfolio — creating a genuinely integrated media presence that reinforces brand visibility across multiple touchpoints. At SmartAds, we have structured several such integrated campaigns for financial services and real estate clients, and the cross-channel reinforcement effect on brand recall has been consistently measurable in post-campaign research. The influencer marketing India trend has also found its way into ET's ecosystem through sponsored editorial formats and expert contributor content, which gives brands another avenue to associate their messaging with credible voices in the business and finance space.

Tips for Creating High-Performing ET Digital Ads

Creative execution on ET deserves as much strategic attention as media planning, and this is an area where we have seen campaigns succeed or fail based on decisions that had nothing to do with budget or targeting. The ET audience is sophisticated and time-pressed; they are reading business news in the twenty minutes between meetings, on the commute, or over morning coffee — which means that ad creative that requires extensive cognitive processing or that looks like it belongs on a consumer FMCG platform will simply be ignored. The most effective ET digital advertising creative we have seen tends to be direct, data-forward, and respectful of the reader's intelligence.

For display advertising, the creative should lead with the most compelling specific claim — a return figure, a product feature, a deadline — rather than a brand logo and a generic tagline. The leaderboard banner and medium rectangle banner formats have limited real estate, and every pixel of that space should be working toward a single clear message. Animation, where permitted, should be used to reveal information sequentially rather than simply to attract attention; an animated banner that shows a mutual fund's three-year return figure building up to its final number will outperform a banner that simply flashes a logo. For video ads, particularly pre-roll ads on ET Now content, the first five seconds are decisive — the brand message and the reason to keep watching must both be established before the skip option appears.

Native ads and sponsored content on ET require a different creative philosophy entirely, which is one that many brands get wrong by trying to make editorial content feel like advertising. The most effective native ads on ET read like genuinely useful content — a market analysis, a how-to guide, a data-driven opinion piece — that happens to be associated with a brand. A financial planning tool brand that produces a native ad structured as "five questions to ask before choosing a mutual fund" will generate far more engagement and brand association than one that produces a thinly disguised product brochure dressed up in editorial formatting. The click-through rate and dwell time data we have seen from well-executed native ads on ET consistently outperforms equivalent-budget display campaigns, which is why we increasingly recommend sponsored content as the primary format for brands that are building consideration rather than immediate conversion.

Frequently Asked Questions About Economic Times Digital Advertising

Q: How much does it cost to advertise on The Economic Times website?

The economic times advertising rates vary considerably depending on format, placement, and targeting parameters, but to give you a working benchmark: standard display advertising on a CPM basis typically runs somewhere between ₹250 and ₹600 per thousand impressions for direct-sold inventory, with homepage and premium section placements sitting at the higher end of that range. High-impact formats like the skinning banner command a significant premium above this range and are typically sold on a day-part or daily takeover basis rather than a pure CPM model. CPC-based buying, where available, tends to run between ₹15 and ₹45 per click depending on the audience segment and vertical. For a meaningful campaign with enough impressions to generate measurable brand awareness impact, a minimum budget of roughly ₹1.5 lakh to ₹2 lakh is a practical floor, though we generally recommend ₹3 to ₹5 lakh as the threshold at which campaign optimisation becomes statistically meaningful.

Q: What digital ad formats are available on The Economic Times platform?

The ET digital platform supports a wide range of ad formats across both website and app environments. On the display advertising side, these include the leaderboard banner at standard IAB dimensions, the medium rectangle banner, the half-page unit, and the skinning banner for full-page takeover impact. Video ad formats include pre-roll ads and mid-roll ads within ET Now and other video content, with recommended durations of fifteen to thirty seconds for non-skippable formats. Native ads, including the listicle ad format and in-feed native units, are available for brands that want editorial-adjacent placement. Sponsored content packages, which involve branded articles or branded content series hosted on the ET platform, represent the highest-engagement format available and are typically negotiated as custom packages through the Times Internet sales team.

Q: What is the monthly active user base of The Economic Times online?

The Economic Times digital platform — across its website and app — reaches in the range of sixty to seventy million monthly active users, making it one of the largest business news websites in India by audience size. This figure encompasses ET's web traffic, ET app users, and ET Prime subscribers, who represent the most engaged and premium tier of the platform's readership. The Times Internet network, of which ET is a flagship property, aggregates a much larger total audience across all its properties, which is what enables the cross-property audience targeting capabilities that sophisticated advertisers use to extend their ET campaigns.

Q: How do I book a digital advertisement on The Economic Times?

Booking a digital advertisement on ET can be done through two primary routes. The direct route involves working with the Times Internet advertising sales team or through an authorised media buying agency like SmartAds, which handles the brief, format recommendation, creative specifications, campaign setup, and performance reporting as an integrated service. The programmatic route allows advertisers to access ET inventory through DSP platforms, either through open auction or through private marketplace deals negotiated with Times Internet. For first-time advertisers, working through an agency with existing Times Internet relationships is generally the most efficient path, as it provides access to better inventory, more transparent pricing, and campaign management support that is particularly valuable when you are still learning what works on the platform.

Q: What is the difference between CPM and CPC pricing on Economic Times?

CPM — cost per thousand impressions — is the pricing model used for campaigns where the primary objective is brand awareness or brand visibility; you pay for every thousand times your ad is displayed, regardless of whether anyone clicks on it. CPC — cost per click — is the pricing model used for performance-oriented campaigns where the objective is driving traffic to a landing page or generating leads; you pay only when someone clicks on your ad. On ET, CPM buying is more common for display advertising and video ads, while CPC buying is more typically associated with certain native ad formats and performance-oriented placements. The right choice depends entirely on your campaign objective: if you are building brand awareness among ET's business professional audience, CPM is the appropriate metric; if you are running a lead generation campaign for a financial product, CPC may be more relevant — though we would caution against using last-click CPC as the sole measure of value on a premium publisher like ET.

Q: Can I target specific cities or regions with Economic Times digital ads?

Yes, geographic targeting is one of the more granular capabilities available through ET digital advertising. City-level targeting allows campaigns to be restricted to specific metro cities — Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, and others — or to be configured to reach audiences in tier-2 cities India where ET's readership has been growing. State-level and regional targeting is also available for brands with broader geographic mandates. This geo-targeting capability is particularly valuable for real estate developers, regional banks, and retail brands whose products are only relevant in specific markets; paying for PAN India impressions when your product is only available in three cities is a budget inefficiency that targeted buying eliminates entirely.

Q: Is advertising on the Economic Times app different from the website?

Yes, and the differences matter strategically. Economic times app advertising reaches a more habitual, engaged audience — people who have actively chosen to install the ET app and return to it regularly — while economic times website advertising captures a broader audience that includes both regular readers and incidental visitors arriving through search or social referrals. The app environment supports mobile-native ad formats that are designed for the scroll and tap interaction patterns of smartphone users, while the website supports both desktop-optimised and mobile-responsive formats. Video ad completion rates tend to be higher on the app, and the overall engagement metrics — time spent, pages per session, return visit frequency — are stronger among app users. For most campaigns, we recommend buying both environments together, but the creative and format specifications should be optimised separately for each rather than using a single set of assets across both.

Q: What audience does The Economic Times digital platform reach?

ET's digital audience is concentrated among urban, English-literate, economically active adults who are engaged with business, finance, markets, and economic news. The platform's readership skews heavily toward business professionals India-wide, investors India-wide, and decision-makers across corporate, entrepreneurial, and financial contexts. Geographically, the audience is strongest in Mumbai, Delhi, and Bangalore, with meaningful and growing presence in other metro and tier-2 cities. Income and education profiles are significantly above the Indian internet average, which is why BFSI brands, premium consumer brands, B2B service providers, and high-consideration categories like real estate and automobiles consistently find ET's audience to be among the most valuable in the digital advertising India ecosystem.

Q: How do I measure the performance of my Economic Times digital ad campaign?

Performance measurement for ET digital advertising should be structured around the campaign objective rather than defaulting to a single metric. For brand awareness campaigns, the relevant metrics are impressions delivered, frequency per unique user, and brand lift — the last of which requires a dedicated survey methodology. For performance campaigns, click-through rate, cost per click, and post-click conversion rate are the primary metrics, but these should be supplemented with multi-touch attribution analysis to capture ET's contribution to the broader conversion journey. Standard UTM parameter tagging, view-through attribution windows configured in your analytics platform, and reconciliation of ad server data against your own analytics are the three technical foundations of good measurement. We also recommend periodic brand recall surveys among your target audience as the most direct measure of whether ET digital advertising is moving the needle on the brand metrics that ultimately drive business outcomes.

Q: Does The Economic Times offer programmatic or native advertising options?

Both programmatic advertising and native ads are available on ET, and they serve quite different strategic purposes. Programmatic advertising allows brands to access ET inventory through DSP platforms — either through open auction or through private marketplace deals — with the efficiency and automation of algorithmic buying. Native ads, which are designed to integrate visually and editorially with ET's content environment, are available in several formats including in-feed native units and the listicle ad format, and they are particularly effective for brands that want to engage readers in a content-consumption mindset rather than interrupting them with traditional display formats. Sponsored content, which sits adjacent to native advertising but involves longer-form branded editorial content, is a separate product negotiated through direct sales and represents the highest-engagement, highest-credibility format available on the platform.

Q: What industries benefit most from advertising on The Economic Times?

The BFSI sector — banking, financial services, and insurance — is the most natural fit for ET digital advertising, given the platform's concentration of financially literate, investment-active readers. B2B advertising India across technology, consulting, logistics, and professional services finds ET valuable for reaching senior decision-makers at a more competitive cost than LinkedIn. Real estate developers targeting corporate and high-net-worth buyers, automobile brands targeting premium and business-use vehicle buyers, education brands targeting working professionals for upskilling programs, and luxury consumer brands targeting high-income urban professionals all find ET's audience profile to be a strong match for their target customer. That said, even FMCG brands with premium positioning — a high-end personal care brand, a premium food product — can use ET effectively for brand visibility among the affluent urban consumer segment, though the platform is less suited to mass-market FMCG campaigns where reach breadth matters more than audience quality.

Q: What is the minimum budget required to run a digital ad on Economic Times?

The practical minimum budget for a meaningful ET digital advertising campaign is in the range of ₹1.5 lakh to ₹2 lakh, which will buy enough impressions over a short campaign window to generate some performance data — though not necessarily enough to draw statistically robust conclusions. For a campaign that runs long enough to optimise creative, test targeting variations, and measure brand impact, we recommend a minimum of ₹3 to ₹5 lakh. Programmatic buying through open auction can lower the entry threshold somewhat, but the trade-off in placement quality and campaign control is significant. For ET Prime sponsorships and sponsored content packages, bud