Adapting to the New Cookieless reality: An Expert Update for Publishers
Welcome to a new piece in Yieldbird’s series, drawing from our own research into the significant shifts in the programmatic…
Increasing the site’s revenue. It has always been a priority number one. You’ve tried dozens of methods, read many articles and experimented with your own ideas. Some turned out effective, while others were completely useless. We’ve tried all of this on our own, and we know what works, and what will be a waste of time.
One of the most effective methods is creating a user-friendly website layout. You have to choose the right amount of ads, too many may decrease your value to advertisers, while not enough will cause low revenue.
Then, you should decide where on the page should they be placed. If the ad units won’t be visible, they won’t generate any revenue. Meeting these conditions accordingly is crucial for the financial success of your website.
What can you do to increase your website revenue?
Follow what’s happening in the industry
The programmatic market is developing at a surprising pace. In 2020 in the US the total programmatic ad spend is predicted to amount to $68.87 billion. The year to year growth is supposed to be 20.1%. Aside from the amazing growth, the market evolves and gets regulated more and more.
This is why staying up to date with what’s happening in the market is so important. It’s easy to stay behind your competitors or overlook a significant change. Regulations like GDPR, or CCPA and third-party data limitations following it, are only a few of these changes.
GDPR
May 25, 2018, is one of this century’s most important and controversial dates for online advertising. On this day the General Data-Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect in the European Union. When the law was adopted in 2016, many did not realize what may it cause.
The GDPR has surely led to a revival in the contextual advertising trend. It used to be very popular at the beginning of digital advertising. Back then, the article was manually tagged by the writer.
However, today the site analysis is performed by external technologies, which, with the help of bots, crawl the pages and segment its content. Thanks to this method, new user packages can be created, and the publisher can continue with GDPR-safe targeting.
First – price
The first-price auction model is used by many SSPs already, and Google recently has joined this group.
Though the majority of the programmatic world is already familiar with this auction model, Google is a dominant player. Any change introduced by such large market participants may be impactful for everyone else.
Google claims that the biggest reason behind this change is that it wants to simplify things in programmatic. The market has become so complex in recent years, that all the buying and selling strategies got too complicated. According to Google’s latest announcement, it just became too much, even for experts.
Unified Pricing Rules
Pricing Rules were recently replaced by the Unified Pricing Rules. The pricing rules which have been used so far got withdrawn completely. The new mechanisms took their role over. Their task is to help manage the access to a publisher’s inventory much simpler than it used to be.
The UPRs (Unified Pricing Rules) are designed to simplify and become a center of managing the minimum prices of publishers’ inventory. What distinguishes them from the old pricing rules, is their wide range of applications. The new rules will apply not only to Authorized Buyers (i.e. buyers in Ad Exchange) operating on the open market. They will also influence:
- Private auctions (PMP).
- SSP platforms participating in Exchange Bidding.
- Header Bidding.
- All the non-guaranteed line items (Price Priority, Bulk, Network) that are at Priority 12 in GAM.
- First Look Demand.
- Other Ad Exchange accounts linked in GAM.
Third-party data limitations
The increasing awareness of the importance of user privacy causes new privacy regulations to come out regularly. It makes it much harder to navigate in this world.
Google conducted an experiment, which was supposed to check how may the lack of cookies influence the publisher’s revenue. The results were disturbing – 56-64% of the publisher’s revenue may be lost due to this.
The question arises – is it possible to efficiently advertise in the world without easily accessible 3rd party data?
Experts recommend taking a look at solutions such as contextual advertising and paywalls. In their opinion, it should compensate for the possible loss of advertising results.
Industry events
As we’ve just described most of the major changes that have occurred in the last year and a half, it’d be appropriate to answer a question – where can I learn about all this?!
Of course, there are many blogs and ad tech news sites that cover most of these topics. They usually share a lot about what’s going on in the market. But, is there anything else you can do to gain knowledge?
Actually, there is. Many industry events happen throughout the year. You can attend lectures led by the best experts in the industry, after which you can talk with them and ask the questions about your particular case. There are three benefits coming from this solution:
- You may learn a lot about the topics you’re currently interested in.
- You’ll know what’s going on in the industry.
- Your network of contacts will grow. Maybe in the future, you’ll be doing business together.
What events should you attend?
There are some that are worthwhile. Every couple months we organize a YieldFest. An event that lets publishers from all over the market meet and exchange ideas, inspire each other and discuss all the issues that are currently disturbing them.
Our events are not the only ones that you can attend. Companies mentioned below organize some events on their own, we’ve attended some of them and we can assure you that they are worthwhile.
What about ad units?
Layout
Learning is one thing, but knowledge without action won’t be of much help. So, what can you start working on now, to increase the site’s revenue?
Very often, when we begin working with a new publisher, we advise them on how can they improve their site’s layout. Increase, or decrease the number of ad units, change their position and size. Creating the site’s layout to achieve the best result requires the usage of appropriate techniques, products, and, most importantly, getting to know the user of your website.
Look for the perfect balance between UX and advertising. It’ll let you maintain your users as well as increase your revenue.
Different methods
However, are layout changes all that you can do to increase the site’s revenue now? As usual, there’s always more to do.
There are two revenue increasing methods that are easy to implement.
Anchor ad
Testing anchor ad could bring good results without much effort. On the other hand, it could cause a negative impact on user experience. To know exactly what to expect, we performed a two-week test on four websites.
We expected this ad unit to have high viewability. This ad unit is supposed to be present throughout the whole user’s visit on the website. Its average result was over 92%.
What’s surprising is that we’ve managed to generate 120% additional revenue. Especially while having eight other ad units on mobile and desktop.
Ad Refresh
Ad Refresh is a method that lets you view several advertisements in one ad slot within the one page-view. Despite its bad reputation, it can be highly effective.
To our surprise, the ad refresh generated growth of daily RPPV (revenue per 1000 page views) of 63%. The daily revenue of this site also increased by approximately 17%. These results were visible the very next day after launching the ad refresh on the website.
Technical solutions
Besides the work that you can do on your site’s layout and ad units, you can try some other popular among publishers’ methods that usually increase the site’s revenue.
They usually demand a little of technical abilities, but they’re worth trying them.
Header bidding
It isn’t the hottest news that the header bidding is an excellent way to increase digital ad revenue. In just two years, header bidding has gone from a matter for only the most tech-savvy publishers to becoming an industry standard.
To this day, over 70% of publishers have adopted header bidding. Server-side is slowly catching up. Why? It’s simply much trickier to develop, although it is much better.
Ad Blocking
Advertisement blocking is a must-have for many publishers. Many of them use it because of legal issues.
In many countries, the law prohibits site owners from advertising specific products or services on the internet. What’s more, is that it’s even prohibited to display certain ads to specific groups of users. These are categories such as alcohol, gambling, or guns.
Despite the legislation, site owners do not want their visitors to see certain creatives. They may contain disgusting photos of sick body parts related to dietary supplements.
AMP
AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. It’s a Google-backed project designed as an open standard for any publisher. It’s supposed to make pages load quickly on mobile devices.
This open-source initiative from Google made a lot of noise in the industry. Especially since more and more users are coming from mobile devices. Without AMP, mobile users can expect pages to load much slower. It can be even up to 3-5 times slower. This isn’t sustainable for users or publishers.
Programmatic deals
Aside from the programmatically (RTB) sold advertising slots, you can do it in direct sales as well. All you have to do is approach appropriate advertiser that’ll be willing to buy your ad slot for a satisfying amount of cash.
Whether you use the RTB model or direct sales, they both allow achieving a similar result. An ad is displayed on the website, to reach a specific user, to let the advertiser build a relationship with him.
Direct sales are based on a manual, process of campaign execution that may require many hours, or even days, of analyses. These are necessary not only to understand the needs of the customer but also to negotiate the terms and conditions of orders between the publisher and the advertiser.
Business partner
Quite a lot so far, isn’t it? Finding new solutions, planning the test, implementation, and observation of the results is a lot of work. To do all of it appropriately you’ll need a team consisting of ad ops with high analytical skills.
What about outsourcing then? Letting professionals, who specialize in increasing site’s revenue, do all this work for you may turn out as one of the best of your business decisions.
How to choose such a business partner then? There are many to choose from in the market, and their number isn’t decreasing.
Google certified publishing partner
One of the criteria you can expect to be met is a GCPP badge.
GCPPs is the community of the most trusted Google partners that helps publishers make the most of advertising tech, and thus maximize their revenue potential.
To become a Certified Publishing Partner, we had to meet rigorous qualification standards. Google chose us to join the program and then trained us on their product offering. However, we do not rest on our laurels. Publishers we cooperate with are surveyed by Google on a regular basis to make sure we provide the best service for our clients.
Choosing a proper partner
Publishers may test both yield-opt technologies and providers to increase the site’s revenue. Although we operate in the realm of technology, often it is the suppliers that turn out to be the key to break the programmatic bank. So how can you find a trusted partner?
A good service provider should be for the publisher like a messenger bringing news from the industry.
How to conduct a test that will help distinguish a prospective partner in the flood of cold emails and sales pitches? What can you do to prepare for a trial period, or make a decision on cooperation after the said trial?
In our ten years of experience, we have had the opportunity to participate in hundreds of tests. They led us to create a client portfolio of over 250 publishers from 30 countries. We understand the problems publishers bother with and the objections that programmatic teams may face within their own organizations.
