Blog
The rise of programmatic advertising and internet users’ understanding that seeing content means seeing ads, has resulted in a never-ending sprint to provide more ads. We have all seen and have an opinion about what we think a Bad Ad may be; offensive, cheap, patronizing are all describing the creative. However, today we will be discussing the type of ads we don’t want to see on the internet. Potentially malicious, often spam-like and border-line illegal ads occur more and more in a programmatic environment at scale. Google blocked and removed 2.7bn Bad Ads in 2019 alone. The ability to sell a campaign to appear alongside your content with the copy and imagery you feel fits your branding is still possible. Trying to do that tailored for each individual user whenever they visit your site though, is nigh on impossible. This ability to work at scale has driven programmatic growth and efficiency, however, it is safe to say that many publishers have lost control of their inventory. So what are Bad Ads and where do they come from?
Website monetization starts and ends with Google for many publishers, be it Google Ad Manager or Google AdSense. The difference between the two is the publisher’s level of sophistication to manage multiple demand sources. The vast majority of publishers, therefore, rely on Google AdSense to deliver many of the ads you see on blogs and independent niche websites. That means Link Ad Units appearing amongst the usual display ads.
These days there is so much information at our disposal, with metrics for almost everything. Sometimes, there are some metrics that do not just show a picture but also tell a story. For example, for Students, your GPA (Grade Point Average) shows how good a student you are, for growing businesses your CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) shows you how much it costs to gain a new customer and grow your business. For Publishers like you, there is Page RPM. What is Page RPM? Page RPM refers to the revenue a publisher would expect to see generated per one thousand page views. RPM is an acronym for Revenue Per Mille, with Mille being the Latin word for a thousand (for those of you thinking back to college that’s why Roman numerals have M for a thousand!). RPM tells a publisher how much revenue is being generated for each page that is viewed on their website. A publisher can even calculate the Page RPM for individual pages. How do you calculate it? Before you can calculate Page RPM, you need to know 2 numbers; Total Ad Revenue – how much ad revenue you think you have made Total Page Views – how many times a user views a page The formula used is as follows: Total Ad Revenue / Total Page Views * 1000 Example: If you have 4k page views per month and an estimated ad revenue of $30, your Page RPM would be ($30/4000)*1000 = $7.50 Why it is Important?…
Rewarded ads or Incentivized ads are a mainstay of the modern in-app mobile advertising experience. These types of ads are designed to reward the user once they have taken the desired action after seeing an advert. Over the years there has been an evolving relationship with this type of advertising, sparking the rise in the freemium model. What are they and how do they work? As the name suggests, Rewarded ads also known as Incentivized ads, offer mobile users a reward or incentive in exchange for their interaction with an ad. This can include installing an app, registering or subscribing to a website or service, or watching a video. This is especially prevalent in scenarios where a user wants to unlock content such as level-ups, more lives, power-ups, virtual coins, removing ads, or premium content. Unlocking content on completion of the desired action can be seen when the revenue model ‘Freemium’ is used. ‘Freemium’ offers users a free version of an app or service that either has a limited offering or that is heavily ad-supported. To remove the ads or unlock more features, a user must pay or subscribe to the app or service. High profile examples of this ad unit would be games such as Candy Crush, where you can unlock game features, boosters, or lives by watching a video ad, and platforms such as Spotify, where you can unlock uninterrupted music for 30 mins by listening to an ad as part of their free version, with ads completely…
On the 3rd of December, Google announced that a new core update is rolling out. This December 2020 core update is the third one this year, the first one was the January 2020 core update and the second one was May 2020 core update. The roll-out Google said “the December 2020 Core Update is now rolling outlive. As is typical with these updates, it will typically take about one to two weeks to fully roll out.” This was a global update, like all core updates, and was not unique to any area, language, or web site category. It’s a classic “broad-core update” that Google releases every few months or so. In this case, it was the longest stretch since the confirmed large core update, which took just under seven months, as compared to the usual three-month period. This December 2020 update On December 16, Google finished rolling out the Google December 2020 Core Update. As previously mentioned, it began on December 3rd at around 1 pm ET and took 13 days to roll out entirely, which is just about the two-week timeline that Google gave us for the core update rollouts. Here’s the announcement from Google that it’s rolled out: It was an atypical core update and it seems to be a big and substantial one. We have monitored a huge spike in volatility on a number of sites on December 4th, the day after the update began rolling out. Then another set of fluctuations on the 10th of December,…
What are Google’s Core Web Vitals? In May 2021, Google announced that they are going to roll out the official ranking factor change – Core Web Vitals. Typically, when Google publishes an update that affects search rankings, it’s all about content. In this case, the update is about a better user experience on your site in terms of speed of loading, reliability, and responsiveness. Today, we’re going to interpret the specifics of Core Web Vitals and help you understand how your search rankings will be affected. The Metrics Explained Core Web Vitals are a set of particular factors that Google deems important in a webpage’s user experience and the metrics will progress over time. So far, Google has defined three main criteria, which publishers and developers need to focus on to improve page experience rankings: largest contentful paint, first input delay, and cumulative layout shift. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This represents the time it takes to load the main content of a website in seconds. Focus on making your LCP score of 2.5 seconds or faster. First Input Delay (FID): The emphasis here is on assessing the time it takes for a web page to become interactive. Focus on bringing the FID score down to less than 100 ms. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This explains the impact of unexpected layout changes for visual page content. Focus on bringing the CLS score down to less than 0.1. In summary, Core Web Vitals are a group of variables that will be an…
Since the very first ad was placed on a website in 1994, the advertising industry has used a specific Ad Technology to enable the monetisation of websites – the Ad Server. According to Datanyze, Google Ad Manager is the dominant ad server used by websites with a global market share of 33%. In 2018, Google merged DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) and Google Ad Exchange to create Google Ad Manager. Which brings us nicely onto Google Publisher Tags. This article will explain not only what GPT are but also how they work, how to generate them and the benefits they bring. What are Google Publisher Tags Google Publisher Tag (GPT) is an ad tagging library used for Google Ad Manager (GAM). Google Publisher Tags enable publishers to dynamically build the ad request and display the ad on web pages. With GPT, you can define inventory, initiate and bundle ad requests, and then render the matching demand. How do Google Publisher Tags Work? GPT is used to define your available ad slots. Placing GPT on a page creates a link between the ad server and a user’s browser. When a user visits a page containing GPT, the following happens: A request is made from the user’s browser to the ad server for gpt.js, the tag code built in JavaScript. The JavaScript builds and sends one or more requests to the ad server for ads tagged on the page. The ad server matches the ad units and any key-values contained within the request….
It is vital for websites to understand how they want their users to interact with their content. User Experience (UX), is all about making the way users interact with you as easy and enjoyable as possible. Traditionally websites are presented as pages and each page belongs to a section or category, users click and read pages of content they are interested in, this is known as Pagination. In this instance, all content and ads load when the page is loaded. More recently opportunities to enable users to discover new or related content without leaving the page they are on have become especially prevalent with users consuming content that is image-heavy or viewed on mobile devices. Here we discuss the two main UX techniques websites can use to keep users on the site and enable the discovery of new content while not loading all content at the initial page visit; Infinite Scroll and Load More.
Google Chrome is the dominant web browser in the world with a 65% market share against the next best Apple Safari at 16%. Google‘s idea was to build a web browser that was fast and responsive with the best user experience possible. So it is with this in mind along with the Better Ads Standards, that Google has added a default setting live from late August to block ‘Heavy Ads’.