You’ve set up Ad Exchange & Prebid, what’s next?

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Last updated: August 13, 2020 | by Kean Graham
You've set up Ad Exchange & Prebid, what's next_

This post was most recently updated on August 13th, 2020

As a publisher, you always want to ensure that you’re running an optimal ad setup and aren’t leaving money at the table. Chances are, you’ve even tried opportunities outside of AdSense. To get better ad revenues, you might have started upgrading to Google Ad Exchange (AdX) and, at the same time, implemented prebid or header bidding. Although, in doing so, will provide excellent results, improving your ad setup doesn’t stop here. In this post, we’ll show you what’s next. You’ll learn the steps to take so that you can get the most out of your current setup.

Not sure what Prebid is, read more about it here: https://www.monetizemore.com/prebid-header-bidding-solutions/

What’s next?

Floor optimization

Whether you are using your own AdX account or are partnered with a reseller, one of the important things that need optimization is your price floors. Keep in mind that Google Ad Exchange switched to a first-price auction in the middle of 2019, and with that switch, they also revamped their floors to unified pricing rules. This means that when setting up floors, publishers need to consider that all line items (except house and price priority line items with 0 value CPM) will be impacted. We’ve written a comprehensive guide on UPR adjustments to help publishers out.

Monitor discrepancies

We’ve talked about not leaving money on the table. Huge discrepancies within your header bidding networks are one of the most common culprits when it comes to revenue loss. Make sure that the revenue and impression discrepancies are within the acceptable range of 8 to 10%.

AdX Programmatic Native

This feature will allow publishers to design ads that complement the look and feel of the website. After enabling this feature, make sure to customize the ad style. You can find out more about optimizing for AdX native here.

Audit ad placements

Most of the time, the better your viewability translates, the higher CPMs advertisers will pay. Websites loading faster will often result in better viewability rates as well. You can run your site’s Pagespeed insights report and review if the recommendations to improve the site speed is viable according to your dev team’s ability and resources. You can also change the ad placements. For example, an ad located above the fold does not result in high viewability at all times as users tend to scroll down immediately. Switching the site to a lazy load or infinite scroll setup is another option to increase load speed and add to the viewability metric. If you can sacrifice a little bit of user experience, testing a sticky sidebar or a sticky footer is an ideal option as they are highly viewable and can provide incremental revenue increase.

Ad refreshes

Before trying this, consider your user’s average time on page. If the average time on page is 40 seconds, setting an ad refresh at 1 minute might not provide the best results. Going back to the viewability score, blindly refreshing all ad units every 20 or 30 seconds may be hurting the user experience and revenue. It is generally a good idea to only run a refresh to ad units that have been counted as viewable, and if it stops refreshing as soon as it is detected that, the user is no longer active on that session but has kept the tab open.

Improve your ad stack

Partner with reliable header bidding networks. We have listed the top header bidding networks that have been proven to perform well.

Bidder timeout experiment

Make sure to analyze your traffic before increasing or decreasing the timeout as they have their advantages and disadvantages. If the majority of your traffic is coming from a non-tier one geographical location, increasing the timeout might not be the ideal choice as it slows down the page. However, an increased timeout could help revenues as it allows more bids to join the auction. To get additional insights about your setup, download our free extension – PubGuru Ad Inspector. We have outlined how header bidding is affecting your site here.

Conclusion

Tackling this list can eat up a lot of your precious time and tech resources. Not to mention the complexity and understanding needed to implement each section effectively. Instead, let our team of ad ops experts help and take your ad revenue to the next level! Sign up to MonetizeMore today!

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