Check for reserved inventory from paused or draft line items

We recommend regular audits of all of your paused, draft, or otherwise inactive guaranteed type line items (Sponsorship, Standard). Whether created in Ad Manager or pushed to Ad Manager via a third-party Sales Management platform, they will reserve inventory until you specifically perform the release inventory action in the line item menu.

Review your delivery settings and adjust as needed

Reviewing and adjusting your delivery settings is another effective way to ensure that your direct campaign line items are reaching their pacing goals. Below is a quick reference to what each delivery setting means.

• As fast as possible: A line item is never considered “on schedule,” and tries to make use of every impression it can get.
• Frontloaded: A line item begins by briefly serving to a goal that is as much as 40% higher than a goal without frontloading, and then gradually declines to serving 5% ahead of schedule as the campaign draws to its end. The sum of impressions during the first half of the campaign can be as much as 25% higher than without frontloading.
• Even delivery: The ad server delivers 5% more than the even goal, though the delivery indicator may be higher than 105% due to inventory forecast insights.

Ensure measured distribution of high-priority line items

It’s also important to make sure that you don’t have too many high priority line items targeting the same inventory, as that will not allow for effective optimization within your direct campaigns. For example, if you have four Sponsorship line items set to capture 100% of remaining impressions and targeting the same inventory the same way, each line item will receive 25% of the available remaining inventory as a result.

Use Check Inventory and forecasting reports

It may go without saying, but it’s crucial to use Ad Manager’s forecasting tools such as Check Inventory, or the Sell-Through system reports if your Ad Manager network has these, to provide accurate availability data.

Avoid too much targeting

As a general rule, just because you can add targeting to a line, doesn’t always mean you should. Targeting key-values, geography, devices, and other details can be great for a very specialized campaign, but the more targeting you add to each line item, the less inventory will be available. It’s best to use the broadest targeting available that still gets you to the readers you’re looking for.

Get help if you need it

It’s not always easy to catch every error, or to find the time to devote to proper optimization and strategy. Our Services team is always available to help with managed ad ops needs. If you need help with strategy, optimization, training, or management, please don’t hesitate to schedule a call with one of our ad ops professionals.

The post 6 Ways to Optimize Your Direct Campaigns appeared first on Sovrn, Inc..

We’ve all had a bad user experience with a website littered with poor quality, distracting or disruptive ads. Perhaps our device suddenly started playing music out of nowhere, or we experienced slow page load times or clicked on a redirect link that brought us unexpectedly to another page.

These tactics all contribute to high bounce rates and increased user acquisition costs for publishers, yet trade-offs are often made when it comes to the quality of the user experience in favor of driving short-term revenue. This short-sighted approach can also contribute to longer-term reductions in revenue and a devaluation of a publisher’s inventory. It’s a lose-lose for both the user and the publisher.  

In order to maintain high digital advertising standards, The Coalition for Better Ads was formed by international trade associations and companies dedicated to improving consumers’ experiences with online advertising. The Coalition for Better Ads leverages user insight and industry expertise to develop global standards to address user expectations.

Additionally, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) released standards to establish best practices that publishers and advertisers are urged to follow to help maintain a balance where publishers can make money and users can continue to have an optimal user experience.

Although every website’s advertising strategy varies, below are three best practices that all publishers should adhere to for creating a better advertising experience:

• Ensure that ads load quickly. Users will tend to leave the page if the ads prevent the content from loading.
• Allow the ad experience to seamlessly blend into the content. Typically, as a rule of thumb, maintain a five ad placements maximum per page.
• Finally, know your audience and target them. Through the use of programmatic technology, publishers are able to deliver more pertinent ads based on user interests.

If you want to see a couple of great examples of quality sites with thoughtful ad placement, check out https://www.playbill.com/ and Kalmbach Media’s https://discovermagazine.com/, https://www.astronomy.com/ and http://mrr.trains.com/ sites

Are you curious about how your website stacks up when it comes to the user experience? Sign up for a free Website Monetization Assessment with customized recommendations delivered by a member of our Services team!

The post Does Your Ad Experience Drive User Engagement or Encourage Bounces? appeared first on Sovrn, Inc..

To achieve Kalmbach Media’s goals, the Sovrn Services team focused on implementing header bidding with Sovrn’s Server to Server Bidding solution; adding new units in DFP to monetize previously unmonetized site sections, and adding new header bidding partners to increase bids, CPMs, and revenue. The team also optimized Kalmbach’s non-header bidding waterfall set-up to ensure better sell-through of non-premium inventory. This comprehensive optimization approach suited Kalmbach well, with the Q1 results speaking for themselves: Kalmbach saw a 27% increase in revenue and a 119% increase in impressions filled.
“Sovrn is helping us improve our game with smarter tools to improve our network advertising practices. We’ve seen some great gains in a short period of time and are optimistic about continued growth in the future. The Services team is quick to respond to our needs,” said Jeanne Sidner, Director of Digital Content at Kalmbach Media.

 
2. ThatGrapeJuice: Launched in 2007, ThatGrapeJuice is a premier urban pop culture website and an internationally established source for urban news, music, entertainment, celebrity interviews, reviews and more. With a strong and unique editorial voice, Sam Ajilore, the site’s founder and owner, was looking for ways to create a sustainable source of advertising revenue while also taking advantage of products and services that deliver results without compromising high-quality user experience.

The Sovrn Services team began by auditing their current ad stack to determine potential areas of optimization. Our recommendations included implementing new display demand sources and Sovrn’s Signal product, a technology that reloads ad positions after 25 seconds if the ad is in-view and actively engaged with. Additionally, floor prices were optimized based on current CPMs and all header bidding partners were reviewed to determine which could create the most competitive bidding environment in the header bidding wrapper. As a result, the site saw a 47% increase in revenue and a 200% increase in CPMs in Q1.

“Working with the Sovrn Services team to manage my ad operations and being able to apply their expertise to optimizing my yield has directly contributed to increasing my ad revenue,” said Sam Ajilore, the site’s owner.

 
3. A2ZWordFinder: Created in their spare time by two senior engineers contracted with NASA, A2ZWordFinder is the go-to resource for word game and puzzle enthusiasts, appealing to a large community of Scrabble, anagram, and crossword aficionados. A long-time publisher in the Sovrn network, the A2ZWordFinder team engaged with Sovrn Services to free-up the time spent on managing ad operations, gain access to our team’s expertise, as well as, find new opportunities to deliver incremental advertising revenue.
To achieve these goals, the Services team focused on adding additional demand to the header bidding set-up, optimizing floor prices and working with demand partners to increase yield. In Q1, A2ZWordFinder saw a 53% increase in revenue and a 24% increase in CPMs. The Services team also implemented Sovrn’s Adblock insight tool, which serves messaging to site visitors asking them to disable their ad blocking software for the site. 67% of users who saw this messaging whitelisted A2ZWordfinder.com, resulting in almost 100,000 page views that otherwise would have been lost.
“We’re very happy to have partnered with Sovrn Services as a publisher in their managed advertising program. We have limited time as a modest-sized publisher to manage ad operations. Sovrn has provided very timely operations improvements with a special focus in the header bidding area, which has significantly boosted income,” said Co-Founder Scott Gilley.

 
Sovrn Services is dedicated to simplifying the complexity of ad operations, saving our publishers valuable time and delivering meaningful results by creating more monetization opportunities. Interested in learning if Sovrn Services is the right fit for your business? Get in touch with a representative to learn more about how Sovrn Services can help you.

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