Black Friday weekend starts tomorrow! We’re very pleased with how much work everyone has been doing around optimization, viewability, and adding new placements/features, and that has us believing that the next thirty days will be close to record breaking for most of our publishers.

Today we’ll cover some news on direct sales efforts, banner refresh rates, and talk a bit about seasonality. As an additional note, we will have more limited hours the next few days (Nov. 26-29) as we celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday, but we’ll still be close at hand if something comes up.

Direct Sales

On top of our efforts in the programmatic space, we have some great news to share. We are going to be officially onboarding a new direct sales manager who has deep ties to agencies and buyers in the United States and Europe. Most of his efforts will be behind the scenes here on the platform, but I will be making introductions as necessary if buyers want to pursue more customized campaigns with your sites.

To continue these efforts, I have two requests (which many of you have already implemented):

Add cody@ggsoftware.io and matt.dartez@ggsoftware.io to your Google Analytics to track metrics outside of our platform Create an “Advertising” link on your site or footer – this can either be a direct mail to sales@ggsoftware.io or it can be an information page saying something along these lines:

Thanks for your interest in (your site title here), and we’d love to help you drive more users to your product! Our website visitors are incredibly enthusiastic, and we’d love to help you connect with our audience.

By advertising on (your site here), you’ll have millions of opportunities to expose your brand to these influencers. They are all early adopters who spend their money in online purchases of all types.

To learn more and chat with our sales representatives, please email us (address of your choice) and we’ll respond with all the juicy details.

These additions (if you haven’t done so already) will definitely help us set up campaigns and empower the direct sales team moving forward.

Banner Refresh Rates

With Black Friday and Christmas approaching, we would like everyone to look at your current refresh rates and – if your viewability is over 50% – think about adjusting those rates to move more ad impressions while a user is browsing your site. We’ve seen great outcomes with sites that have focused on viewability making this adjustment, and – if you are still set at the default 90 second interval – consider moving that to a faster metric.

If you have any questions about that, please ask Matt or myself.

Seasonality

This is a super exciting time of year (everyone makes money!) but I want to remind everyone that it only lasts until the end of December. Once the calendar ticks over to 2021, be prepared to see a substantial decrease in CPMs as advertisers restart their marketing budgets and Q1 rears its ugly head. It is not uncommon to see 40% decreases in CPMs from end of Q4 to Q1, but if you have any questions, please let us know ahead of time.

That’s it for this month! As always, you can contact myself (cody@ggsoftware.io) and Matt Dartez (matt.dartez@ggsoftware.io) if you have any questions.

Have a great start of your holiday season, and we’ll be in touch.