Small Business Resource

One factor outweighs all others in achieving the best CPMs possible: quality high-value traffic.

In the current economic climate, the days of burning through end-of-quarter budgets from lofty advertisers are unrealistic. Advertisers are increasingly looking to achieve their CPA performance goals while spending less on pure branding campaigns.

Publishers need to adjust.

To maximize your potential and deliver high CPMs, you need to be aware of your click-through rates and improve the performance conversion rates of your users. Matching campaigns with your user demographics will help this. One simple example: gaming campaigns work well on gaming traffic. Ideally, advertising should be an appealing part of your overall site content.

Too many ads seen in one day by your audience also hurts eCPMs. Frequency cap your traffic to generate higher CPMs. The first view is always the best quality, so displaying the ads with a “freq cap” of 1/24 can be a standard request from advertisers. Keep in mind that certain ad sizes and placements always perform the best: 300×250 medium rectangles and 728×90 leader boards are often the best performing sizes. Picking obscure sizes can result in not having the creatives to run in the placement, as there is a lack of advertisers and, thus low CPMs.

Placement is critical to performance too. Having a placement above the fold will generate better results than one at the bottom of the page which users may never see. Ever wondered why other sites have a 728×90 leader board at the top of the page on a site? Generally, it makes more money.

Most methods to increase eCPMs and revenue are common sense, advertising needs to be seen as a partner to your site that needs to fit in and work together with your audience. The moment you ‘tack’ it on it will degrade your performance.

via Kitara Media