5 Proven Monetization Tips to Boost Your Ad Revenue

So you’re a publisher with amazing content. You’ve got plenty of traffic, loyal followers, and diverse audience demographics. Producing content and ensuring top quality user experience is a labor of love for publishers. But another concern is how to monetize your properties effectively. You know that your ad space is valuable, but how can you get the most out of that revenue stream?

We sat down with ClearPier’s very own Director of Publisher Relations, Megan Sun, and Director of Business Development, Parag Joshi to chat about successful monetization strategies. Sun and Joshi have nearly two decades of experience in the media buying space between them and extensive expertise in publisher business development and ad quality. Here are their top 5 proven ad revenue boosting monetization tips for publishers.

1. Remember that Content is King

Joshi: This may sound obvious, but I think it’s important to emphasize the role that content plays in how much revenue you can generate. Ensure that you stay clear about your site’s raison d’être because your site’s purpose is precisely why audiences visit in the first place.

The most profitable publishers remember that their first priority is to always produce quality content, because they know this sustains audience engagement. Maintaining quality of content is the basis to driving all of your revenue models across ad inventory, native sponsorships, affiliation, subscriptions, and more.

2. Get to Know Your Audience

Sun: Everyone says this but it’s so important to actually exercise this. You need to get to know your audience. Understanding your audience will help publishers realize the brands that will be most likely to purchase your inventory. There are platforms out there like Google Analytics, comScore, and Woopra that can provide insightful analytic data for publishers.

Once you know this, you can cater your content to fit the demographic and drive better performance for advertisers trying to target this specific audience segment. For instance, if you know that the majority of your users are women ages 18 to 34 with children, then you’ll be able to come to the conclusion that brands in the family and parenting categories would be a great fit for your site. With this insight, you can package your inventory appropriately.

3. Be Aware of Important Advertiser Metrics & Test for Optimization

Joshi: When it comes to your ad inventory, keep in mind that advertisers have a goal and to reach these goals they’re constantly optimizing against key metrics. Keep metrics like click-through rate and viewability in mind and test lazy loads (ads that only load upon scroll), or the positioning of your ads in different areas on your pages to see which perform best. Re-examine the data and see which ad unit size receives the best performance so you can weed out the lower performers.

There are also a lot of site optimization tools, like Visual Website Optimizer for example, that show you heat sensors patterns on where your users are most likely viewing your ads or engaging with your content. These tools also show you if your content is too long form and whether or not users are scrolling all the way down the page. If results show that your users do not scroll all the way down, then placing an ad at the bottom of the page will have poor results. Whether it be conversions for ticket sales or tracking how many users are coming from your site through their landing pages, the better your performance is according to metrics, the higher your fill and CPMs.

4. Keep Ad Quality Top of Mind

Sun: Publishers should be experimenting with their ad revenue strategies, but when it comes to their inventory it’s critical to keep ad quality top of mind. In platforms like ClearPier’s, there are features to control the types of ads being shown to the end user.

Publishers should always be making an effort to stay in control of the type of ads that run on their site because negative or inappropriate placements directly affect not only user experience, but also impacts a publisher’s brand reputation. This in turn effects the advertisers that will choose to work with you and could drive prospective clients away.

5. Consider Reinvesting Budget with a DMP

Sun: The goal for all publishers is to keep on driving that revenue up. As your ad revenue grows, consider reinvesting some of that budget and working with a DMP (data management platform). This will help you understand your audience at a more granular level and can be extremely attractive to clients.

Why? DMPs can create logical deductions based on a user’s browsing habit. Let’s take from the example we had above. Let’s say the majority of your users are women ages 18 to 34 with children. DMPs allow you to combine your data with theirs to reveal what percentage of these users are reading the sports section of your site. As a result, you discover that this audience segment actually splits into more than just family and parenting. This audience also encompasses a millennial audience interested in sports and health.

Understanding your audience is valuable to advertising partners because it helps advertisers when it comes to targeting. If you are able to offer clients the ability to target specific users and specific content at site-level across article genres, sections, home page, and more, then you’ll be able to scale up your monetization efforts.