Make more money with your site – Part 1 – Supply Quality

A warm welcome to part 1 of the mini-series Make More Money with your site. Today we will dig deeper into the concept Supply Quality and explain why designing your ad landscape wisely is crucial for your site’s revenue. There are three main categories you should consider a little extra when planning to maximize the monetization of your site. Let’s get started.

1. Page layouts and viewability score

In order to structure your website in the most efficient way possible, you firstly need to understand how your readers consume the content on your site. Start by mapping out your top positions, meaning the positions that have the highest time on screen, and place your ads here. This should be obvious (but for some reason it’s not). How do you know what your top positions are then? In general, if the ad’s “time in view” is over 30 sec it’s considered a premium placement. Keep in mind where on the site you place the ads. Don’t place them where your users aren’t scrolling since they will be determined unviewable, which will hurt your domains overall score. This score is used by many advertisers when they buy inventory. In general, the lower the score the less you will gain from your ads. Strive to increase your site’s average viewability to over 70% since many agencies don’t buy inventory at all from sites with a score lower than 70%.

2. Content browsing – scroll or gallery?

It’s not only the page layout that affects the performance of the site, but you also need to carefully decide on what format to go with. There are two main content browsing options; Scroll and Gallery view. Both scroll and gallery view have their benefits and different requirements to improve ad supply quality.

Scroll = Content is displayed as a so-called feed

Users scroll down in order to get more content. Scroll is great for long formats and viral content, where you want users to continue browsing down and spend as long time as possible on your page. In scroll view, you usually have fewer ads per screen view, but your sessions lengths are typically longer. In scroll, you can utilize lazy load that loads both the content and the ads at the same time in order to maximize ad time in view. You can also choose between a paginated scroll, where the users click to access the next page or infinity scroll, where moving to the next page happens by continuously scrolling further. There is no clear evidence which one of these two is better, you have to try what works best for your site.

Gallery = Content is displayed like a magazine

Users flip to the next page to get more content. Gallery view is great for optimizing viewability as all ads are inherently viewable all the time. This layout works well for content people spend a lot of time reading. It’s not as good for goofy memes and inspirational feeds since people don’t tend to like flipping as much as scrolling. Quality of the content is key when choosing this layout. Try to avoid way too long sessions since this can hinder your results. A good rule of thumb is to provide 5-10 pages per session for optimal results.

3. Ad placing and pacing

You also have to keep in mind to both place and pace your ads nicely. Avoid stacking ads into one place. Pace your ads to match the flow, and try to follow the rule of never having more than 33% of your screen filled with ads. This has shown to be a good rule of thumb in order to maximize revenue, viewability, site sessions and user experience.

Tip for mobile is to focus on footer ads and in-line placements in order to stick to the 33% rule. Tip for desktop is to focus on a few sticky placements on the sides or bottom of the page and pace ads in between content nicely, either with in-article or end of the article, before the next one shows. If you use gallery layout, focus on sticky placements around the screen and one placement in between the content.

So to sum it up, better supply quality equals higher demand which equals higher CMPs and fill-rate which equals higher revenue.

A lot of information to keep track of. Hope this helps you monetize your site in the best way possible and as always, we are happy to help you out. Drop us a line at sales@kiosked.com and we are on it.

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