Adding more ads doesn’t always mean more money.
For digital publishers, more placements, demand partners, and aggressive refresh settings can create more advertising opportunities but also result in slower, more disruptive pages. The net effect is less time on site, lower viewability, and suppressed long-term revenue.
The value of a website monetization audit is helping revenue teams understand what is happening and the shape of the tradeoff.
1. Evaluate Ad Density and Placement
Begin with an audit of how many ad slots are present on a page and where they exist on the page. Consider the differences between desktop, mobile, article pages, and other high-traffic templates.
- Find placements that sit in competition with editorial content or where users must stop reading to engage with the page.
- Compare how much an individual slot earns versus the overall impact on page performance.
- Check if too many ads load within a long-form article.
- Check the mobile layouts separately since they have less screen property to play around with.
The general idea is to find the slots bringing in revenue that pay the bills without hurting the reader experience. Removing the lowest-earning slot can even make a better experience now and have a small direct impact on your earnings.
2. Measure Ad Viewability
There’s little correlation between an ad impression and an actual ad being seen by a person. But viewability has a better chance at that, along with numerous other use cases.
The Media Rating Council standard for display viewable impressions is that 50% of an ad’s pixels are in the viewable space for at least one continuous second; for video, it’s two seconds.
When auditing campaigns for viewability, look at the metric by placement, by device, and by page template. Look at where you’re seeing low viewability. Is the ad loading too high on the page, pushing the creative so far down it falls below the fold; is it in a position visitors don’t scroll to; etc. Then adjust the factors needed to raise your viewability rate.
3. Investigate Latency and Core Web Vitals
Advertising technology may impact extra network requests, scripts, and late auction activities. They can affect load and interactive speed, especially on mobile devices.
How may ad experience be related to Google Core Web Vitals issues?
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Load performance
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP): Interactive responsiveness
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Layout Shift margin
Good User Experiences metrics: LCP <= 2.5s, INP <= 200ms, CLS <= 0.1, 75th percentile of page visits
Compare field data with the test cases to identify the advertising script, out-of-page creatives, and fragile ad container.
4. Review Header Bidding and Ad Refresh
A crowded ad stack creates competition but doesn’t necessarily equate to equivalent benefits. Review demand partner performance, auction timeouts, bid density, and net revenue (after fees) of each partner.
Check ad refresh policies. Establish the policy and define the conditions under which an ad is refreshed. Refreshing an ad while a user is actively viewing a page serves another opportunity, but too many refreshes can impact the user experience and the quality of the inventory.
What triggers a refresh? How often are ads refreshed? Do ads remain in view? What is the % of users who reload the page and refill the ad slot? Compare the additional revenue against latency, viewability, engagement, and user experience.
5. Turn Audit Findings Into Action
Before making changes, consider which will have the most impact on revenue, but also consider if there are any technical risks that could do more harm than good. Make changes to parts of the page first before a site-wide rollout. Before and after will show you the effects in isolation.
Tracking revenue per thousand impressions, viewability, and engagement alongside ad impression count will give you a more complete picture.
For publishers seeking support with this process, OptAd360’s website monetization services for news publishers offer a starting point for evaluating advertising performance and improving monetization.
Building an ad stack that can provide checks and balances between yield and reader experience. Consistent auditing helps publishers find areas of their inventory that are being wasted. Complexity can be removed accordingly, and publishers can get rid of guesswork in revenue.
