One of our favorite things to do here at sovrn is to serve premium advertising on our publishers’ websites. While we like to serve as many premium ads to our publishers as possible, there are sometimes reasons why advertisers won’t advertise on a website. We wanted to pass along some of the things we’ve learned about how you can remove these advertising roadblocks and make your website more advertiser friendly—and make more money!
High-Quality Content- the #1 Way to Attract Premium Advertisers
The first thing an advertiser looks at when deciding whether or not to advertise on a website is the quality of content. Quality content generally means engaging text, images, and video excluding nudity, profanity, or indecency. Most are looking for websites with content suited for all audiences. It’s not to say that you shouldn’t take a stand about things or be opinionated—just try not to be inappropriate or offensive. Even dated content can come up in a search and prevent us from advertising on your site. Improving content from top to bottom is the first and most important thing you should be thinking about if you want to make money as a publisher.
Ad Tag Location
If you are thinking about where to install your sovrn ad tag on your website, install it above the fold. This isn’t always possible with varying website designs, widgets, and images. But if you have the option, or are going through a redesign sometime soon, keep this in mind. After content, the second question advertisers like to ask is where their ad will be served on the site. Oftentimes, the only answer they will accept is “above the fold.” Above the fold ad tags make it a lot easier for us to sell your ad space and make you money.
No Exclusive Contracts
When you use our ad services, you don’t have to sign any exclusive agreements or binding contracts. You can use us for advertising and concurrently work with any other advertising network you would like to. However, if you work with an advertiser who does make you sign an exclusive agreement, we are then limited from providing you ad services or helping you optimize your revenue by integrating with other open networks. If a goal of yours is to make more money, you can be far more strategic by avoiding exclusive contracts. And if you have quality content and growing readership, signing an exclusive agreement is something you should avoid. If you have an exclusive agreement you could be getting paid the same thing for a whole year even if your traffic doubles.
Increase US Traffic
While we have plenty of awesome international publishers, it’s still very difficult to monetize international traffic. By far, the US has the largest advertising spend in the world. As such, US internet traffic is really the only traffic that our premium advertisers want to see. So if you are trying to make more advertising money, just keep in mind, it’s not total page views that count—it’s US page views.
Have a Privacy Policy
Have a privacy policy. As a sovrn Publisher you agree to post a Privacy Policy on your homepage at a minimum. To really do it right, this policy should have a hyperlink back to the opt-out policies of anyone who advertises on your site (you can find sovrn’s here and many more at NAI). A good privacy policy and opt-out clause just means that your readers can opt-out from passing along cookies and other information to third parties when visiting your website if they so choose. You can build an industry standard Privacy Policy at http://www.bbbonline.org/UnderstandingPrivacy/PMRC/createpolicy.asp. It’s a small thing you can do that won’t change your site besides a small link at the bottom, but it will help you to be more appealing to advertisers and make more money.
These are just some things we have learned from our premium advertisers about how they spend their money. Let us know if you can think of anything else!
