Contextual Advertising for Publishers
Hello!
After a year of wandering through the columns of various online publications, we decided to launch our own blog in which representatives, mentors and friends of our project will share their knowledge and experience.
In the first publication, Oleg Khrienko, head of the commercial department of one of the 404Group projects, talks about the monetization of media resources using contextual advertising.
Contextual advertising is the basic source of income for most online resources. If a site cannot sell advertising space to a direct advertiser, then almost always the project owner places a context on the free space. The share of revenues from contextual advertising for the vast majority of Internet resources ranges from 50 to 90%, so the optimization of this revenue channel is the most important task.
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The Russian market in this regard is one of the most difficult, since the country has two roughly equivalent partner systems for website owners - YAN (Yandex Advertising Network) and Google AdSense. A rare site is a partner of only one of these systems, since differentiation allows you to increase profits.
In the end of 2014 and the beginning of 2015, the dollar exchange rate had a great impact on the revenue of sites. Depending on the internal revenue accounting system, it could turn out that revenues from AdSense in ruble terms increased significantly, although there was a fall in dollars. The fact is that AdSense takes into account earnings in dollars and pays income for the next month when it reaches the limit for withdrawal. While virtual dollars were in the account in AdSense, the ruble fell. As a result, Google was forced to pay the difference to Russian publishers. This all, naturally, could drive any analyst crazy, who should take similar aspects into account in her work with the context.
At first glance, the work on increasing the income from the context seems simple: you just need to choose the appropriate advertising formats for free space on the site. But with this approach, the webmaster does not use even 40% of the total potential of his resource, and sometimes he may be completely disappointed in this channel of earnings. To avoid this, it is necessary to adhere to the following sequence of actions:
1. Decide whether your site is an MFA.
MFA (Made for Adsense) - a type of sites that do not plan to receive income through direct advertisers or services. This is usually articles, the only way to monetize which is contextual advertising. The appearance of the resource is not important here and there is almost no chance that users will bookmark it.
If your project is an MFA, then you can not limit yourself in anything when optimizing context blocks. If you came to the conclusion that this is not the case, then the area of your work is the blocks under the main content and sidebar.
2. Make sure that the content part of the site and the sidebar are suitable for the most popular formats for advertising materials: 728x90; 240x400; 336x280
3. Choose the most profitable places on the site.
This is usually the space between the article title and the article itself, the space under the article or the final video (the visitor’s exit point), the block between the menu items in the sidebar, the block in the center of the article (for the MFA). The yield of the seats is determined through split testing. When choosing places, it is necessary to take into account that contextual advertising systems first show more profitable ads based on internal statistics, and then less. At the same time they pay you for clicks. Thus, if you give the context a little-clickable zone in the header of the site, which is loaded first, the ads that are most profitable for you will go there. As a result, you will lose some share of income from more clickable places where banners will load after the banner in the header.
4. To determine the optimal location of AdSense and YAN blocks on the site.
Here again, split testing will help you, but there is no need to test every place. It’s enough to decide which system is more profitable for your resource (where there are more suitable advertisers and less traffic). To do this, you need to test one place and identify the most profitable system. Next, we give the best places on the site (near the main content) to the most profitable system. When the limit of one system is exhausted, we use another in the vacant places.
5. Remember the effectiveness.
The more ads you have on the page, the cheaper the advertisers that you have displayed and the cheaper your visitors click. The optimal number is 2 ads from AdSense and 5-7 ads from YAN (depending on the type of site).
6. In addition, it is worth a critical look at your content.
If the articles are too long, then it is likely that the user will not scroll to the bottom of the page and leave earlier. This means that the blocks should be located either in the content itself, or, which is optimal, add pagination in the article - increases revenue by 10-15%
7. Choose the optimal block design.
For AdSense, the built-in mechanism of experiments is used; for PCN, you need to manually start split testing. When selecting a design, it is worth considering that ad units should not be very different from the content, otherwise users will not pay attention to their content and this will reduce the number of clicks.
Interesting fact: fixing a block on the screen in the sidebar increases revenue by 20%. But perhaps this is only for YAN.
8. Set targeting by geography for various traffic channels.
YAN is more popular in Russia, but the number of advertisers drops sharply outside the Russian Federation, therefore it is advisable to change the banner grid depending on the region of the user.
9. Separate the entry and exit pages on the site.
Increase the number of ad units on exit pages, decrease on entry pages and transit pages. These actions will improve the behavioral indicators of the resource and at the same time increase revenues.
10. Using Google Analytics tools, select the most profitable exit pages on the site and redirect traffic from cheap pages to more expensive ones (this needs to subordinate all the logic of internal linking)
Landmarks:
To make it easier to navigate, it is worth giving the CPM revenue figures, which can be considered optimal for various topics. This does not mean that you can not get higher income (it all depends on the quality of your site), but if your performance is significantly lower - it is urgent to take up the optimization of the context on the site.
The distribution of income on different topics for March was about the following:
Women's resources - 83 rubles. per thousand impressions
Slimming and diets - 45 rubles. per thousand impressions
Construction and repair - 250 rubles. per thousand impressions
Medicine and health - 170 rubles. per thousand impressions
Dreams and horoscopes - 60 rubles. per thousand impressions
Pets - 21 rubles. per thousand impressions
Cooking - 45 rub. per thousand impressions
SEO - 74 rub. per thousand impressions
Jurisprudence - 103 rubles. per thousand impressions
Cars - 115 rubles. per thousand impressions
Finance - 210 rubles. per thousand impressions
IT - 132 rubles. per thousand impressions
Check how your sites in March are consistent with these indicators. If your experience is significantly different in a big way, it will be interesting to know about it in the comments.
After a year of wandering through the columns of various online publications, we decided to launch our own blog in which representatives, mentors and friends of our project will share their knowledge and experience.
In the first publication, Oleg Khrienko, head of the commercial department of one of the 404Group projects, talks about the monetization of media resources using contextual advertising.
Contextual advertising is the basic source of income for most online resources. If a site cannot sell advertising space to a direct advertiser, then almost always the project owner places a context on the free space. The share of revenues from contextual advertising for the vast majority of Internet resources ranges from 50 to 90%, so the optimization of this revenue channel is the most important task.
')
The Russian market in this regard is one of the most difficult, since the country has two roughly equivalent partner systems for website owners - YAN (Yandex Advertising Network) and Google AdSense. A rare site is a partner of only one of these systems, since differentiation allows you to increase profits.
In the end of 2014 and the beginning of 2015, the dollar exchange rate had a great impact on the revenue of sites. Depending on the internal revenue accounting system, it could turn out that revenues from AdSense in ruble terms increased significantly, although there was a fall in dollars. The fact is that AdSense takes into account earnings in dollars and pays income for the next month when it reaches the limit for withdrawal. While virtual dollars were in the account in AdSense, the ruble fell. As a result, Google was forced to pay the difference to Russian publishers. This all, naturally, could drive any analyst crazy, who should take similar aspects into account in her work with the context.
At first glance, the work on increasing the income from the context seems simple: you just need to choose the appropriate advertising formats for free space on the site. But with this approach, the webmaster does not use even 40% of the total potential of his resource, and sometimes he may be completely disappointed in this channel of earnings. To avoid this, it is necessary to adhere to the following sequence of actions:
1. Decide whether your site is an MFA.
MFA (Made for Adsense) - a type of sites that do not plan to receive income through direct advertisers or services. This is usually articles, the only way to monetize which is contextual advertising. The appearance of the resource is not important here and there is almost no chance that users will bookmark it.
If your project is an MFA, then you can not limit yourself in anything when optimizing context blocks. If you came to the conclusion that this is not the case, then the area of your work is the blocks under the main content and sidebar.
2. Make sure that the content part of the site and the sidebar are suitable for the most popular formats for advertising materials: 728x90; 240x400; 336x280
3. Choose the most profitable places on the site.
This is usually the space between the article title and the article itself, the space under the article or the final video (the visitor’s exit point), the block between the menu items in the sidebar, the block in the center of the article (for the MFA). The yield of the seats is determined through split testing. When choosing places, it is necessary to take into account that contextual advertising systems first show more profitable ads based on internal statistics, and then less. At the same time they pay you for clicks. Thus, if you give the context a little-clickable zone in the header of the site, which is loaded first, the ads that are most profitable for you will go there. As a result, you will lose some share of income from more clickable places where banners will load after the banner in the header.
4. To determine the optimal location of AdSense and YAN blocks on the site.
Here again, split testing will help you, but there is no need to test every place. It’s enough to decide which system is more profitable for your resource (where there are more suitable advertisers and less traffic). To do this, you need to test one place and identify the most profitable system. Next, we give the best places on the site (near the main content) to the most profitable system. When the limit of one system is exhausted, we use another in the vacant places.
5. Remember the effectiveness.
The more ads you have on the page, the cheaper the advertisers that you have displayed and the cheaper your visitors click. The optimal number is 2 ads from AdSense and 5-7 ads from YAN (depending on the type of site).
6. In addition, it is worth a critical look at your content.
If the articles are too long, then it is likely that the user will not scroll to the bottom of the page and leave earlier. This means that the blocks should be located either in the content itself, or, which is optimal, add pagination in the article - increases revenue by 10-15%
7. Choose the optimal block design.
For AdSense, the built-in mechanism of experiments is used; for PCN, you need to manually start split testing. When selecting a design, it is worth considering that ad units should not be very different from the content, otherwise users will not pay attention to their content and this will reduce the number of clicks.
Interesting fact: fixing a block on the screen in the sidebar increases revenue by 20%. But perhaps this is only for YAN.
8. Set targeting by geography for various traffic channels.
YAN is more popular in Russia, but the number of advertisers drops sharply outside the Russian Federation, therefore it is advisable to change the banner grid depending on the region of the user.
9. Separate the entry and exit pages on the site.
Increase the number of ad units on exit pages, decrease on entry pages and transit pages. These actions will improve the behavioral indicators of the resource and at the same time increase revenues.
10. Using Google Analytics tools, select the most profitable exit pages on the site and redirect traffic from cheap pages to more expensive ones (this needs to subordinate all the logic of internal linking)
Landmarks:
To make it easier to navigate, it is worth giving the CPM revenue figures, which can be considered optimal for various topics. This does not mean that you can not get higher income (it all depends on the quality of your site), but if your performance is significantly lower - it is urgent to take up the optimization of the context on the site.
The distribution of income on different topics for March was about the following:
Women's resources - 83 rubles. per thousand impressions
Slimming and diets - 45 rubles. per thousand impressions
Construction and repair - 250 rubles. per thousand impressions
Medicine and health - 170 rubles. per thousand impressions
Dreams and horoscopes - 60 rubles. per thousand impressions
Pets - 21 rubles. per thousand impressions
Cooking - 45 rub. per thousand impressions
SEO - 74 rub. per thousand impressions
Jurisprudence - 103 rubles. per thousand impressions
Cars - 115 rubles. per thousand impressions
Finance - 210 rubles. per thousand impressions
IT - 132 rubles. per thousand impressions
Check how your sites in March are consistent with these indicators. If your experience is significantly different in a big way, it will be interesting to know about it in the comments.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/290132/
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