Seven tips: Higher advertising revenue for website operators
1. below the fold & variety
When positioning ads on your site, remember that you can also display ads in areas of a page that are not immediately visible. If the content on your page is of high quality and interesting, the reader will scroll to the end of the text. You can offer additional ad space there. For greater profit, you should also allow both text and display ads. Publishers often only use one of the two ad types for visual reasons. You should also activate the option of displaying different format sizes in one ad position. This increases the competitive and auction pressure among advertisers and results in rising CPMs.
2. standards & billboard
Concentrate on the integration of IAB standard formats. Agencies, ad networks, advertisers and advertisers focus on these standardized ads when creating banners, as they can skim off the largest possible inventory. The integration of one or a few special formats represents a good mix of optimal monetization while maintaining a good user experience for the reader. Here too, as long as the advertising industry concentrates on communicating its advertising message using IAB standard formats, publishers will benefit from the competition for available advertising space and thus from rising CPMs. The attention-grabbing billboard is one of the online advertising formats in Germany for which gross advertising investments rose the most last year (OVK Online Report 2015/02, page 11). A strong shift in the advertising budgets invested from wallpaper to billboard can be seen. Take advantage of this trend and offer a corresponding billboard format on your site.
3. mobile analysis & monetization
Mobile reach is increasing. As a guideline, it can be assumed that more than 30 percent of all accesses are made via mobile devices these days. For the top 20 news sites in Germany, this figure is as high as 40 percent (analysis by Meedia). Analyze the pages with the highest traffic in your mobile reach and ensure consistent monetization of these. Mobile interstitial or undestitial formats and the medium rectangle currently have the best mobile performance. As the requirements in advertising marketing for mobile and stationary reach differ greatly, you should use specialized mobile marketers for mobile premium marketing.
4. content & SEO
Traffic is an important success factor: Every advertising revenue from a reach stands and falls with the reach that can be marketed. The basis for this is a well thought-out content strategy. Advertising revenue can only remain at a consistently high level if your website always presents up-to-date and interesting content that is ideally also SEO-optimized. Improve your existing content strategy by regularly monitoring the success of your top categories and articles using your web analytics tool.
5. ad server & inventory cluster
Exploit all marketing options for your website. By using your own ad server solution, you have the option of controlling your entire advertising inventory in a CPM-optimized manner. The market leader among ad server systems, the Google DFP Small Business Adserver, is particularly suitable for this purpose. It can be used free of charge by any website operator who has their own AdSense account. In the ad server, you can cluster your available inventory according to criteria relevant to the advertising industry, such as demographics, geography (for example, targeting by zip code level) or interests. This additional information for advertisers reduces wastage in targeting and leads to greatly increased CPMs.
6. remaining space & CPM uplift
In addition to marketing your premium advertising spaces, do not underestimate remnant space marketing. By using an ad server, the available residual space inventory on the standard IAB formats Leaderboard, Medium Rectangle and Skyscraper that is not optimally monetized by the premium marketer can be auctioned off to the highest bidder according to a dynamically configurable CPM. This allows previously neglected reach potential to be additionally monetized.
7. dynamics & performance enhancement
Put the performance of your own premium marketer in competition with Google AdSense or the Doubleclick Ad Exchange program. This means that an ad is displayed based on a dynamically defined CPM level. The marketer or ad network that offers the highest CPM for the ad placement is awarded the contract for the ad placement (dynamic allocation). Experience shows that an increase in performance of up to 50 percent can be achieved with this type of yield optimization.
