Video content has gained impressive popularity. It’s engaging, it’s creative, and it’s mobile-friendly. Hence, video advertising has also been widely used. Many businesses (86% to be exact) use video marketing to generate buzz about their products. And publishers are eager to maximize video ad revenue. As a result, there are more and more ad networks specializing in video monetization. That’s why we decided to take a closer look at video advertising and what are the best ad networks to explore. What is video advertising? As the name suggests, these are ads that involve video content. There are in-stream ads that appear before, during, or after video content (called pre-, mid-, and post-roll, respectively). These could be considered irritating at times, so to ensure a good user experience, publishers take different measures. They may allow users to skip pre-roll ads after 5 seconds, limit the number of video ads shown per video, or refrain from using mid-roll or post-roll. There are also outstream ads that are displayed alongside static content (in-content or as a sticky). These use existing ad units and do not require publishers to offer video content. The IAB categorizes video ad formats into three groups: Linear video ads – videos shown before, during, or after the video content. Non-linear video ads – videos shown along with video content without interrupting it (i.e. overlays). Companion ads – display ads, or banners, shown alongside the video. What is a video ad network? Ad networks are intermediaries that help advertisers and…
Raya Tsvetkova
Display ads have been the king of digital advertising for quite a while. But then native advertising came into play and changed the game. Advertisers are always looking for ways to get to the user more efficiently and native ads offered a non-intrusive way to customers’ attention. While display ads still serve an important marketing purpose, they are now only one of the possible approaches. Thus, advertisers may be looking for both native and display ad inventory, depending on their goals, and publishers need to decide how to build their ad inventory in this ever-so-competitive landscape. Display Advertising Often referred to as banner ads, display ads are still the most popular type of digital advertising nowadays. The rectangular boxes with advertiser message that links to a landing page are your typical display ads. They come in various sizes and formats, such as text, image, and video, some may even be interactive. Display ads have evolved over the years and offer more impactful ways of addressing the audience. Users, on the other hand, have become so used to them that they may often experience the so-called “banner blindness” – something advertisers are trying to fight. Enter native ads. Native Advertising While typical display ads are easy to distinguish and pinpoint, native ads often look just like the rest of the content on the page. You can recognize them from their label – most often “Sponsored”, “Promoted”, or “Recommended”. Native ads are designed to blend with the elements on the website and…
Google AdSense Auto Ads offers a simple and straightforward way to place ads on your website. If you are new to advertising or simply don’t have the time to deal with manual setup and placement of ads, then Auto Ads is a great way to monetize your website. Despite the tool’s simplicity, every now and then it happens that publishers notice no ads appear on their website. If this is the case for you as well, check out five of the most common reasons why your Google AdSense Auto Ads might not be showing. 1. Did you turn off your adblocker? While it may seem obvious, to check if your website displays ads correctly your browser adblocker needs to be off. Too often we forget that tool is working in the background and keep wondering what’s wrong with the setup. Before digging any deeper just quickly check if your ad blocker is on. If that’s not the case, then keep reading to find other possible scenarios where Auto Ads won’t show. 2. Is your site approved already? To check if you’ve already added your site go to Sites > Overview. The site you want to monetize should be marked with Ready. If the status is Not reviewed you would have the option to Request a review. In case you get the following message “Something went wrong. Please try again later.” carefully check if you entered the correct URL. If the message pops up even after that, it means that your…
Prebid.js, the most popular header bidding technology, was initially launched back in 2015. According to its creators, the goal was to “make header bidding easy for publishers by bringing conformity and simplicity to the header bidding process”. Today, Prebid has become the most widely used header bidding wrapper on the web. It is an open-source technology that allows anyone to build on it, using one simple optimized foundation. It also offers the largest repository of working header bidding adapters. In this article, we’ll discover what exactly are header bidding adapters and look at a few examples. What is a Header Bidding Adapter? Header bidding adapters are a piece of code that is used to create bid requests and process these requests to a specific demand partner. Each programmatic partner that the publisher wants to include in their header bidding setup has its own adapter, which must be added to the wrapper. The adapter carries the bid request along with information about the ad size, type, and format. The most popular header bidding adapter is non-surprisingly that of the most popular header bidding wrapper – Prebid.js. Prebid is a free open-source header bidding technology, which has the largest repository of working adapters, supporting over 300 demand partners and 50 analytics providers. There can sometimes be compatibility issues between different adapters in one container, in which case the adapters could be adjusted by either the buyer or the wrapper management party. Types of adapters Prebid offers two types of adapters for publishers:…
Back in December 2018 Google released Target CPM out of beta and made it available to all Google Ad Manager (then called Google Ad Exchange) users. The tool is an adjustable alternative to the traditional (fixed) price floor and comes in handy for boosting publishers’ fill rates. In this article we’ll take a closer look at both the good old price floors and Target CPM, focusing on the latter as the newer yield management option. What is a Price Floor? Going straight to definitions, a price floor is a fixed CPM price that serves as a set minimum to the bids that can participate in an auction. It allows publishers to define a price threshold for their inventory, below which they are not willing to sell. Most publishers will already be familiar with the concept, as it has been a key tool in yield management for quite a while. Price floors were especially useful in second-price auctions, back when this was the standard. Today, in a first-price auction world, the pricing strategies have changed as there is no longer a need to minimize the difference between the two highest bids. However, bid shading has imposed the need for a tool to preserve publishers’ ad inventory value, and price floors play a key role here. Another important use for price floors is to keep low-quality ads away in order to preserve the user experience unharmed. What is Target CPM? Target CPM, or tCPM, is another way to set price floors that…
Header bidding became one of the hottest buzzwords in ad tech to overthrow the now obsolete and inefficient waterfall model. With its adoption rate rising every year since 2014, header bidding wrappers offer publishers a way to request real-time bids from multiple demand partners, querying every piece of available inventory using the code placed at the website’s header. In addition, header bidding ensures that your ad inventory is sold for a fair value, increases overall CPM, has excellent flexibility, and comes in many sizes and shapes, with options to fit any ad ops team. so What is header bidding wrapper? A header bidding wrapper is a javascript code that stays on the publisher’s webpage, making requests to the demand partners and finding bids for them. It can manage multiple demand partners while defining rules, for instance, the number of bidders participating and how long the auction waits for bids. A bid wrapper will guarantee that every demand partner has their bid request triggering at the same time. Furthermore, wrappers come with a timeout setting, defining how long the browser should wait before closing an ongoing auction. It’s also capable of dropping partners as necessary during the bidding process. Lastly, it comes with a set of analytics tools, helping identify the most efficient methods, warning if a demand resource isn’t winning impressions to remove those subsequently. How Does Header Bidding Wrappers work? Publishers can quickly add or remove partners on-demand with a wrapper instead of managing and adding code for each…
When it comes to programmatic web monetization, people automatically think of display adversiting and openRTB. There is, however, a lot more to explore in the ecosystem and affiliate marketing is a prime example of that. Such programs are actually one of the oldest types of advertising and surprisingly, their internet revival has somehow been widely neglected by the publishing world. In spite of their relatively low popularity, affiliate deals have an enormous potential and have become an integral part of the monetization strategy for many who have implemented them. So, let’s have an overview of what Affiliate Programs are and how to use them.
Producing engaging content should be the top priority for publishers at pretty much all times. While it may be difficult to pinpoint what exactly that consists of, it’s without a doubt the make-or-break factor for any digital media business. A lesser known fact among industry circles is that you can actually generate way more revenue with even half the traffic, if you manage to attract an audience with high and frequent on-page actvity. In short, the higher the user engagement with your content, the more traffic your website generates and the higher your revenue opportunities are going to be.
Nowadays, web users around the globe largely accept videos as their primary source of information, education, and of course entertainment. Videos are easy to consume, grab people’s attention and perform better than pretty much any other type of advertising or content throughout the entire ecosystem. Not a lot of other formats have been аs successful and video has become an essential part of marketers’ toolkit for branding purposes, driving engagement and expanding their reach across the web. Consequently, that creates great monetization opportunities for publishers, but what about those who aren’t using video as their medium of choice? Luckily there’s an answer. Outstream video allows media owners to cash in on content in pretty much any format.
Nowadays the digital publishing industry is taking users’ consent more seriously. With the enforcement of GDPR, ePrivacy Directive and, CCPA online businesses had to readjust the way data from internet users is collected, used and stored. It became highly advisable (and in some cases obligatory) for online businesses to adopt a system that is notifying the web consumers and requiring their consent for collecting their data during their visit. This is where a CMP (a.k.a Consent Management Platform) comes to the rescue, especially for large scale digital properties with high volumes of traffic, where the adoption of a far more structured approach is required.