Programmatic How-To: Assessing Your Inventory Quality

A high quality website will attract not only users but also Advertisers, who will be willing to pay for your advertising space. There are a lot of factors that could be undermining your inventory’s value, but sometimes it can just be the case that your competitors are managing their inventories better. So how can you assess your performance in relation to your competitors?

There are no ads without the content surrounding them. Depending on what network you are working with, policies regarding ad serving may vary; but usually they point to the same unwanted categories. Shocking or adult content or photos, fake news, gambling etc. may drive some Advertisers away, as they do not want to be associated with such topics.

When it comes to ad banner metrics, viewability is one of the most important, as it indicates whether a user has seen the impression and interacted with it. Directly related to this is viewable time, which can be interpreted as how long an ad is present in the user’s viewport. If you are using Ad Exchange, you can use an Ad speed report, which will show you the reason for low viewability issues.

There are a number possibilities as to why slots never enter the viewport, the most non-optimal ad grid where low-engaging banners are placed in the parts of the page: usually somewhere near its bottom. It might also be the result of low engagement; as what is present above the first or second floor has not caught the user’s attention. One more common thing is the illusion that the first viewport is a complete page even though there is much more content below. This can be fixed by redesigning the website.

If the problem is related to the low-page speed, you can seek help with Page Speed Insights. PSI’s report was recently expanded with Core Web Vitals to show metrics like FIB, CLS or LCP.

Your inventory from the Advertiser’s perspective

An Advertiser’s goal is to reach their target audience via your inventory; and the milestone goals of their campaign involve clicks, conversions, recognition etc. The more that user interests coincide with an offer, the more likely it is that users will invest in the impression. But that is not the only factor, as the ad needs to be seen by users. As mentioned before, Viewability is one of the primary metrics. Equally important is ad density, which influences user behavior. A high ad-to-content ratio may lead users to dodge the website, despite the value of its content. It might also decrease the probability of the same users interacting with the advertisement, commensurate with low click-through rates and conversions.

How to identify your programmatic competition

Your competitors are websites offering similar types of content; and they are looking to capture the same users. You need to be fully aware of user demographic and goals; and the reasons which users may have for entering your site. This knowledge will work to your advantage.

One way of identifying your competition is to do market research. If you publish news content, you will need to check out other websites that produce news for the same locality, city or country. A helpful tool that will help you with this task is Similarweb.

Let’s take for example The Washington Post, a site that covers a wide variety of topics – from breaking news to political analysis, reviews and weather. Similarweb’s report will show you that viewership interests relate to News and Media, Law and Government, Science and Education. The Washington Post’s viewers also visit websites like nytimes.com, theguardian.com or bbc.com.

You can also simply create a list of your direct competitors for ranking and comparative purposes.

Another market research strategy involves looking for feedback from your users, which can also bring about unexpected results (especially if your content covers very narrow or specific topics). There are many other approaches, depending on what information you have regarding your users, and informational items such as email campaigns, house ads, surveys, social media, etc.
A simple solution that can also deliver valuable results involves running keywords in search engines related to your content and geographics. Analysis of these results will also give you an insight on how high your website places in search results and whether you need to improve your SEO.

Comparing your inventory quality ratio to those of your competitors

You now know who your competition is, so what’s the next step? Try to identify the techniques and solutions they have implemented. Find out where they have succeeded or failed in terms of UX, usability or ad grid. If they have fewer ads, or have placed them in a non-disruptive way, you can look to provide unique content, offer membership, or create a new layout.The same questions could be asked regarding UX and usability – are your competitors making their user journey shorter, or easier? This knowledge will provide you with some very important insights as to whether you need to improve certain aspects such as the design or the advertising offer.

A tool that could give you answers to some of these questions is MarketScout. By running campaigns on chosen domains, this tool will gather information regarding their CPM, Viewability and win rate.

Such information will allow you to rank your inventory against your competitors. Let’s take CPM for example – if other websites price their inventory higher when it comes to certain viewability ranges, this can be a sign that you are undervaluing your ad space. Besides the lower CPM, a situation like this will leave you open to bid shading – as the buyers will achieve a high win rate at low prices. You will also understand better how accessible your inventory is on the Open Market. 

Summing up

In order to optimise your inventory’s value, audit both the content and the ad banner metrics. This will make it easier to tweak and modify, as you will be now more familiar with both your strengths and weaknesses. In order to rank your inventory against the competition, use tools available on the market – whether they be Simiarweb, Marketscout; or any other such tool that can provide reliable information. Then use all the gleaned knowledge to your advantage.