Hi all, I wrote this post to help publishers to increase their profits, I hope you guys will find it beneficial. I'll be glad to get responses . A key metric in the online advertising world is the eCPM (effective cost per mille). This is simply the amount of money that will be generated for the advertiser per 1,000 impressions. It is the best metric to use by far to measure the success of an advertising campaign since it allows you to calculate the ROI. For publishers eCPM means a slightly different thing, it’s the effective CPM a publisher is able to get for selling his inventory. As you all well know, your inventory value is not constant there are many factors, which influence your inventory value, like: GEOs (countries), hour in the day etc. Why Should Publishers Bother Increasing The eCPM? You might think that increasing eCPM is only beneficial to the advertisers, but in fact publishers can benefit too. Think of it this way – the more revenue your traffic brings to the advertisers the more you can charge for the ads. As long as the ROI for your advertisers is positive and high they will continue to pay for the ads on your website. Raising eCPM can be difficult, it could take a lot of trial and error, but when you get it right the increase in revenue is certainly worth the effort. Read on for some of the ways in which you could raise eCPM for your own website. Getting The Ad Placement Right Some people say that the higher the ad is on the page the more coverage it will get, but that is not always the case. You need to experiment with ad placements on different parts of the page using a variety of ad sizes. Get your statistic tools in place to measure CTR, “hot spots” on the webpage etc. You have to approach it like a professional, and the profit you can achieve by getting the right placements is huge. Heard of the phrase – “less is more”? Some think that adding many banners on a webpage will increase the number of clicks on their ads, and the performance of the webpage, but that is not always the case. Placing to many banners on a single webpage might cause “ads blindness”. So you would want to keep the number of ads on a single page within reason, and to adjust it to your audience. Certain types of audiences are more “ad tolerant” than others! Split Up The eCPM Into Segments To increase your eCPM it would help to get a better understanding about how the different factors contribute to the overall eCPM. This would include analysing the following factors: Ad Space eCPM: This metric relates to where the ads are placed on your website. Each space will have a different clickthrough rate. For example, one area might attract twice as many clicks as another, and therefore the eCPM will be twice as big. Ad Unit eCPM: Not all ad units produce equal results. There are a wide variety of ad types that you can use such as banners, skyscrapers and boxes. The best way to know which ones are going to provide the highest clickthrough rate is to test them out. Page eCPM: Not all pages are going to get an equal number of clickthroughs per 1,000 viewers. This metric will allow you to see which pages are the most profitable. You might notice something in common about these pages that could be responsible for the higher eCPM’s, and you could use that knowledge to increase the eCPM of the other pages. Different Ad Types Advertising statistics indicate that interactive ads get a healthy response from viewers. Therefore, don’t be hesitant about using rich media ads such as flash, pop-ups, video, floating, in-page, games and questions. By sticking to simple ads you could be shooting yourself in the foot. People enjoy interactivity on the internet. So give it to them and you might be pleasantly surprised by the high levels of eCPM you’ll be experiencing. Feel free to post your website here, and let us all to review the ads on your website, or just PM me for more information. Michael
A good add on to this. The Page eCPM is commonly used today, when you see 'RPM' - its referring to a Page eCPM. Good article. A lot of these points are key to performance based networks.
Good point! thank you for adding that! Since most advertisers track conversions, even when they buy at flat CPM rate, they know how well their banners preformed on specific site (by preformed I mean CTR and conversion at the end of the chain). Website with good placements, which will result in higher CTR will make more money to the advertiser. On the long run, advertisers will be bidding higher CPMs for that specific website, since they get higher eCPM from it (higher profit per CPM they pay).
Good post / article. You explained a lot and I think all the important points have been covered. Before digging more in this topic, anyway, a publisher must focus on obtaining visitors, because without enough daily impressions no stats can be generated and studied.
Absolutely. Its all about building a good, original site, with organic and direct traffic. Of course Volume (quantity) of traffic. It matters. In the case of monetization more volume allows more campaigns to be run which allows for great optimization to find the best performing ones. Its extremely difficult (nearly impossible) to optimize with little to no traffic.