Best Advertising Platforms & Ad Networks to Maximize Your Earnings

What KPIs Should You Use to Assess Ad Network Performance?

Regardless of your bidding strategy and the platform you use, it is important to track the ads performance. Here is a short list to know if your ad network is doing the job:

Ad Impressions

This is a basic step for digital advertising. If your audience doesn’t see your ad they cannot interact with it. The more impressions your ad gets, the more chances to get your user’s attention. Platforms like Google Ads allow you to segment impressions based on your campaigns and ad groups. Then you can track the ad impressions to determine which version of the ad works best.

Website traffic

It is a vital metric for publishers. The more visitors your site has, the more quality advertisers you can get. Check traffic according to demographics, location, and origin. Analyzing your traffic can give you insights to improve your SEO and therefore, attract more relevant visitors.

Total page views

This metric tracks any time a user visits one of your pages. This metric also counts refreshes and multiple-page views. Here you can look at how individual pages are performing, and optimize them accordingly.

Bounce rate

This type of website data refers to the number of users that traveled to your site but left without any interaction. Tracking bounce rate shows you the quality of your traffic. If you have a high bounce rate, it may mean your website has quality issues, or latency. This means you are not likely to attract high-quality advertisers or networks.

Cost per Lead (CPL)

This metric tracks how successful you lead-generation efforts are. Publishers get paid for each new referral or customer they can lead to advertisers. Users are expected to show interest via interaction like filling a survey, giving their email details, and similar.

Cost per Click (CPC)

This metric indicates how much it costs when a user clicks on your ad. Cost-per click differs by industry, and there are industries more competitive than others.  For instance, in Google Adwords, the highest-rated keywords are in the legal industry and consumer services. 

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CTR

The click-through rate calculates how many of the users that see the ads end up clicking on it. It provides a good measure of ad performance because it measures each ad individually.

Conversions

It measures whether the ads are prompting the users to interact with them. Conversion rates tell you if the ad is creating new customers or not. You can track by ads, ad group, keyword, or campaign.

Cost per Acquisition (CPA)

This metric indicates how much it costs advertisers to acquire a customer. CPA varies according to the industry. While publishers don’t usually have access to this information, it is worthwhile to try at least to understand how much it costs to your target advertiser.

Return on Ad Spend  (ROAS)

This metric measures the revenue that every dollar you spend on advertising.  ROAS can tell you which ad is delivering the best revenue, and which ones are underperforming and need to reallocate your budget.

Types of Ad Networks

Specialized Ad Networks

These are also called “niche” networks. These ad networks typically target specific industries or niches. For instance, there are display advertising networks that target software advertisers, publishers, and developers. These networks usually handle specific and high-converting, inventories.

General Ad Networks

Unlike specialized networks, these handle a broad spectrum of advertisers. In this category, we can find Google and Facebook ad networks. These bring huge audiences of consumers to the table, along with extensive and detailed customer data.

Promotion Platforms

These tools give you access to multiple ad networks, exchanges, and marketing resources. Promotion platforms help you manage multiple campaigns via multiple ad networks, access marketing resources, calculate marketing costs and optimize your marketing.

How to Combine Ad-Networks to Get The Most From The Publishers Companies?

As a publisher, you can integrate more than one ad network. However, keep in mind not all networks are allowed to combine with Google AdSense. Google has a list of ad networks you can run along with their own. Once you know you can run multiple networks, how do you do it? There are two methods you can use to choose the right network for your waterfall or header bidding. 

Waterfall

This process involves ranking ad networks based on their performance. If the first ad network cannot take all the impressions, then the inventory passes to the second network, which will try to complete the unfilled impressions. If it cannot, then the rest of the inventory passes to the next one.

Header bidding

This system sells your ad impressions based on real-time market value, encouraging advertisers to win the impressions. This ensures you will get the highest possible revenue for space.

How to Optimize Your Advertising by Choosing the Right Website Category and Ad Network

To choose the right network, take all the information and follow these simple steps:

1. Weed out irrelevant networks and find the relevant ones

Classify according to the three factors we mentioned above: budget, niche, and audience.

If you have a specific niche, then look for networks that cater to that niche. For instance, if your niche thrives on video content, then search for ad networks that serve video ads. If you

Knowing your audience will help you find ad networks that serve this audience. For example, if your company caters to fitness fans, then you may require a broader ad network than if your company caters to kombucha followers. If you promote software to an audience of Linux users, then you can use more targeted solutions too.

2. Select the right size of the network.

A larger network, not necessarily means it is better for you. Large ad networks will have a lot of options to choose from, but they don’t usually carry specially targeted ads. If you want to advertise a specialty product, a large network may not be well suited to your needs.

3. Quality vs Quantity

Sometimes you get what you pay for. For ad networks, you may get better pricing and more traffic from a large network, but the traffic you get will not be high intent traffic. To find high-quality, high-converting visitors, you need to get your traffic from the right sources.

4. So many options

Large advertising networks offer extensive options, including re-engagement ads and remarketing. While this can give you an advantage when it comes to targeting, you should ask whether you need all these extra features. Sometimes simplest is best when it comes to advertising. Focusing your advertising on the right websites and ad networks often gives better results.

What’s the difference between an Ad Server and an Ad Exchange?

An ad exchange is a technology platform that serves as an intermediary, connecting ad inventory to advertisers. This process is usually conducted via real-time bidding. Ad exchanges often leverage inventory from SSPs, DSPs and several ad networks.

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An ad server is a technology tool, a web server or a system that stores and uploads the ads on specific digital properties.  Ad servers also monitor and track visitors activity, measuring metrics and providing reporting about the ads performance.

How do we rate the Ad Networks?

To create that list, we evaluated certain parameters and use them to rank the solutions.

Features

When you are selecting the right ad network for your company, it is important to assess what features and underlying technology it offers. Some of the features you may look for in an efficient ad network include:

• Machine learning and AI capabilities
• Advanced reporting
• Ease of management
• Multiple ad formats
• Contextual targeting

Performance

Every ad network is different so we looked into the ones that provided a more versatile and complete solution. While large ad networks offer a large pool of advertisers, their actual performance can vary. Sometimes it is better to choose a niche or premium network that will cater to your specific audience.

Requirements

We selected the networks with the clearer requirements. Large networks often have large traffic requirements since they work based on volume. There re common content requirements to almost all the selected ad networks:

• Your content should be unique
• No inappropriate content
• No ad-cluttering
• Content should be relevant to the ads

Payment Methods

How and how much the network will pay you is another criteria you should look for, and we considered in our ranking. We selected the networks that offered the best paying models.

What reviewers said

Regardless datasheets and company information, there is no value like an honest user review. We based our search on industry-leading reviewers, to know what actual users are saying about the solutions.

Tips From CodeFuel for Publisher Success

Usually, when ads become more popular, their prices get lower. So, if you think about making enough income through ads, you probably come out with ways to increase viewability and add monetization options to existing ads.

However, monetizing your online assets with ads needs to be done right if you don’t want to risk weighing your site down with ads. Cramming too many monetization options without balance can risk driving your users away. As a publisher, you should try to maximize revenue while maintaining a great user experience. This is the key, happy and engaged users organically monetize your site.

Here are 5 tips for publisher success:

• Be consistent: It is important your monetization efforts be consistent in terms of relevance and message. Focus on delivering value to users to increase their engagement and the CTR.
• Have great content: On the same line, a key to a great user experience and high CTRs is delivering useful and engaging content that provides the context to the ads.
• Diversify your monetization options: Use multiple ad networks and monetization platforms to increase your reach and revenue.
• Manage your SEO: The best ads won’t work if people cannot reach your site. Ensuring your SEO strategy is in top shape will attract advertisers.
• Monitor, track, and review: A monetization strategy should be dynamic, so be sure to monitor and track KPIs (engagement, clicks, bounce rate, viewability). Use them to review and adjust your strategy.