5 Ways to Boost Your Website Monetization!

Introduction

If you’re a publisher and you’ve been thinking aloud that you’re not making enough money from your website, then you’re definitely experiencing a very common reality among publishers of all sizes.

The decision to take action to improve your revenue could be the most essential step you can make towards strengthening your website’s profitability and future-proofing your digital portfolio for years to come.

Today we will expose some of the most beneficial options for generating significant financial returns for your website, specifically, by optimizing your display, mobile ad units through preferred deals and private auctions, choosing between Google AdX and Google AdSense, and lastly, adding video monetization in order to earn significant CPMs.

We believe that website monetization is an essential financial lifeline and is the most important aspect to focus on for increasing website revenue.  Since there are so many ways to improve your revenue, let’s get started!

Programmatic Optimization

These days we see the struggle publishers face in striving to keep pace with all of the new programmatic advancements emerging in the marketplace.  Both publishers and advertisers are navigating frequent and ever-changing technologies constantly emerging in the programmatic industry.

There is no doubt that there is a lot to know and a lot to do whether it’s simply optimizing an ad stack, exposing inventory on strategic display and mobile ad networks or working with an expert optimization specialist like Oraki.

For publishers committed to programmatic on both display and mobile, it is essential to be up-to-date in order to create the highest value for themselves and their advertisers. In particular, two of the most beneficial programmatic technologies currently available are preferred deals and private auctions.

Preferred Deals

Preferred Deals allow individual buyers to negotiate fixed-price, first-look deals with sellers.  The CPM is generally higher than regular programmatic and on par with direct sales because advertisers are seeking impressions based on the specific data available or gathered by the advertiser previously.

Preferred deals are based on direct agreements between publishers and advertisers where generally advertisers approach the publishers about specific ad sizes, placements and audiences and the two parties negotiate a specific fixed price for the impressions amongst themselves.

What’s unique about preferred deals is that they are executed programmatically.  Whereas once advertisers would simply send publishers an ad tag which would link to the allocated ad placement, now the entire execution runs through DSPs and SSPs (e.g. DoubleClick AdX & DoubleClick Bid Manager), where a deal ID get things moving along.

Private Auctions

Private auctions are programmatic deals that allow publishers to create a higher-priority auction available only to white-listed buyers of their choosing for specific inventory the publisher desires to make available.

One such SSP allowing private auctions is DoubleClick Ad Exchange (AdX) by Google, which when setup through DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) delivers the best results for publishers. Any advertiser interested in participating in a private auction is recommended to be using a DSP (such as DoubleClick Bid Manager).

Within the private auction, publishers establish a specific floor price with the chosen advertisers and lets this small group of buyers compete in an exclusive, private programmatic marketplace auction. The floor price, in general, is higher than that of the open marketplace, so the buyers can pick and choose the premium impressions that they would like to bid on based on certain known parameters beforehand.

Video Monetization 

In recent years, featuring monetized video content on a website has become an important avenue for publishers to consider within their monetization plans.

Video content is a highly effective method for both engaging website visitors as well as providing the ever-growing pool of advertisers a means for running video programmatic advertising campaigns.

While many publishers jump right in and adopt video, most have chosen not to, whether due to lack of video content, site layout or even due to knowledge how to implement the technology in the correct manner.

The decision to not feature video could be a strategic mistake for publishers. 

Video is increasingly proving to be the best way for publishers to increase their current revenue stream through opening themselves up to receiving significantly higher CPMs as compared to display advertising.

This is due to the fact that advertisers are continuing to adopt video advertising as an essential method for delivering their message and are willing to pay premium prices for interested and longer engaged audiences.

Google AdSense

As the standard monetization default for websites, AdSense is the world’s largest contextual ad network enabling online publishers of any size to monetize their website and mobile assets. 

AdSense includes ads displayed in search engine results, Google products and on the Google Display Network (GDN). AdSense serves high fill rates, with almost unlimited demand. It offers fast and reliable payment in most regions and the security of working with Google.

Whether you have recently added or you have been using AdSense on your website for years already, the essential question to ask yourself is whether you are making enough money with Google AdSense.

We are constantly hearing from our clients that are only using AdSense on their website and are apprehensive to move on from it despite being dissatisfied by the revenue it is generating. 

We agree that AdSense is a great option for growing publishers and we understand the concern they express when discussing whether or not to drop AdSense for another monetization solution.

Conversely, there are additional methods for optimizing ad units in addition to various monetization solutions that a publisher could add that would open up excellent possibilities to further monetize their current traffic and grow revenue exponentially through strategically placed ad units and expert ad unit optimization.

DoubleClick AdX

DoubleClick Ad Exchange (AdX) is Google’s programmatic platform featuring Real Time Bidding (RTB) technology for premium websites to be paired with premium advertisers.

AdX pairs buyers and sellers across the industry and works with premium publishers and advertisers in the world’s largest real-time programmatic RTB bidding exchange. Connected to ad networks, agencies, and third-party demand-side platforms, the AdX marketplace is driven by advertiser demand, conducted via live auction for the ad units.

If you have more than 5M visitors on your website per month, then you can and absolutely should switch over to AdX.  Publishers featuring AdX on their websites are exposed to the world’s most premium advertisers who are eager to spend significant advertising budgets on sites that are widely trafficked.  Just this difference alone between membership in AdSense and/or AdX equates into a significant financial gain for the publisher who qualifies and begins using AdX.

In addition, AdX reaches its full potential when it is enabled to compete with other networks via Google’s ad serving platform – DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP). By utilizing DFP (either Small Business or Premium), publishers can rotate between ad networks for their ad units in addition to directly selling ad space to advertisers, while always striving for 100% fill rates through the real-time competition since added competition for ad units drives the CPMs higher.

With a multitude of demand sources in competition for more of your website’s ad units (5 instead of AdSense’s 3), more bidders are involved for more ad units and the stridently pushing higher the price of the winning bids for your ad units.  In the end, there’s no comparison, publishers make significantly more money by having AdX paired with DFP on their website.

Ultimately, if you’re a publisher who is aiming to maximize your advertising revenue and your website has over 5M visitors per month, then graduating to AdX should be your goal.

• Sell your ad space to the highest-paying buyers in real-time
• Increase revenues from premium and remnant inventory
• Detailed reports on all of your inventory
• Realize higher margins

If you would like to join AdX and potentially make more money from your traffic, Oraki can assist you in making this happen and putting your website on the path to maximizing your financial yield from advertising.

Though if your website doesn’t have millions of impressions per month, chances are that you have already added AdSense to your website as one of your first decisions for monetizing your website.

Conclusion

While at first it may feel like taking a deep dive into the unknown with so many intriguing options available to publishers, we completely appreciate that adding new monetization solutions to your website is not a straightforward and simple process. 

Regardless, you shouldn’t be hesitant to press forward and try to improve your monthly revenue.

Your website should be a vehicle for making money and we’re here to assist you along the way to amplify your monthly ad revenue.

Regardless of the size of your website, Oraki can enable your website to add all of these effective monetization streams to your website and then handling all of the complex optimization thereafter.

We hope the writing of this post has assisted you to better understand the programmatic landscape and it has empowered you with information to make you more website revenue than you are earning today.