Yield Optimization For Publishers in Google Ad Manager
Welcome to yield optimization by Ad Energizer. You’ve done your research, read blogs after blogs, articles after articles, you may even be an experienced Adops optimizer, but even if you’re not, for sure this can add insight to your optimization strategies. We have collected all the best practices and experience-based optimizations that worked best with all our clients, for you to focus only on the important parts and save time.
Quick introduction, yield optimization is a technique experts use to help drive higher revenue from your ad inventory. Mainly with data analysis, we can determine which inventories generate the most revenue, and which do not. From there, we learn and understand the key factors in which drive optimal profit for your campaign.
Basing on the fundamental solutions, we will focus on the details to help you understand and set things up differently whilst ensuring a boost in revenue and a fresh way to energize your campaign.
The Three Key-Optimizes in Ad Exchange:-
- Floor Price & Pricing Rules
- General Settings in Ad Exchange
- Ad Unit Formatting
Floor Price & Pricing Rules:
Floor price is the lowest value in which your ads space can be sold in a real-time auction. Publishers set this for their inventory to return at least a certain amount after a bidding process. Greater floor price value doesn’t mean better results though. Take into consideration the circumstance of having a highest bidder, but could not reach your floor price value. This would opt for a lower fill rate, hence a strategic analysis is made to balance both entities.
For experts, this is nothing new to them, but notice that all strategies differ from one another. Some would maximize the value of floor prices first and work with the fill rate during optimization, while others apply a small value in floor price, then work their way up to achieve what they call the “Balance” between CPM revenue return, and win-rate of impressions. Bigger campaigns utilize dynamic price floor, but when to apply it, makes it a unique strategy for optimizers.
So what is the right amount for a floor price? Is there such a thing as an ideal price floor to begin with? Yes, and no. No matter how experienced we are, we’ll see that price floor is something very volatile in which needs our consistent and routine attention for optimization on a daily basis. We can however base our predictions with recent trends of pricing from similar campaigns that you started. This would need a great amount of time and data analysis, however if done accurately, would maximize the most of your revenue.
Benefits and Applicability of Dynamic AdX Price Floor:
Though Dynamic price floor is highly beneficial when it comes to heaps of data analysis as artificial intelligence do the leg work for pricing adjustments, it would still need heavy records of data or large amount of impressions to predict and provide an effective floor price. Bare minimum of around 15 Million of impressions on a monthly basis. That is why small businesses would not benefit as much as doing manual adjustments.
If your campaign is a good match for dynamic floor pricing we would still recommend using manual adjustments on the first few weeks of optimization just to check performance, stability, and gather needed data testing for AI-based programmatic features to take place.
Learning Points for Pricing Rules:-
- Avoid sudden and drastic changes to price floor. Always set a period or time-frame to analyze the changes made, and work from there.
- Apply most ad unit granular rules as a priority for them to be reviewed first.
- Keep pricing rules simple for faster ad selections and to avoid complex optimizations.
- It is important to segment line item inventory based on their performances, and apply a set of pricing rules for each inventory section. Though very helpful, floor pricing can be lengthy procedure depending on the amount of ad units/placements.
- Geography
- Devices
- Connection
Improve and understand view-ability as a contributing factor for CPMs and worth of impressions in auctions. Include this as one of the metrics when utilizing auto-refreshing ad units and adding floor prices to them accordingly.
General Settings in Ad Exchange:
Your basic configurations may leave you with less coverage for your impression as well. It’s always best practice to check them out once in awhile especially when changes have been made in the campaign. Below are some of the settings you may need as a checklist for to you optimize your basic settings in Ad Exchange.
Ad Exchange Configuration Check-list:
- Be sure to have Partners in your network partner distro approved. And domains as either owned or represented. As unapproved partners/unclassified domains won’t be served ads.
- Avoid blocking too many categories of advertisers to increase competition rate.
- Set branded/anonymous type all pricing rules to provide buyers an idea where their ads are served. You can set pricing rules for these pricing types, moreover a visible increase in revenue can be noticed almost immediately on Branded types.
- Opt-in for the newly added Ad technology on a regular basis. Be sure to study them and check on reviews as well.
- Enable Programmatic Direct and assign roles for optimization.
- Enable first look and optimized competition.
Ad Unit Formatting:
By utilizing popular ad formats and techniques to target ad unit inventory sizes, publishers are able to boost ad coverage for their campaign. Unlike pricing where the values are dynamic, most advertisers have a preference when it comes to buying ad spaces. Try putting yourself in their shoes and determine how you’d like your ads to be displayed on their pages.
Get familiar with popular ad sizes:
1) 336×280 large rectangle.
2) 300×250 medium rectangle.
3) 728×90 leaderboard.
4) 300×600 half page.
5) 320×100 on mobile, the large mobile banner.
Note that these are not all the sizes, but the sizes in which are in high demand with our advertisers. Do the research as well for trending sizes in which advertisers may change preferences. Always look for tips in blogs and articles for the latest popular sizes.
Source: https://www.digitaloperative.co.nz/digital-intel/top-performing-ad-sizes/
https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/17955?hl=en
https://www.disruptiveadvertising.com/adwords/top-10-adwords-banner-sizes-you-need-to-know
Best Practices for optimizing Ad formats and techniques.
- Now that you have an idea of the most common ads used by advertisers, be sure to test the outcome using constants and different version of the formats.
- Manage flexible size settings for inventory sizes.
- For mobile versions of your pages, be sure to optimize both in Mobile App, and Mobile web. Note that Mobile app ads serve second to the highest to website ads in generating revenue for campaigns.
- For video contents in your website you wish to monetize with ads, be familiar with the type of ads you want to serve first to avoid compromising content of videos. Ensure to allow skippable demand, and put a fine limit of 15-30 seconds in non-skippable ads. Description url should pass request to initiate serving ads.
Conclusion:
As you can see, there are tons of methods of ensuring optimal performance for your revenue. You may find other helpful methods on you experiences, and feel free to share them with the community. Quoting Albert Einstein, “You cannot solve today’s problem, with yesterday’s solution.” in which is very much applicable to all our Ad optimization techniques. We must find a way to innovate and read between the patterns of data to achieve our desired revenue. The world of Online Advertising is dynamic, we adjust to the one thing constant, which is change.
This article is a team effort by the Ad Energizer team. If you will like Ad Energizer to handle your Yield Management, Please fill out the form below. Thank you
