How can you optimise your ad revenues on your website?

In the wake of the boom in native and programmatic advertising, making money to support your blog or website has never been easier. 

But while knowing that advertising is the key to success, how can small publishers ensure that their blog, news site or website doesn’t lose its charm or independence, and most importantly its readership?

Advertising on the internet is complicated. Particularly if you’re only a small team or just a one man band. We’ve all been told about premium ad sales, RTB, trading desks, CPA, CPL, SSP and so on, but how can you ensure that you can get the best advertising on your website and make the most revenue?

It’s a question that we encounter on a day-to-day basis with our clients. How can we retain a website’s authenticity but still obtain the funding from advertising it needs to keep running – and importantly, ensure the site can continue to grow its readership? 

We tend to focus on four key rules to ensure this: the ad placement and pricing, ad format, ad type and whether it’s mobile ready.

Ad placement and pricing

You begin with the type of ad that will best suit the website. It’s important that any ad placement gives you the best deal. 

Insights on what has worked before on a given site are useful, but you also need to understand that what succeeds on one site won’t always on others. Independent publishers in particular are different from the larger publisher groups – so they need to have adaptive content and their ads need a degree of flexibility.

It’s vital to look at content, size of the space and size/relevancy of the ad when deciding how it works and fits on the web page. Our algorithm, for example, scans the different offers in the market, including ad formats and pricing across all trading desks. We then calculate the best offer for a website in split-second real time. 

Ad format

Whether your readership is five thousand or seven million, ‘standard formats’ should be integrated on to every website, fitting into the layout perfectly and being absolutely un-intrusive to the reader’s eye. 

However, high impact ads such as skins and footers can have huge benefits for your website. These offer a premium creative brand experience and can grab the consumer’s attention. They will increase clicks per ad and boost revenue on your site.

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