Did you know that advertising influences 90 percent of consumers? Advertisements are an excellent way to bring attention to and shape people's perceptions, attitudes and purchase decisions toward a product, service or idea. However, to get the most out of ads, you need to advertise the right way. Part of this involves establishing clear goals, creating a solid strategy and embracing continuous improvement.
As a publisher, you will want to get the maximum value for your premium ad inventories. To do this, you must sell your inventory at the best prices. Ad yield management is a strategic approach to help publishers realize the best possible return on investment. But what is yield management, and how does it work?
Here's what to know.
An Overview of Ad Yield Management
Simply put, ad yield management is a practice used by publishers to manage supply and demand to optimize pricing and maximize revenue. Managing ad inventory in this way requires that a publisher finds the right balance between generating revenue from your digital platform and providing value to your customers.
To find a perfect balance that maximizes revenue, you need to think about product availability, resource allocation and price adjustments based on customer demand and changing market conditions. In addition, you have to closely monitor, track and analyze your advertising efforts, as well as leverage historical data in order to optimize ads for peak performance.
Why Ad Yield Management Is Important
Typically, the total amount of inventory on a site will be constant over time while demand for the inventory keeps changing. Yield management helps publishers manage this challenge without losing money, time, or resources. Below are a few benefits of yield management for publishers.
Improved User Experience
By obtaining data, publishers can segment their audiences and deliver personalized experiences, leading to increased engagement and satisfaction.
Formulation of a Pricing Strategy
Publishers can rely on consumer behavior and demand prediction to adjust prices and allocate resources.
Insights
Yield management provides publishers with robust analytics to analyze audience behavior and assess ad performance. This data-driven approach empowers publishers to optimize their strategies and maximize revenue through informed decision-making.
Demand Management
Publishers can forecast the demand they expect to get in different seasons. That way, they can sell ad inventories at the best prices while still ensuring customers get value for their money.
Maximize Revenue
Ad yield management helps create opportunities for the highest prices. By adjusting pricing and inventory based on demand, publishers can ensure ad revenue optimization while still delivering a great user experience.
Essential Components of Ad Yield Management
Generally, ad yield management is a broad concept. However, certain primary activities constitute this practice. They include but are not limited to:
Header Bidder Optimization
This technique involves fine-tuning ad setups to fill ad space and increase revenue. Increasing competition for your ad inventory then helps ensure your ad space gets the best price.
Price Flooring
The floor price is the minimum price for your ad inventory. Price flooring helps manage supply and demand to maximize ad revenue.
Ad Unit Placements and Settings
This strategy entails determining how ads are placed, how many they will be, how frequently they refresh, and how visible they are. Your ad unit strategy has a significant impact on ad revenue.
Ad Quality and Blocking
To maximize your ad revenue, you need to manage ad quality by selecting the most relevant ads and blocking low-quality ones. This improves user experience which could in turn help to increase your revenue.
Supply Path Optimization
This process involves simplifying and streamlining the supply chain in order to enhance efficiency and transparency. That way, advertisers can buy inventory more easily, leading to an increase in revenue for publishers.
The different activities that make up yield management can be complex. However, these efforts can be organized into a consistent ad yield management workflow that includes:
- Strategy and hypothesis building
- Testing, reviewing results and drawing insights
- Continuous monitoring and management
Best Practices for Optimizing Ad Yield
Managing ad yield is a challenging task. However, adopting the right approach will go a long way in enabling publishers to realize their goals. Adhering to proven best practices will help create a good foundation for increasing your ad revenue. Be sure to:
- Optimize your website and inventory. When done right, this will increase engagement, effectively enabling advertisers to get more conversions from the ads.
- Always adhere to AdSense rules and regulations. This will help to avoid downtimes, ads getting rejected and your website getting penalized.
- Have a clear understanding of key metrics. This will put you in a better position to evaluate the performance of ads and take steps to improve the marketing campaigns.
- Optimize for mobile. Considering that over 50 percent of global internet traffic comes from mobile devices, making the website mobile-friendly will help in reaching a wider and more diverse audience.
- Use price floors wisely. When it comes to floor prices, make sure that they remain competitive for bidders but at the same time boost your ad yield.
Key Yield Management Tools and Technologies
As a publisher, using the right tools and technologies for yield management helps make the most of your advertising efforts, maximize your yield and grow your business. Some helpful tools and technologies to consider are:
Data Analytics Platforms
Leveraging platforms such as Adobe Analytics and Google Analytics facilitates valuable insights into user needs, behaviors, and preferences. These insights allow publishers to make informed decisions about audience segmentation, inventory management, and pricing.
Ad Servers
A dedicated ad server will make managing and optimizing your ad inventory easier. The right server will have capabilities that allow setting up campaigns, managing placements, improving ad targeting and tracking performance.
Header Bidding
With header bidding, you can offer your ad inventory to multiple ad exchanges. This increases competition for the available ad space and results in higher bid prices. Ultimately, you stand a better chance of realizing better ad fill rates and higher revenues.
Dynamic Price Floor Optimization
This data-driven pricing technique adjusts price floors for ad inventory automatically and in real time based on ad demand, user behavior and other market dynamics.
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