Introduction
If you are a publisher and are losing ad revenue, then it is time to take a closer look at where the revenue is dropping to see what you can do to avoid it in the future. A drop in ad revenue can be due to many factors such as inventory quality and ad placement issues.
You may start getting lesser impressions because of low demand from advertisers or because they are unable to reach their targeted audience on your site due to poor targeting options offered by your platform provider.
Lets dig deeper on the whole scenario now.
Advertisers are increasingly looking for more relevant ad placements.
Advertisers are increasingly looking for more relevant ad placements, so if you are not using the right ad network or partnered with the right adtech company, it becomes a problem!
They want to make sure that their ads are being seen by their target audience and most importantly and are getting a good ROI for all that ad spend.
If you aren’t using a tool like an ad revenue calculator that gives you the best estimates on how much you are making and losing, you’re missing out!
Advertisers don’t just want to know what sites their ads appear on—they also want to know who is seeing them.
Why did your ad revenue drop?
1. Traffic slump & less Impressions
If you’ve observed your traffic declining lately, you may have also seen the gross ad impressions dipping as well! Find out how much traffic is declining by checking your Google Analytics account in the pageviews section. Usually, its an SEO issue and lack of posting quality content consistently.
2. Low Fill Rate
Once Q4 starts, publishers do their best to increase their floor prices for improving their ad earnings. But, they dont keep up with floor price readjustments after the holidays which leads to a slump in ad fill rates as advertisers dont feel like bidding when the inventory price is not right! The reason for this is the decrease in demand for ad inventory, as users are less engaged and, consequently, buyers are more cautious during recessions.
3. CPM Drop
The ad revenue doesn’t necessarily increase after publishers lower their floor prices after the holiday season. This is mainly due to inevitable CPM (Cost per 1000 impressions) drop in January which has been hard to stop since the past few years. CPM decline zeroes out majority of the work put in by bloggers regardless of the improvements made to fill rates or ad inventory.
We all know that profits made during Q4 are the largest, so its hard for Q1 to keep up with that level of CPM highs.
- Ad Blockers
Another reason is the use of ad blockers by users. This is a major cause for concern, as more and more people use them as they become aware of them.
How to recover ad revenue
To recover ad revenue, you need to understand what you can control and what you can’t.
Here’s what you can do to improve your ad revenue:
1- Floor Price Readjustments
Readjusting the floor price can easily increase the fill rates on your site. In December, a high floor price probably gave you optimal returns, but it doesn’t work the same way in January. Advertisers try spending less on ads after the holiday season. That’s why you’ll need to lower your floor prices to get more deals and boost your ad revenue.
2- Private Marketplace (PMP) deals
In addition to ad network auctions, PMP deals can significantly increase your inventory value. 7 figure publishers love PMP deals, as the whole process is smooth and transparent with an exclusive pool of advertisers who actually want to buy your ad space. This results in higher RPMs and eCPMs.
3- Optimize your ad Inventory
Once you readjust your floor prices, its time to split test yout ad placements and go for winning ad sizes and formats. If possible, choose a placement that includes Video Views or Watch Time % instead of Impressions as this will give advertisers more value for their dollar and drive higher bids from them in turn leading to better fill rates for your ads too!
To determine what works best for your websites, experiment with different ad placements and ad units. Once you know what whic ad units and formats work best, no one can stop you from improving your earnings from ads.
4- Talk to AdOps Professionals
There’s no publisher out there that knows the A-Z of ad revenue optimization and its hard to optimize ad layouts, do PMP deals, and split test all the time leaving you less time for creating content. This is when you need to talk to an ad management company like MonetizeMore or Playwire so that they work on your site’s ad optimization and revenue scope audits while you focus on development and content.
You can stay on top of your competition by retaining and increasing your inventory value.
You can stay on top of your competition by retaining and increasing your inventory value. You can do so by using header bidding. Header bidding is a way to get the most value out of your inventory by using real-time bidding (RTB) technology.
You might be thinking, “Why use header bidding?” Header bidding will help you increase both fill rate and ad revenue for many reasons:
- It increases the fill rate because more sources bid on the impression, resulting in fewer wasted impressions.
- Since there are more bidders on each impression, it’s easier to get a low price point than if only one buyer were competing with multiple sellers as would happen without RTB technology such as Pubguru Header Bidding.
Take advantage of real-time programmatic header bidding to increase your fill rate.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are many factors that play into the amount of ad revenue you’re losing. Unfortunately, it’s not easy to know how much revenue you’re losing from each one of these losses (especially if they all happen at once!). But by partnering with the right AdTech company who can do it all for you while you work on the content part, you’ll save a tonne of time & money.
How much ad revenue have you lost lately? Let us know in the comments.
