How Publishers Can Leverage In-Quarter Advertising Budgets
Reading Time: 4 minutesAdvertising budgets are at their highest in the fourth quarter and bring lucrative opportunities for publishers to earn significant revenue. Advertisers tend to crank up their budgets to attract holiday shoppers and stay at the forefront of their minds. This increases competition in the programmatic ecosystem, driving higher CPMs and fill rates, and ultimately more ad revenue for publishers. However, how much ad revenue publishers will generate will mostly depend on how well they optimize their websites.
The average daily ad impressions for publishers in Q4 are higher than the average for the rest of the year. Although this sounds great, publishers won’t be able to earn much if the viewability of those ads is poor. It’s imperative for the ads to be seen for users to click on them. This is the only way for advertisers to drive conversions and for publishers to generate revenue. As more people realize this, viewability is gaining immense popularity as a critical metric to measure ad performance.
Due to global economic uncertainties and privacy regulations, publishers have witnessed a decline in ad revenue in recent months. Even though the advertising industry is somewhat struggling, the economy as a whole is stable. Even though inflation is going up, consumers are still spending, albeit at a lower rate than they were prior to the pandemic. Let’s talk about some ways publishers can take advantage of holiday shopping traffic and attract advertising budgets across all devices.
3 Ways to Attract Advertising Budgets This Quarter
1. Prevent Ad Fraud
Ad fraud covers a wide range of malicious activities in digital advertising that lead to the waste of advertising budgets. In fact, the cost of ad fraud will reach $44 billion this year, accounting for 45% of total ad spending. Fraudulent traffic can make publishers lose their ad accounts and even damage their relationships with their users and advertisers. Making it difficult to distinguish high-quality ad space from fraudulent ad space, ad fraud breaks professional connections and adversely affects the adtech industry. To prevent this, publishers should remain aware of any possible ad fraud occurring on their websites and take the required measures to make sure only real users view their ads.
2. Optimize Ad Formats and Placement
Some ad formats and sizes perform better than others, with ad placement playing a crucial role in determining their viewability. There are certain norms that have proven to work better when it comes to ad layouts and sizes.
For example, placing an ad at the top of the webpage will provide better results than placing it at the bottom, since users will have to scroll down to view the ad being displayed, which decreases the likelihood of them noticing the ad. Moreover, horizontal ads placed above the fold, and vertical ads placed along the sidebar often produce great viewability rates. Thus, it’s important to experiment with different formats, sizes, and placements to see what works best for a certain website.
3. Utilize Video Ad Units
Compared to other content forms, videos are significantly more engaging. This explains why adding a video ad unit greatly helps publishers increase ad impressions and viewability. The traffic on websites is higher during Q4, which makes it the best time for publishers to try out video ads and analyze how users respond to them. At the same time, publishers need to make sure that they do not intrude on the user experience while experimenting with video ad units. For this reason, leveraging native video ads is the best option, as they seamlessly blend in with the web content and provide meaningful engagement, leading to higher ad revenue.
What Does The Future Behold For Publishers?
With increasing competition in the advertising landscape, advertisers are getting pickier about the audiences they buy as they want to maximize the capability of their advertising budgets. What publishers lack today is a segmented and customized approach to ad monetization. The “one size fits all” approach doesn’t work anymore, and user monetization should be based on the interest, value, and engagement levels of the user.
Publishers need to adopt new measures and leverage innovative monetization strategies to solve this key challenge and continue attracting advertising budgets, be it this quarter or the upcoming quarters. Even though slow economic revival is a major challenge for publishers, the future is certainly optimistic for them. They need to gear up for the holiday season to make the most of the opportunities that lay before them.
VDO.AI helps publishers increase their revenue earning potential while providing them with impactful solutions that deliver engaging ad experiences and drive additional ad revenue.
Connect with VDO.AI here and get started with your monetization journey today!
