Yield Optimization for Digital Publishers
Tags: Monetization, Programmatic, Advertising, Publishers, Digital Marketing

In partnership with leading programmatic advertising platform Rubicon Project, AdJoin Media now offers a competitive yield management solution in conjunction with our premium Private Audience Marketplace to further increase revenue for publishers’ unsold ad inventory.

The conundrum

Before relying on Google Ads only, understanding how to segment your strategy can make your output more productive. More than 80% of publishers rely on Google Ads as a back-fill solution to monetize their unsold advertising inventory, often yielding low CPM rates. However, depending on the content and volume of traffic a publisher’s site generates, eCPM’s and revenue earnings can vary drastically.

Example:

Some publishers, such as general news, classifieds and sports portals that generate high volumes of traffic (over 10 million monthly impressions) but are not necessarily considered ‘niche’ often make good revenue from the high volume of unsold ad impressions monetized by google back-fill ads, but yield low CPMs.

Then there are publishers with smaller volumes of traffic (under 5 million monthly impressions) that generate ‘niche / specialized’ content such as Women in Tech / Golf / Financial Business / Computer Gaming. They may get higher eCPM averages from Google, but may still generate less revenue than the likes of a site which generates revenue from 10x as much inventory.

Thus in order for a site to generate decent revenue from an ad exchange or back-fill partner such as Google AdSense, a site must have high volumes of traffic.

Google ads and ad exchanges are very popular among advertisers, as it allows them to programmatically buy massive amounts of inventory at very low rates. There are also many resources at hand for an advertiser to optimize their campaigns, but little a publisher can do to optimize their google back-fill ads to yield higher eCPM’s.

This situation often results in publishers’ having their inventory cannibalized by google back-fill ads, and trying to get the advertiser to buy your inventory at a premium rate becomes more challenging.

Competition Works!

This is where Private Marketplaces (aka: PMPs) and other programmatic ad companies come into play.

There are different types of PMPs, but for this article we’ll introduce you to AdJoin’s Private Audience Marketplace.

Essentially, with the help of a very powerful Data Management Platform (aka DMP) AdJoin are able to repackage your unsold inventory into audience segments and market it at a higher rate with the help of AdJoin’s many strategic buying and reselling partners.

Once again, you can’t rely on 1 PMP to fill all your remnant inventory at a higher CPM, so it’s healthy to include other PMPs and let them compete for your inventory in a Programmatic Real Time Bidding auction.

If AdJoin’s Audience Marketplace is unable to fill all your unsold inventory and you are still left with a high volume of traffic being filled by Google back-fill ads. In partnership with Rubicon Project, AdJoin now offers publishers an open RTB yield optimization solution.

For many publishers that do not have a programmatic monetization department or an ad operations team within their business, this proves to be a very challenging feat.

If you are a publisher that relies only on Google back-fill ads, then it’s worthwhile looking to a partner like AdJoin to help you with a yield management solution.

How does it work?

Any inventory not filled by a premium direct sale is given an opportunity to be bid on by various PMPs and ad exchanges.

Whoever bids the highest rate wins.

Any inventory not filled by AdJoin can now be given an opportunity to be bid on by Rubicon’s Open RTB. In order for Rubicon to not cannibalize your traffic, I always ask publishers to provide me with their average eCPMs they get from Google back-fill ads.

Your average eCPM from Google now becomes the min CPM for any advertisers in Rubicon Open RTB to bid on.

When AdJoin and Rubicon Open RTB are unable to fill your unsold inventory a pass-back tag fires allowing Google Ads to fill what’s left.

Keen to explore and find out what potential revenue you can generate?

Feel free to contact me.