The first step in ensuring you have strong advertising revenue is by placing ads on your site – the Nitro fast way makes this easy. However, this is not enough to guarantee that your revenue performance will be as good as it can be. In the following article we will outline some best practices to follow for placing ads on your page – what to keep in mind, what to avoid and what is most impactful.
Quality vs Quantity #
It’s not solely the number of ads on a page which drives value. More ads on the page means more impressions, which can in turn lead to higher revenues. However – too many units on a page can cause a dilution of your CPM rates due to an overly aggressive ad density. If you have questions on this, reach out to your Nitro support team. We are on hand to offer suggestions on how to turbo boost your revenue while keeping the optimal balance between UX, ad density and advertiser value.
Location, Location, Location #
It’s all about where you place ads on the page. A few key things to keep in mind are laid out below.
- Stay away from elements that users interact with regularly
- Users do not want to click ads, in general, unless they are directly interested. And accidental clicks can be damaging, so make sure your navigational elements are clear of ads.
- As an addendum to the above, ensure that there’s a healthy margin of padding between advertisements and other elements on the page.
- Above the fold is good – but not too high
- You want your units to be visible quickly on the page, but not at the very top as they will be immediately scrolled off-screen. Above the fold (before the first scroll) is good, if at all possible you want the placement to be at the 50% or so page height above the fold. If you put content at the very top, and then the ad placement, the user is less likely to scroll it away.
- Keep your users in mind
- You don’t want to annoy or alienate your userbase with your ad layout – keep them at the forefront of your consideration when designing your ad layout.
Placement Specific Notes #
You’ve found where you want your ads to go – fantastic, now lets look at some important things to keep in mind when designing the spots they will live in.
- Label!
- It is important to clearly define what spaces of your sites are advertisements. You don’t want users to be unsure if they’re looking at a creative or your site – so dismiss the doubt with the power of a label.
- Avoid surprise ads and pop-ups
Placement types and formats #
When we talk about optimizing ad layout there are a few different formats that spring to mind immediately as low effort, high impact units that you can implement to supercharge your page revenue performance. Let’s run through a few of those now.
- Sticky units
- A sticky anchor is a powerful tool to deploy across your site, either anchored to the top or bottom of the page. This unit boasts perfect viewability, is dismissable by the user (configurable on your side) and will push more impressions over the life time of the page than a traditional in-content unit. It’s a win on all sides.
- Sticky side rails follow a similar pattern as anchors – but will serve taller demand that typically doesn’t fit within the content of the page, or within a leaderboard. The space they occupy on the margins of the page is typically empty – and they are a very easy implementation to put that white space to work.
Sticky rails are great for desktop layouts – and can be a triple combo with an anchor and a video player, which makes for a ubiquitous and high impact approach that performs extremely well (anchor, a rail or two, a video player and then in-content units spaced out to include 1 per page viewport). However for mobile you have to take a bit of a different approach. There are no gutters to use – and having both an anchor and a floating video may be too busy for your users. The best way to tackle this is to research your users behavior, see where their attention is and implement your placements to take advantage of that. Your Nitro Client Success contact can help with that – so get in touch fast.
But what about sizes? #
So small a thing but so big an impact – the sizes you include on your ad units can dictate what the bidding pressure behind each placement is. Too few sizes and you may lose out on valuable CPMs. However, there are a few standards in place. The IAB recognizes three sizes as the standard.
- 728×90
- 300×250
- 160×600
- There are also standard sizes for mobile scaled leaderboards (320×50, 320×100), larger skyscrapers (300×600, 320×480), and larger leaderboards (970×90, 970×250).
As a general rule of thumb – the more sizes you can fit within a slot, the higher the competition for the slot. More bidding pressure means more access to higher CPMs, so if you have the space for multiple sizes use that space effectively and implement what will fit.
What else is there? #
There are a myriad of units not covered here – gamified units like rewarded video, instream audio video players etc.
These implementations are very specific and tailored to the site – if you’re interested in them please reach out to your Nitro Client Success team and we will answer any questions you might have.
That’s all from us for today – if you have any questions or would like to get started on your epic journey to turbocharged ad revenue, contact us today.
