In particular, publishers who receive income from selling media space constantly strive to develop and find new ways to increase digital advertising revenues. New trends and innovations come and go. Sometimes, it can be difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff when thinking about what is really useful, worth testing, and worth putting into practice. Media and websites are different, and not all solutions are suitable for everyone, but those who build a framework and operating culture that enables continuous testing and innovation usually achieve the best results in advertising sales.
Relevant Digital is a software and service company that works globally with publishers and various advertising sales organizations. For publishers, we have developed Relevant Yield, which allows publishers to manage and optimize advertising technologies and combine all critical sales data in a single user interface to facilitate decision-making.
Relevant Yield helps publishers develop and enhance ad sales processes, increase advertising revenues, and enable daily cost savings by making various maintenance tasks and testing easy. This neutral technology does not automatically favour or optimize individual demand sources but instead focuses on achieving the best possible total sales and transparency. Relevant Yield is used by ad ops teams, people responsible for sales and revenue development, management, and, of course, advertising sales teams.
Relevant Digital is an independent company whose mission is to increase revenues from publishers' digital services. We have been fulfilling this mission for 10 years. Based on what we have learned from the market and our customers, we would like to share some of our experiences and tips regarding optimising digital advertising and current trends. Additionally, we will tell you how Relevant Yield helps publishers build an operating culture of continuous growth and learning.
More advertisers by investing in quality
Investing in the viewability of ad placements is always topical. Advertising buyers must be more aware and demanding than ever. If previously 60% viewability was considered reasonable, now the goal should be closer to 80%.
We have noticed that improving the viewability of ad placements significantly increases the number of advertisers interested in the site and enables a higher achievable cost level (eCPM). A tool like Relevant Yield helps to identify development needs, monitor the development of the viewability, and the effect of quality improvement on the number of buyers, price level, and total sales.
We started working to improve the viewability of one publisher's ad placements in February 2022, when it was at 57%. In February, there were 6,480 advertisers on the site. In April, the viewability had risen to 73.7%, with 10,203 advertisers on the site.
The attached graphs also show the effect the change had on revenue, eCPM, and RPM.
The results show that the improvement has had a great impact on income. We recommend monitoring buyer behavior and testing to find a balance in terms of the quality of the ad inventory. You can read more about improving viewability here.
Ad-refresh, i.e. updating the ad during a page load
Ad-refresh is especially useful for sites and content where visitors spend more time. These are often news, sports, and video content. Ad-refresh refers to loading several advertisements to the ad placement during the same page load. Even if the visitor stays on the same page, several different advertisements are updated in the ad placements of the page. Ad-refresh can be used to increase the ad inventory and thus also affect the income from advertising and the viewability of ads on the site because the ad is only updated if the ad placement is visible.
Regarding sales growth, it is essential that the entire auction, covering all vendors from Prebid to Amazon, is allowed to re-bid. In some cases, it makes sense to limit ad refresh to programmatic campaigns only. Then, a tool like Relevant Yield is needed, which can be used to manage, e.g., enabling reloading by ad placement, reload interval (time), number of reloads, and the minimum viewability before a new ad is loaded. Read more about ad refresh here.
The future of advertising targeting
Advertising targeting and its future have remained hot topics for a long time as various parties contemplate what will happen after the removal of third-party cookies. Right now, it seems that targeting in the future will primarily take place using first-party data, shared IDs, and contextualization.
Technically, one of the strongest means will be first-party data. However, even the largest publishers will face challenges with having enough data, and smaller ones will likely find it challenging, perhaps impossible, to achieve the desired scale.
Contextual targeting has recently become fashionable again. The third interesting and growing trend is shared IDs. We don't yet know if browsers will support shared IDs in the future, but they might add value to the digital advertising ecosystem.
We have implemented a large-scale pilot with publishers ID5, Piano DMP, and Adform DSP regarding shared identifiers. The results have been positive for both publishers and advertisers. Reachability in Safari and Firefox has improved significantly when, instead of third-party cookies, targeting has been done using ID5 identifiers. The revenues have also seen a clear (around 10%) growth. So, the publisher should learn about this possibility as well. Using a tool like Relevant Yield, it's easy to implement shared IDs, test them, and measure their functionality. You can find more on the topic here.
Ongoing floor price optimization
Optimizing advertising is a continuous learning process, and testing and utilizing new ideas can be very profitable.
One helpful idea is to optimize floor prices based on the audience. Some of our customers optimize prices based on the geographical location of visitors. For example, an audience from the domestic market may be more valuable to a local advertiser than international visitors. Floor prices that vary by region should be tested, especially by publishers that reach a broad audience, for example, worldwide. If publishers can identify a visitor's geographic location, Relevant Yield offers a solution to set floor prices based on this information. Base pricing based on content categories may also be reasonable, i.e. financial news may be more "valuable" than local news.
Another fascinating aspect is the behaviour of different buying platforms (DSP). Their goal is to buy advertising inventory as cheaply as possible. As we live in an ecosystem where one DSP's market share is significantly larger than the others, covering a large number of advertisers, it may be possible that active price optimization can activate the better-paying advertisers of that DSP to become buyers of the site. Searching for optimal price levels is interesting when you use a tool like Relevant Yield, which makes it easy to test floor prices and monitor the effect.
Prebid Mobile
We have noticed that many publishers are struggling with mobile app monetization. Partly, this is because scalable technologies enabling the commercialization of the application inventory have not been available. But the good news is that things are getting better. Several customers use Relevant Yield to prebid in mobile applications and have achieved good results.
Using Prebid in applications requires the Prebid server-side implementation. Relevant Yield also fully supports the Prebid server-side solution, enabling more efficient application monetization. You can read more about the Prebid server here.
But most importantly...
As stated, trends come and go, and only some survive. But how can you build a sustainable and innovative media sales culture that enables continuous growth?
Hardly anyone expects that, but unfortunately, there is no single easy solution. Increasing advertising revenues and commercial development of media is continuous hard work that is also fun. We would start by paying attention to at least these things:
- Enable continuous agile testing and optimization
- Free up resources from manual work, e.g. from reporting to commercialization
- Make sure that everyone involved in advertising sales has access to the necessary data, from Ad ops to sales management. For some, it may mean SSP-specific detailed level reporting, while for others it may mean tracking sales per advertiser.
- Make sure that you have motivated and curious employees and that they have the necessary tools to test and exploit new innovations.
These are the themes that we at Relevant Digital work on every day. We support publishers in their development work with Relevant Yield and our expertise.
Relevant Yield is the market's most comprehensive and effective solution for maximizing advertising revenue. It offers independent Header Bidding management and analytics in one system, as well as reporting covering all sales sources. With Relevant Yield, sales and ad ops teams can improve their processes and benefit from cost savings and increased advertising revenue.
Read more about Relevant Yield here or order a free consultation here. If you do not currently need development in advertising sales, you can also subscribe to our newsletter to stay in the loop.