How to Acquire Premium Demand for Your Inventory (PART 1)

The future of online media has become more about quality and safety. Advertisers are changing their buying strategies, taking into account a new approach to data security and user experience enhancement. Over the past couple of years, Marketers and Advertisers have become significantly more educated about what you can do with Programmatic technology, and expectations are higher than ever.

Publishers seem to understand the market’s challenges. However, the approach to own products and to the sales strategy is changing in order to win back higher CPMs and attract quality demand. Looking through the prism of performance in Programmatic, increasing the quality of inventory still requires some groundwork to do.

Taking good care of product

Online media is all about metrics, and premium demand suppliers are investigating sites closely from many angles before they start cooperation. To make sure as a Publisher you meet their expectations, we recommend that you look at your product holistically so as to understand your inventory within the Programmatic landscape.

Below you will find the first part of the key areas that we recommend reviewing:

Viewability – overview

The IAB defines viewable impression as below:

Display ads: 50% of the ad’s pixels are seen for a continuous 1 sec.
Large display ads (+242k pixel): 30% ad’s pixel seen.
In-stream video ads: 50% ads pixels seen for a continuous 2 sec.

Increasingly brands and media agencies set their own standards of viewability. We sometimes see 50%, 70%, 80% and even 100% of viewable impressions as being a measure of success among Advertisers.

The ultimate goal of the Advertiser is to reach out and encourage the user to engage with their services / products. To achieve this, it’s important to make sure that those ads reach the prospective client. Advertisers know that high-visibility ads generate better ROI for their campaigns. Therefore, Advertisers target their ads to highly visible websites. They’re also willing to pay significantly more to get those viewable impressions. On the other hand, Advertisers exclude sites and ad placements with less viewable ads because they know that they contribute little to the effectiveness of their ad campaigns.

Publishers with higher viewability will not only be considered, but can justify a premium. Ensuring strong viewability helps secure higher bids and more demand for your inventory.

Being able to monitor and optimise ad viewability can directly increase your CPM rates.

Design

Most Publishers immediately think of design changes when it comes to optimizing Viewability. Here are some tips on how Publishers can significantly improve their overall website viewability score:

• Using Above-The-Fold
• Avoid top of page placements
• Use on-fold and immediately above fold placements
• Aligning ads with the most sticky parts of your content
• Keep the length of the webpage short
• Dedicated, optimized setup for specific page types or content categories

The Ad Layout Review can help you to find out which of these changes best support your business:

Speed of both ads and the product

Both the ad speed and the speed of the product itself have an impact on viewability metric.
Asynchronous loading where possible: This helps the ad to load independently of the page resources.
Minimizing passback: This means reducing the number of ad calls made from different servers through pass backs.
Lazy loading: Loads the ads only when they are in the viewpoint of the user. This helps to ensure higher viewability and will reduce the number of impressions served out of the view.
optimal Header Bidders setup: test both the quantity and the choice of bidders to ensure that ads are served quickly. Consider using server-side HB setup as well.

Ad serving

1. Select more viewable sizes: the content and layout will determine the size of the ad.
Most common, ad sizes like 728×90, 300×250, and 300×600, along with vertical sizes like 120×140, 240×400, 160×600, and 120×600 are considered the most viewable.

2. Use the best performing ad position. Even slight changes to the exact location where you place ads can significantly affect their visibility. For example, placing the top leader below the site navigation bar instead of at the top of the page. As ever, the key is to test and measure what works best for a given situation.

3. Use sticky ads and adhesion units – Some ad placements are designed to maximise ad viewability by staying within the viewable area for longer. Adhesive ads are those that stick to the top, bottom, or side of the screen so as to stay in view.

4. Use more types of ads that get higher results in terms of viewability – eg. video

Content quality

Last but not least (for this part) – content that is engaging and informative offers a better chance of holding the user’s attention as they scroll through the page. Invest in content, keeping it interesting, relevant and fresh, which in turn ensures that the user will see the ad. This is what building value in your website’s ad space is all about.
A deep understanding of your content is crucial in an increasingly competitive digital media. The content data and audience stats it can provide are one of the most powerful development tools any online Publisher can have; but only if they can clearly reflect your business goals and provide insights that you can use.

For that purpose you can use Google Analytics (or other web analytics tools) and analyse:
a) Find out what type of content your users are most interested in and focus on them.
b) Check the depth of your content scrolling and consider using non-text content at key points to keep your visitors engaged.

In the next part of this article we will discuss the role of Audience, Ad Density, Web Vitals, CMP, Safety and Demand Suppliers. Stay tuned!