Historically, the industry has seen increases in programmatic advertising spend during Q4, especially around the holidays. As a publisher, this means you are likely seeing an uptick in ad performance as Q4 comes to a close. However, this may not last for long. Brands pull back on their programmatic ad dollars as Q1 and the New Year commence.
So, what does this mean for publishers? Initially, you will see lower fill rates and CPMs in Q1 than what you saw in Q4. In an effort to combat this drop in ad performance, we have a few suggestions for you.
Lower Your Floors
When you set a price floor, you are effectively preventing advertisers from bidding on your inventory. Thus, when you lower your floors you are allowing more demand partners to bid on your inventory, which can positively affect your revenue stream. Lowering your floors in the first part of the new year will help combat a decrease in ad performance.
Add Additional Ad Zones
Adding more ad zones to your site will help increase your ad revenue. While we recommend having 5 ad zones or less per page, identifying how many zones you have on each page will help you evaluate where additional zones can be added. This is where InView ads come into play. InView ads can be completely additive to your current page layout without changing any of your existing ad zones.
InView ad units leverage reader engagement activity cues to serve creatives only when each unit is at least 51% in view. The ads continue to create additional ad serving opportunities as long as the reader is engaged with site content, generating multiple impressions per pageview. The best way to get started is to implement one of the sticky InView ads into existing white space on your site.
Implement Outstream Video
Video ads are an easy way to bring in additional ad revenue. But what if you don’t have video content you ask? Not to worry. Outstream video ads allow you to monetize your editorial content with high video CPM’s that are fully responsive, highly viewable and gives readers full playing control. And the best part? You don’t need video content.
Consider Hashed Emails
A hashed email is an encrypted version of an email address. They can benefit publishers in two ways:
Direct Monetization
Hashed emails create an additional revenue stream by helping publishers monetize their data. They do so without sacrificing the privacy or security of their readers, as all data is non-personally identifiable. For publishers with a significant number of emails, Sovrn will pay based on the number of net new unique hashed emails in a calendar month.
Indirect Monetization
Stronger reader profiles provide demand partners more data and thereby reward Sovrn publishers with increased CPMs. They also allow for better audience analytics in Me.
Explore Header Bidding
Have you considered implementing header bidding on your site? Header bidding is a technical optimization to programmatic advertising that enables publishers to offer their inventory to demand partners simultaneously, rather than sequentially,before sending the winning bid to their ad server.
While header bidding isn’t a great fit for every publisher, as it is more technically challenging to implement, it can truly supercharge your ad optimization.
There you have it. A few strategies we recommend implementing as we head into the new year.
