This means that the publisher website is averaging less than 30,000 impressions per day or less than 1 million impressions per month.
Step 1: Log into the publisher’s DFP account, run a report for previous months to check the average volume of impressions they’ve been serving. Notice any abnormal drop or spikes.
Step 2: Log into the publisher’s Google Analytics account. Check the number of Page Views for the previous months.
Step 3: Calculate the average ads per page (DFP impressions/PageViews). The calculation must be based on the same timeframe on both DFP & Google Analytics.
Step 4: If ads per page are normal (+/- 20% of the expected number of ads the publisher is running per page), low impression count is most likely due to low traffic volume.
Step 5: If a publisher is doing ad arbitrage (meaning they buy traffic), there is a big chance for their traffic volume to fluctuate.
Step 6: Check their traffic sources in Google Analytics.
Step 7: If they get mostly social traffic, that signals the publisher is possibly doing arbitrage unless their social media fan base is huge.
Step 8: Traffic fluctuation is expected for arbitrage publishers. If a low impression count continues for at least 14 straight days, manage publisher expectation that we won’t be able to optimize properly with such a low volume of traffic.
Step 9: If the publisher served less than 1 million impressions for previous months. Recommend that we switch the publisher as AdX-only or PubGuru Header Bidding only, whichever is applicable.
