I’m always surprised to see the ongoing popularity of this post, fittingly titled “Ad Revenue By The Seasons,” and its relevance to publisher earnings ever since it was first published.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be so surprised though. History tends to repeat itself, as the saying goes, and in our case, the advertising industry proves no exception.

In this edition of Behind the Numbers with Brad (BTNWB), we’re diving into seasonality once more, this time with a definitive guide to specific dates (and printable eCPM prediction calendar!) to keep in mind throughout the year.

The beauty of being in the publishing world for 15+ years and representing nearly 8,000 sites in nearly every lifestyle niche that exists is that Mediavine has data.

Billions and billions of points of data.

Again, history repeats itself, even during the trying times of a pandemic. Life as we know it has changed in many ways, but spending patterns around major holidays and events — and lower spending patterns around the ends of fiscal quarters and years — persist.

In order to outline the exact dates that you, a publisher, should focus on to optimize content and earnings, I’ve teamed up with Cynthia, Director of Mediavine’s Business Intelligence team (a.k.a. the keeper of the data), to isolate the hottest (and coolest) days of the year.

So to speak. These don’t always correlate with the weather outside.

To arrive at these “hot or not” days, we’ve analyzed eCPMs by calendar day, using the last few years for comparison. Mediavine calculates eCPM by looking at the average CPM and multiplying it by the fill rate on an individual day.

CPM and fill rate are both heavily influenced by increased competition, which results from advertisers eagerly positioning themselves to get in front of the right audiences during the periods of higher consumer spending, such as holidays.

Without further ado, here’s our eCPM guide for 2021!

(If you’d prefer a printable version, we got you! Print either the color or grayscale PDF to pin to the wall behind your desk. You can also find them in this Google Drive Folder for easy cloud storage.)

The beautiful graphic above, put together by the amazing graphic designers on the Marketing team, is a perfect illustration of each quarter and month, complete with major holidays and events associated with each and how low or high we would expect eCPMs to be.

Going forward, this will be my favorite graphic to reference as we move through the year, and as a publisher it should be high on your list as well because it beautifully illustrates the best days of each month (and each month does have them), from the slower times of January (new quarter, new year) to late November (holidays).

As you can see, it also clearly illustrates how the end of the month is almost always better than the beginning of the month, no matter the time of year.

So, how can you put this graphic to use as a publisher?

First, print it out. Now, laminate it, and hang it above your desk, on the refrigerator or on the mirror. I mostly kid but not entirely.

Think of this as your content roadmap for the rest of the year. Take a look at the upcoming days with the best eCPMs, and look back at your previous content.

Is your content relevant to the holiday or events around those days?

For example, did you have a recipe or travel post that performed really well last year around Memorial Day? 

If so, shine that post up! Add images, link to relevant content or even just break up those larger paragraphs into smaller paragraphs to maximize your advertising real estate. 

Focus on promoting that post ahead of the days in question and allow that momentum to carry you into the highest earning day of that holiday cycle.

Don’t have a post for that holiday? Well, now you know when to create one. Make and push out some new content to capitalize on the traffic and earnings when eCPMs are highest.

At Mediavine, we are always challenging our publishers to make the most of their hard earned traffic, and using this seasonal data is a powerful tool in your arsenal.

We hope that the data acquired and organized into this amazing graphic helps you meet the challenges throughout the year to make 2021 your best yet.

The post Best Days of the Year (with Printable) —Behind the Numbers with Brad appeared first on Mediavine.

Today? Let’s talk about how to increase your CPM.

First: What is CPM?

Essentially, CPM stands for “cost per mille” and has to do with how much each ad spot costs advertisers. By optimizing your ad inventory and website for user experience, you make more money.

So let’s dive into a few simple ways to do that.

Fill in your video details

If you’re using video in your content strategy — wait, you are using video, right? — you’ll want to make sure you include fill in all the video details.

Why?

Because, no matter how wonderful they are, advertisers don’t watch your videos.

They DO read your video details, especially the URL and keywords. It’s those details that help them determine where to spend their ad dollars.

The more information you give them, the better they are able to make decisions on where to spend. So why not make it easy on them?

Think about your Jump button

If you’re using a Jump button on your site, know that doing so comes with the risk that users will skip over your in-content ads, which has an impact on your viewability. It can also drastically decrease the number of impressions you’re serving.

However, there’s definitely a portion of your audience that wants the ability to skip to the meat of your content.

So what can you do?

Give it a think. Consider your goals.

If you decide a Jump button is for you, try making it less obvious. Rather than a big, colored JUMP at the top of all your posts, look at a subtler design. Are you using multiple Jump buttons? Try narrowing down to just the one that’s most useful for your readers.

Finally, if you determine a Jump button is the best experience for your readers, make sure you enable the Jump to Recipe Arrival Unit. It has excellent viewability and will help boost your recipe card CPMs.

Disable the Adhesion Close button

Another way to increase your CPM that requires balancing user experience and your wallet is found at the bottom of your screen.

It’s called the Adhesion Unit — that banner ad at the bottom of your website — and it’s a big revenue generator. It has great viewability which lends itself to high CPMs. So first, check your Dashboard and make sure that you’re running the Adhesion Unit for both desktop and mobile.

Now for decision time: to disable or not to disable the close button?

Disabling the Adhesion Close button can increase revenue for that unit by 10%! This means increased impressions on a unit with already high CPMs.

Improve engagement and first-party data with Grow

Third-party cookies are crumbling. First-party data is the future. The future? It’s kind of already here.

You can begin enticing your readers to share their first-party data with you through Grow, our user-engagement suite designed for a more privacy centric internet. Logged in users who’ve consented to the use of first-party data are the most valuable to advertisers.

With features like Grow Subscribe and the Spotlight Widget you can easily encourage readers to sign up for your newsletter, log in to your website and build a network of users across the world wide web.

The post How to Increase Your CPM appeared first on Mediavine.

Even though Q2 is quickly approaching, these tips can help you optimize content, step up your SEO game and increase your revenue no matter what season it is.

When it comes to making sure you have great performing ads, we definitely have our go-to tips — like content length, shorter paragraphs and font size — but we also have new tricks to share along with updated best practices.

All of these impression-boosting tips and tricks are tried and true, and since there’s more than one way to make a good (blog) impression, we’ve rounded up seven ways to help increase your revenue.

7 Ways to Increase Your Ad Impressions

Increase Your Earnings with Video

We can’t stress this enough. Add videos to all of your posts!

Creating video is simple with easy to use apps you can download in minutes and the time investment is worth the payout.

Optimize Your Most Valuable Content

Things like newsletter opt-ins, related post widgets and affiliate native shopping ads can look like “end of post cues.” Use heat maps to optimize your most valuable content and look for any roadblocks in your posts that might cause readers to leave before they find what they’re looking for.

Adjust Your In-Content Frequency Using Page Level Data

Adjust your ad frequency (how often ads appear in your posts) based on the length of your content and visual appeal. More ads might equal more money, but they don’t always equal the best user experience.

How Many Images Should You Use in a Post?

To make the most of pictures in your posts, use vertical images and add a hard return between pictures and text. Include as many unique images (that add value) as you can.

A couple of other quick image tips: Make sure your image completely fills the container and avoid using functions like text wrapping, which can shorten content on desktop, thereby reducing your revenue.

Increase Font Size — and Increase SEO & RPM Along With It

Improve your ad performance with an increased font size and line height. We recommend 18px for font size and 1.6px for line height. Bigger is better, but there is such a thing as too big — we don’t recommend going larger than 22px.

Word Count: Why More is More For SEO and Revenue Alike

Increasing your word count has many benefits. Not only will it provide more opportunities for ad impressions, but it will also raise your chances of being found by search engines. Make sure that your posts consist of quality content and contain useful information for your readers.

Examine Your Jump Button Settings

Believe it or not, design choices can have a big impact on your ad impressions. Here we’re specifically talking about jump buttons. A lot of readers want them but they can really impact your impressions and revenue. That’s why we advocate for offering your audience a jump button, rather than encouraging they use it.

Tl;dr: Put your ads where your readers are!

These tasks may seem daunting, but you don’t have to do them all at once. Add video to your highest performing posts first; set aside 20 minutes a day for optimizing your most valuable content.

Day by day, you’ll increase your impressions and rev up your revenue in time for Q2!

The post How to Increase Your Ad Impressions appeared first on Mediavine.

From a business standpoint, all of us at Mediavine were on pins and needles wondering how lockdowns, health concerns and changing consumer habits would affect industry spend.

Would we see advertisers scale back, or even close their doors? What does a “new normal” even look like when so many variables are constantly in flux?

More importantly, how would all of this turbulence impact the more than 7,600 publishers that Mediavine works with — and who depend on us –every day?

Now that 2020 is over, the data has been gathered and neatly organized by our Director of Business Intelligence, Cynthia Butler, and I’m happy to bring you some of the most useful insights in the latest installment of BTNWB. (That acronym has taken hold by now, right? Anyone? Sigh, fine. It stands for By the Numbers With Brad).

Below, we’ll review RPM trends from 2020. As usual, we look at RPM from a session level at Mediavine. Here’s what we found by aggregating all Mediavine sites:

It’s not hard to see when major lockdowns began, and in turn, when advertisers decided to reevaluate their budgets and hold off spending until the dust settled.

We are still living with Covid-19, of course, and with that brings some uncertainty, but RPMs started to recover from the March-April decline in the middle of 2020.

As you can see above, by late July, RPMs were outpacing 2019 and ended up doing so by wide margins as they continued increasing steadily through December.

Some of this increase was likely due to advertisers regaining some lost confidence, not to mention previously-withheld budgets being reinjected into the market.

But don’t discount the collective work behind the scenes by Mediavine’s hard working teams who found incredible ways to increase publishers’ earnings per session.

Our engineering and operations experts worked tirelessly on technology initiatives such as outstream video, faster server-to-server connections and much more in 2020.

Marketing churned out amazing and engaging content, and our sales force (virtually) knocked on more doors than ever before, garnering new and exciting deals.

As always, our award-winning support teams were everyone’s rock, lending unparalleled and unwavering guidance to a bigger, more diverse group of publishers than ever.

On that note, we would be remiss if we didn’t applaud our publishers themselves. Countless times we saw people take the challenges of recent months and turn them into opportunities — optimizing their sites and pages with remarkable results.

Arts and Entertainment

With indoor gatherings prohibited, restricted or simply less desirable due to the pandemic, advertisers quickly backed away from the entertainment industry.

Audience interest in arts and entertainment content also slowed in some cases, given the onslaught of news in a year that was oftentimes chaotic.

As summer came to a close though, Mediavine started to see a slow but steady increase in overall RPM for entertainment sites which continued.

By the end of the year, the category was more or less back to “normal” — at least to the point where there’s reason for optimism in 2021.

Food & Drink

You’ll begin to see a pattern emerging with each of these graphs, regardless of category. A downward trend in overall RPM through the summer months, followed by an upward trend through the rest of the year, also summarizes the food and drink space.

The spring declines in RPM were mitigated somewhat by record traffic in 2020 for our food & drink sites as people sought recipes and meal ideas from the internet like never before.

Advertisers were still wary about putting money into the market during the summer months, but demand ramped up before the holidays and finished the year incredibly strong.

Travel

A frequent topic of the BTNWB posts has been travel sites.

No group of publishers was more affected in traffic and RPM in the past year. Given what a global event this was, and all the uncertainty surrounding it, that’s not a surprise.

The bad news has been obvious and covered at length. The good news is that travel was no exception to the pattern of RPMs steadily climbing in the second half of 2020.

A sign of a resurgence in the industry and more confident travelers? We sure hope so, for everyone’s sake. Working at home is only fun when you can occasionally leave.

All kidding aside, check out the interactive chart below to browse through the rest of the site categories that call Mediavine home and see how they performed.

The trends for each of them point to a positive end to the year and hopefully to the beginning of a new year with a less volatility and more continued growth!

The post 2020 Year in Review RPM by Category — Behind The Numbers with Brad appeared first on Mediavine.

After 10 months in which we’ve heard the word “unprecedented” infinite times, and a political season to match 2020’s craziness, November is here.

We’re smack in the middle of Q4, when a quick glance at our publisher Dashboards each morning can cause one to break into a holiday song:

“It’s the most wonderful time of the yearrrrrrr!” Just take a look at this actual archival footage of a Mediavine publisher after checking their Q4 RPM.

Yes, Q4 is a magical time filled with spirit, verve and ever-increasing CPMs. But what can we expect specifically, from now until 2021?

I’m glad you asked!

In this edition of Behind the Numbers with Brad, I’ve once again teamed up with Cynthia Butler, our talented Director of Business Intelligence, to shed some light on this topic.

In previous editions of BTNWB (we love our acronyms in this industry, however ridiculous), we’ve explored how Covid has impacted publisher traffic and RPMs in 2020.

While it’s clear that Covid is far from over, the good news is that the advertising industry has adjusted and seems to have found some stability, even in uncertain times.

Budgets that were paused earlier this year during peak panic have been reinjected into the marketplace, leading to a strong performance as we close out the year.

Moreover, many businesses have adapted new and exciting ad campaigns, thanks to fresh strategies such as online delivery and curbside pickup.

Will this mean that November and December 2020 follow the same patterns we saw in 2019? We sure hope so, but there’s no guarantee (see upcoming disclaimer).

Let’s get to the numbers. We took a look back at 2019, by site category, to analyze RPMs week over week from the beginning through the end of the fourth quarter.

We uncovered some interesting Q4 trends. I want to highlight a few that stood out the most, along with my most logical explanation for each.

Food & Drink

Steady growth starting around the middle of October, and booming right before Thanksgiving, is the trend line for sites in the Food & Drink category.

These revenue trends also come at a great time of traffic growth. People are looking for new recipes for the holidays, and advertisers want to be a part of it.

Even after the tryptophan hangover wears off, RPMs stay high before taking a slight dip at the beginning of December due to the start of a new month.

RPMs then remain on the high side right through the end of the year, before taking a sharp downturn in the last week of December after Christmas.

At that point, even though it’s technically still Q4, advertising budgets are exhausted and consumers are less likely to be shopping.

Health & Fitness

Something that I found interesting: our Health & Fitness sites follow roughly the same trend lines as Food & Drink sites but with a sharper drop off after the first week of December.

This tells me that companies and brands are eager to get in front of health-conscious eaters ahead of Thanksgiving, before taking a pause and looking forward to January 1 and the ambitious resolutions that a new year brings.

Personal Finance

The RPM trend from our Personal Finance category of sites also tells a great story.

We see much more steady growth throughout Q4 than most of our other categories, with only slight dips near the beginning of each month.

Advertisers on these websites are likely targeting the budget-conscious population. They have deals galore starting in October and continuing all the way through Halloween, Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday (or as those of us who work from home call it, Monday) and Christmas.

Take a look at the fun interactive table below to see for yourself how RPM changes vary week over week for various site categories.

Now for the disclaimer, because what would 2020 be without some unpredictability?

With Covid making a strong resurgence in some areas, and uncertainty surrounding the elections, we may see some changes in these numbers compared to last year.

Generally, the ad industry follows the overall climate of the economy. When the economy widely shut down in March, advertising ground to a halt.

Since then, it’s recovered somewhat and if the economy keeps running smoothly with the majority of businesses open, we should continue to see strong ad spend.

If conditions worsen and we experience shutdowns similar to Q1 of this year, which we can’t predict one way or the other, it could be a different story.

To put it more simply, these numbers are subject to change from year to year because 2019 and 2020 have been wildly different years but hopefully they won’t!

Either way, Mediavine is always well positioned to earn the most possible for its publishers and we look forward to a future post where we can recap and compare the two.

The post Holiday RPM Trends — Behind the Numbers with Brad appeared first on Mediavine.

Hello there! I’m Cristina, Publisher Support Specialist and Optimization Expert. A big part of my job here at Mediavine is helping publishers maximize their ad revenue. I’m super excited to share that we have revamped the Content Upgrade Challenge to help you optimize your site to earn more!

New for 2022: We’re excited to help you give yourself a raise! We’ll be walking through the Content Upgrade Challenge workbook together in our Facebook group, talking through the tips and tricks and sharing posts that explain the reasoning behind our recommendations along the way.

Join us in our Facebook group for community support!

After joining, check out and print our PDF of the workbook. You’ll need it to organize your optimizations.

What’s new in the workbook?

• Updated ad settings and recommendations
• Worksheet to help you dive into page-level data
• Longer SEO checklist based on SEO Like A CEO
• Video checklist to make sure they’re performing optimally

(If you’re a person who likes digital work, we also have the workbook in spreadsheet form.)

What is the Mediavine Content Upgrade Challenge?

We launched our first Mediavine Content Upgrade Challenge in October 2018 to help publishers leave no stone unturned when optimizing content for Q4. The Mediavine Content Upgrade Challenge is back, redesigned and armed with the most up-to-date tips and best practices to help you maximize your income at any time of year!

A lot has changed in the past few years. While many things have remained the same when it comes to what makes for great performing ads (content length, short paragraphs, optimizing your most valuable content, etc), we have lots of new tricks up our sleeves as well as some updated best practices to pass on.

But one thing that will never change, for the Content Upgrade Challenge and for all of us at Mediavine, is to make sure you’re ready to earn as much as you can YEAR-ROUND!

Step 1 — Follow along with the first blog post in the series and do the Google Analytics Audit to find last year’s top posts for every month of a quarter to find which posts to optimize. The best way to predict what posts will trend this year is to look back and see what posts were popular with your readers the previous year.

Step 2 — Get tips from the second post to analyze and optimize your top posts. Once you have a good idea of what content to focus on, analyze those posts and optimize them. Do an ad audit and a site audit. Make sure you’re getting every impression you can!

Step 3 — Read through the third Challenge post to share your work and track your progress. Make the most of that optimized content through social shares and keep up with your growth!

What’s new since 2018

The new Mediavine Dashboard with page-level data

Dashboard 2.0 opened up a wealth of data including average impressions per page, fill rates, CPMs and viewability. Now you’ll be able to see how optimizing your posts can translate into revenue on the page-level, and you can really dig into what posts are earning well for you and what posts need further optimization.

How to tell why a post isn’t earning well

Your Ad Revenue essentially comes down to a simple equation:

CPM * Impressions / 1000 = Your Money!

How much advertisers spend on a post and how many ads that are viewed by your reader are big parts of the equation of how you earn. If you notice a post with a lower RPM or lower overall revenue, look at the impressions and CPM for that post to see what part of the equation is lacking.

Impressions/Page

The metric that you have the most control over is Impression/Page. This is the average number of impressions served per pageview.

How your readers interact with your content plays a big role in how your ads perform. Since this can be so crucial, impressions/page data gives you a good idea of reader behavior on your site. Is your most valuable content too high in the post? Look at your posts on both desktop and mobile and really look at it from the perspective of a reader to find why those impression numbers are so low.

A good thing to keep in mind is that impressions are not the number of ads per page, but the number of actual ads served. A high number of impressions is a great indicator that your post is well optimized and your readers are really engaging with your content. Low impression numbers mean you have some more work to do!

Are you using a jump button? Have you turned on our arrival unit yet? The arrival unit — an ad placed just before the recipe card — helps publishers utilizing a jump button recover revenue by providing them with a highly viewable ad. Publishers using a Jump to Recipe or Jump to Card + Mediavine-exclusive ad optimizations do not see a loss in revenue or viewability.

What does it mean if my CPM is lower?

Just like many different factors can go into your RPM and overall earnings, CPM is influenced by a lot of different things as well. These can include:

• Your Traffic — Where your readers are coming from, what device they’re on, demographics, and a multitude of things can play a role in how much advertisers will spend.
• Viewability — Advertisers will pay more if they feel confident their ad will be seen by the reader. Things like page speed and how quickly your readers scroll through your content can impact your site-wide viewability score.
• Your keywords — Do you have any words in your post that might not be considered “family-friendly?”

Looking for an easy way to boost your site-wide viewability score? Run, don’t walk, to turn on our new InView technology. InView keeps any horizontal banner ad in view at the top of the screen as the user scrolls using the existing Optimize Ads for CLS placeholder box.

The average increase to in-content and recipe ad viewability with InView is 8.22%, so it’s definitely worth your time to learn more about the recommended InView settings and other viewability increasing tips in our help doc.

It’s not always possible to directly control your CPM, but gaining insight into how those numbers are being influenced on your site is beneficial, and can help you know where to focus your energy.

New Video Features like the Universal Player

Many publishers earn 20–30% of their ad revenue from video alone so it’s pretty huge! And now, with the Universal Player, you don’t even need to create your own original video content to cash in on those high CPMs.

When the Universal Player setting is enabled in your Mediavine Dashboard, the Player will run an outstream ad on any page on your website that does not contain a video, maximizing your revenue opportunities. Visit the help doc for recommended settings and how to set up the Universal Player in your Dashboard today.

Grow

Grow is Mediavine’s new audience engagement platform. It works directly with the script wrapper that Mediavine publishers already have implemented on their site and is not only beneficial for earnings, but great for readers as well!

Grow allows your readers to log in to save their favorites, build recipe boxes, share content and everything else they’ll love. It will also help you build your email list with our incredible Subscribe and Spotlight features as well as collect very important first-party data.

Create

In 2018, we officially launched Create by Mediavine^®, the card that marks up your content for schema and opens up that ad unit beyond the recipe-writing crew to all of the world’s bloggers who run “How-To” content, so they can take advantage of this unit as well.

The List feature is great for round-ups too. It makes creating a round-up post of both yours and your friend’s content a breeze meaning more posts to earn from without too much extra work. Win-win, right? We’ve loved seeing how our publishers have used Create so be sure to check out our list of creative ways to use Create!

Grow Social Pro*

Grow Social Pro is our social sharing WordPress plugin that includes options for social share buttons and some powerful Pinterest settings to help you put your Pinterest game on autopilot.

With Grow Social Pro you’ll be able to set custom and hidden Pinterest images for each of your posts that includes a section dedicated to Pinterest descriptions so you can make the most out of your keywords and Pinterest SEO plan.

If you’re just getting started with Grow and Pinterest, make sure to read the blog post about how to use Grow for Pinterest.

*As of December 6, 2023, Grow Social and Grow Social Pro have been acquired by NerdPress. More information is available here.

Now, let’s get that content upgrade going!

The post The Mediavine Content Upgrade Challenge: 2022 Update appeared first on Mediavine.

We’ve found that reaching this magic number is a key indicator of when you should put ads on your site, and as a result, it’s become a goal for many bloggers just starting out.

(more…)

The post Mediavine Publishers Grow Exponentially AFTER Joining. Here’s Why. appeared first on Mediavine.

If you’re reading this, you probably know what RPM is and how it’s calculated. What you may not know, given the complexity of the subject and sheer amount of noise surrounding it online, is how to improve it.

Short answer: There is no short answer.

In programmatic advertising, a combination of your audience, your content, your site speed, past ad performance and numerous other factors contribute to that final amount we as publishers all strive to increase.

Looking for a quick fix or comparing individual websites (or ad management companies) trying to unlock the mystery are fruitless endeavors. There is no mystery. But there is a roadmap to success.

Focus on your own site (specifically, your content) and you’ll be on the right track. This is a long-game strategy, but it works. Here are — count ’em — 24 ways to improve your RPM over time.

1. Increase Font Size

You might not think that the font size you select can impact your revenue, but especially in a mobile-first world, it makes a big difference. We suggest keeping your font sizes between 18-20px, careful to avoid anything over 22px.

Not only will increasing your font size improve your site’s readability and make your content more engaging, it’ll provide you the opportunity to run more ads without harming user experience. Repeat: You’ll reap the benefits in terms of user experience, SEO, accessibility and revenue.

All from the simplest of changes. Don’t walk, RUN to fix this one.

2. Increase Line Height

Assuming you’ve taken the advice above and reevaluated your font size, those larger fonts will need to be paired with increased line height, or the spacing between lines of text.

While not quite as important as font size, it’s a close second — keeping your text legible and aesthetically pleasing is critical for any publisher.

So what are you waiting for? Learn how to increase your line height to match your new user-friendly font size.

3. Shorter Paragraphs

Would you believe just hitting Enter, or Return, more often can improve your site’s scannability, engagement and revenue? Believe it.

Remember, as more content is consumed on mobile devices, web-friendly shorter paragraphs provide MUCH better user experiences — and with that, higher viewability and earning potential, thanks to the additional spots where our in-content logic can insert ads.

4. Longer Content: Increase Your Word Count

This one is a little more challenging, but longer content keeps users engaged with your content — and ads — for a longer duration, plain and simple. With our in-content logic, Mediavine ads are designed to not disrupt user experience. So in order to generate more ad revenue, you’ll need more material.

We suggest aiming for a minimum of 700-1000 words, and not just for the sake of ads. It’s better for SEO and giving yourself opportunities to rank on long-tail keywords.

It takes work, but longer content boosts RPM and SEO alike.

5. Use Headlines

We mean using actual HTML headlines, like the one above this paragraph.

That’s using heading tags such as <h2></h2> in HTML or the Heading 2 (and beyond) tags in the visual editor of WordPress.

Using actual HTML heading tags, the proper ones, is essentially signaling to web browsers, Google and the Mediavine Script Wrapper, that you’re writing a heading.

Why does that matter? It’s important for making sure we’re placing ads properly and not breaking up the flow of your words. That results in much better engagement of readers with content and ads, and a higher RPM over the long run.

6. More Unique Images

Much like writing longer content, including more images can improve RPM.

However, much like with content, it’s important that any additional images are unique and bring value to the user. Be sure your images are optimized for speed and performance and try adding text between images so you don’t impact viewability. It takes effort, but it pays off.

7. End with Your Most Valuable Content

The temptation in an age of limited attention spans is to get right to the point, but don’t give away your best content at the top of the post. Be protective of your most valuable content and run it at the end.

If you’re running a recipe or how-to card, end your content with the card. If your post is a printable, end with that printable. Make sure your audience engages with your whole post and doesn’t bounce early.

8. Shorten Your Sidebar

One of your most valuable ad units is the sticky sidebar, or the ad at the bottom of the sidebar that sticks with users as they scroll. The shorter your sidebar, the quicker the user can get to that ad unit and start making you more money.

Ads that are clearly in view for longer periods of time — even if we’re talking about mere seconds — have a chance to refresh, potentially earning you additional, highly valuable ad impressions and higher RPMs.

9. Optimize In-Content Settings

On mobile devices, where there is no sidebar, a vast majority of ads served are in-content units. It’s where users are most engaged and it’s vital to your RPM.

Optimal in-content settings, such as making sure your ads are Optimized for Content Length, your mobile in-content frequency isn’t too low and running paragraph buffers that make sense for your content formatting, will make sure your in-content mobile ads pay dividends.

10. Make Sure You’re Running Universal Player!

The Decade of Video continues into the 2020s and if you’re not running video now, please make it a priority.

Video CPMs are several times higher than their display ad counterparts, and the demand for them is only increasing as broadcast budgets move to digital.

Take advantage of video ads by running the Universal Player and following our video guide to learn more about all of your video options. It’s a lot easier than you think to run videos, even if you don’t have any video now!

11. Fill Out Your Video Details

Every time you upload a video to the Mediavine Dashboard, you’re presented with fields to enter video details. You need to fill these out.

Providing the permalink to link to the blog post best describing that video, setting your keywords and your title might seem tedious, but it’s crucial to that video’s performance, especially on top suppliers like Google Ad Exchange.

12. Optimize Video Placement

Wondering where you should run videos — if you are using a recipe card, disregard this tip. Videos embedded into your recipe cards should stay there for optimal user experience. If readers use the “jump to recipe” button, they won’t have to search your content for your video.

For everyone else, enable that in the Video Player Settings of your Dashboard, and then our script wrapper will automatically place your video in an optimized position that will ensure fast pagespeed AND ideal placement for user experience and ad performance.

13. Embed Your Videos

Noticing a pattern lately? Sick of video tips yet? Sorry, it’s the (2nd) Decade of Video for a reason.

Make sure you aren’t just relying on Featured Videos, and embed your videos in posts whenever you have a specific one. Embedding videos in a post — either via the Mediavine Control Panel or by inserting the embed code from your Mediavine Dashboard — will ensure you’re choosing the best video option for a post.

If you are using a recipe card, be sure to embed the video there.

The better a video matches a post, the better the user experience is and the more engaged your users will be.

More engaged users mean video ads perform better. Plus, did you know the Mediavine video player is SEO optimized? By using video embeds rather than featured videos, we output JSON-LD Schema.org markup, making your posts eligible for special video placements within Google Search!

14. Opt Out Less

As part of our commitment to give publishers as much control over their businesses as possible, we offer the ability to opt out of certain ad categories in the Mediavine Dashboard.

However, doing so often comes at a price. Each category you opt out of limits the competition for your ad placements — and less competition means less money in your pocket. Please opt out with caution.

15. Monitor Your Health Checks

The exclusive Mediavine health checks are the single best tool for monitoring the health of your ads. If your health checks drop, it’s likely due to a surge in traffic to a new article, or a change in your top posts in general. Our amazing support staff is always here to help, but monitoring health checks can help you self-diagnose a lot of problems.

If you’re usually all teal and drop to green, you may just have an un-optimized post that jumped into your top 10. Monitor these health checks, self-diagnose and contact us if you need help!

16. Improve Site Speed

Thought you escaped a pagespeed recommendation in a RPM optimization post by Eric Hochberger? Think again! Repeat after me: Faster sites mean ads load faster. Faster loading ads mean higher viewability. Higher viewability means advertisers pay more, resulting in higher CPMs — and RPM.

Site speed is key to ad performance in addition to all the benefits it provides for user experience and SEO rankings. (No wonder this Eric guy is so obsessed with it.)

Follow the advice in our pagespeed resources post, and consider enabling our settings that let you optimize ads for mobile pagespeed and desktop pagespeed. Lazy loading images is another way you can increase your site’s speed.

And, of course, take full advantage of Trellis, Create and Grow for your website. This exciting trio of Mediavine tools for WordPress is optimized for pagespeed… Would you expect any different?

17. Use AMP Only if Necessary

AMP is a great technology created by Google for building websites with accelerated mobile pagespeed. However, it’s not without its faults. For starters, it’s building an entire new version of your site using AMP rather than standard HTML and JavaScript. By definition, that limits what JavaScript, including the Mediavine Script Wrapper, can do for you. In short, you’re serving a lighter version of our ads that will earn less.

Only run AMP if you need to, such as if you’re a Google News Publisher. If you don’t know what Google News is, then you’re not one. In short, most likely you shouldn’t be running AMP if you want to maximize your earnings. Instead, focus on improving the speed of your regular pages. If you’re doing everything right, you shouldn’t need AMP.

18. Don’t Run a Page Builder

Page Builders, or really any kind of visual template editors, are going to produce hard-to-read HTML code. This is the very nature of what makes those page builders and template editors so flexible.

Unfortunately, that HTML is difficult to parse for humans and computers alike. Google encourages publishers to decrease your DOM nodes; page builders do the opposite.

Even worse than upsetting Google, potentially? You’re going to trip up the Mediavine Script Wrapper’s in-content logic and our ability to insert in-content ads.

If you want a visual way to design pages, we strongly recommend Gutenberg. The built-in new editor for WordPress is effectively a page builder, but its blocks produce much better HTML than any third-party page builder.

In short, don’t run a page builder, but if you do, email us so we can try to help undo some of the damage.

19. Switch to TLS / SSL / Secure

If you haven’t already, make sure your site is secure with an TLS / SSL certificate. Sites beginning with http:// instead of https:// are marked as “Not Secure” in the Google Chrome browser. The green lock makes users feel secure, so it’s an easy way to build trust among your audience. Plus, Mediavine ads are TLS compatible, and third party cookies now require TLS. Here’s our guide to going secure.

20. Watch For JavaScript Conflicts

JavaScript is the language that powers the interactive web, including ads. It’s also extremely powerful and flexible — sometimes too powerful and flexible. A poorly-written piece of JavaScript can cause conflicts with other JavaScript, including the Mediavine Script Wrapper.

Be wary of known conflicts and do a self plugin audit whenever you can. As we’ve said in the past, less is more when it comes to plugins. Each plugin you run can potentially introduce more JavaScript, causing conflicts and hurting your RPM.

21. Improve Engagement and First Party Data with Grow

Third-party cookies are required for personalized ads and thus are the linchpin of programmatic advertising, and they’re blocked by default in Safari and soon will be in Google Chrome.

Using Grow, your readers can log in to your site and you can begin serving personalized ads in Safari again today and Google Chrome again in the future. The sooner you sign up, the quicker you can begin making more money today and in the future.

Oh and did we mention Grow is free and helps increase your traffic? It has amazing features like recommended content, improved site search, social sharing and more. Enable Grow directly in your Mediavine Dashboard today.

22. Switch to Trellis!

Trellis is our WordPress framework built for site speed and optimized for Mediavine ads. Thanks to its crazy speed optimizations, you can hit the new Page Experience requirements of Google.

However, more important for this guide and your bottom line are its exclusive advertising features. With built-in native feed ads, improved viewability and more, we’ve seen an overall increase of 30% RPM on sites running Trellis to non-Trellis sites over the same time period.

As of 2021, Trellis is now available to all WordPress users!

23. Don’t Compare RPMs

We touched on this above and, trust us, we know it’s tempting.

There are plenty of income reports out there, and bloggers talk. But comparing RPMs with other publishers, even if they’re in your exact profile, is still a fruitless exercise.

The best advice we have is to compare your RPM with… yourself. Focus on your site and your content. Commit to these tips. Watch earnings improve, relative to where they once were, over time.

There’s too much that goes into programmatic advertising to control everything, or to compare websites fairly. Most advertisers buy inventory based on audiences and demographics, both of which are extremely nuanced.

Improve what you can on your end and your RPM will increase. Any time spent contemplating other publishers’ RPMs won’t improve yours. Take our Content Upgrade Challenge, which helps guide you through optimizing your top content for ads.

24. TALK TO US

Please. Reach out. We’re not just here when things go wrong.

Even when everything is working fine, Mediavine is here to assist with site audits and making sure your site is performing optimally. You can reach us at publishers@mediavine.com or by using the teal chat bubble in the bottom right corner of your Dashboard or website.

As many of you likely know, our publisher support team is amazing. They’re the reason we’re the most award-winning Google Certified Publisher Partner. Take advantage of the amazing services they provide!

Check out our Teal Talk with Eric on Revving Your RPM!

The post How Do I Improve My RPM? appeared first on Mediavine.

My role is to analyze new opportunities, and offer performance suggestions and troubleshooting guidance to our product, revenue and publisher support teams. So when I was approached to write something for our publishers, I shockingly decided to talk about performance and analyzing it.

What is Performance?

What do you consider performance? Is it how you’re tracking compared to a goal you set? How you’re performing compared to another website? Week over week? Year over year?

There are so many different ways to monitor and analyze performance. Some can be complicated, others pretty straightforward.

Here’s a simple step-by-step process, and some tips to help analyze your performance for the more complicated questions.

Step 1: What is Your Ultimate Goal?

Do you want to increase revenue? Do you want to hit 1 million sessions? Do you want to increase your traffic from social media? Focus your analysis on what will help you achieve your goal.

Most likely, there will be more than one step to take, and more than one action needed to reach your ultimate goal. This is very typical. Just keep your goal in mind as you monitor results.

Helpful Tip:

Don’t make the ultimate goal unreachable. It’s also easier if you build a number into your goal, e.g. “Increase revenue 10%” vs. “Make more money.”

For the sake of this blog post, we’re setting an ultimate goal for you to follow along with:

Reach 1 million sessions per month.

Growing site traffic is a great goal. (Go you!) We have a number of resources to guide you on the road to achieving your goals.

In this scenario, let’s say we worked on increasing pagespeed and it went up 20%! (Here’s a post on how to increase pagespeed.)

We’ll use this example throughout the steps to help guide you through your own analysis. Now we’ll look at how increasing pagespeed helped us attain our ultimate goal of 1 million sessions per month.

NOTE: You can follow these steps for any goal, so use our example as a jumping off point as you follow the rest of the steps.

Step 2: What Question Do You Want to Answer?

Next, determine the question you want an answer to.

It could be really simple, such as “How many sessions did I have yesterday?” It could be more complex, such as “Has changing pagespeed impacted my session growth?”

Figure out the question before looking at the numbers. This may sound backwards, especially if you only have a specific data set, but there are times that seeing the data could influence your question.

Helpful Tip:

Be specific. Asking something like “Did my revenue go up?” is generic and may not lead to results that can help guide you.

Our Example Question:

“How much have my sessions grown since my pagespeed went up 20%?”

Step 3: Do I Have the Data I Need?

The next step is figuring out if you have the data you need. In certain cases, you might not. If that’s true, there are still ways to infer answers (we’ll go over some of these later).

Helpful Tip:

Focusing on 2-3 things helps you zero in on the question. Too much data can create noise and not provide actionable insights.

Our Example Data:

• Date pagespeed changed (10/1/2019)
• Pagespeed before 10/1/2019
• Pagespeed after 10/1/2019
• Sessions by Day

Step 4: What Do I Want to Compare?

If you’re looking at performance, you probably want to compare it with something, most likely a date range.

Keep in mind that multiple factors might impact the comparison. For example, Sunday performance differs from Monday, January performs differently than June, Google Search traffic performs better than Pinterest, and so on.

Helpful Tip:

Focus on one or two comparisons. Also make sure you give the data time to adjust to any changes you have made.

Our Example Metrics:

• 7 Day period before change (9/22/2019-9/28/2019)
• 7 Day period after change, plus a few weeks (10/13/2019-10/19/2019)

Step 5: What Metrics Will Help Answer My Question?

We could throw out many three-letter acronyms, but which ones mean something to you? If your question is “Has changing pagespeed impacted my session growth?” then looking at CPM won’t help you.

Again, there are a lot of metrics. Always focus on the question you want to answer. Obvious as it sounds, it’s easy to spiral down into a rabbit hole without that focus.

Useful metrics can be RPM, CPM, Sessions, Revenue, Pageviews and/or Impressions. You can also break each of these down by Geo, Device Category, Day of Week, Traffic Source, etc.

Helpful Tip:

Make sure the metrics link exactly to your question. CPMs may be affected by session growth, but session growth won’t be impacted by CPMs.

Our Example Metrics:

Date, Sessions

Step 6: How to I Analyze the Data?

There are many different ways to analyze data. One that is usually very effective is % change. For example, if your RPM changes from $25 to $30, the change would be 20% growth.

To calculate % change, take the number you want to compare ($30 in the above example), subtract the number you’re comparing to ($25), and divide the answer ($5) by the number you’re comparing to ($25):

($30-25) / ($25) = .2 = 20%

Helpful Tip:

Perhaps you had an article go viral and this could account for your session growth. Always look to see if there are outlying factors that could have influenced results.

Also, keep track of any changes you might have made, such as adding or removing a plugin, changing ad settings, etc. Any of these might skew the data.

Our Example:

• Sessions between 9/22 – 9/28: 105,000
• Sessions between 10/13 – 10/19 – 125,000

(125,000 – 105,000) / (105,000) = .19 = 19% session growth

Advanced Tips

Try to piece out if data is correlated.

Just because a bird flies by your window doesn’t mean your hair is turning gray (that might just be my hair … I blame my kids). Two things that have no relationship can occur simultaneously.

Keep a spreadsheet of any changes you make with plugins, layouts, styles, SEO, etc. with dates. This gives you historical reference points that you may not remember a month from now.

Inferring Data

There are times when you don’t have all the data in front of you. For example, if you’ve increased your Google traffic due to SEO improvements, you might also see an increase in RPM using the above tools.

Even if you don’t have Google session RPM broken out, you can use the data in this article to help infer that RPM has increased because Google sessions increased, illustrating the value of improving SEO.

Here are some basic data points to keep in mind when looking through data:

Referral Source Value

Most publishers know that not all traffic is created equal.

You may be surprised at just how much more some referral sources are worth to your site than others, though. Keep that in mind when you look to increase your users.

Below is a graph showing the value of sources compared to one another.

For example, Google traffic is worth 10.1% more than average. If you grow Google traffic, your RPM would be impacted positively, especially compared to increasing your traffic from Instagram.

Geography Value

Country of origin is one of the most important factors that determines the value of a user, as ads perform far better in the U.S. than anywhere else. Here are our top countries and their values compared to each other.

Device Value

Not unlike geography, device values also lead to a wide variance. Here are value breakouts by device compared to each other:

Try it Yourself

We put together a simple spreadsheet to help you try these new tools yourself:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ApFwrakOcJCyjJT1zTu8gScBsmEIH0X305unMMuGTXg/edit#gid=0

Using your dashboard data, pull in data from last Monday (New) and compare it to data from the Sunday (Original) before. See if you can figure out which of those two days performs better for your site.

You can use this information to help inform you on when to post updates on social media, add blog posts, etc., to maximize revenue.

Good luck! As always, feel free to leave a comment or email publishers@mediavine.com with any questions you have along the way.

The post What is Performance: How to Measure, How to Compare appeared first on Mediavine.

We’ve discussed these settings in the past, at length (the post linked to above, written by our CEO himself, is a terrific reference), but it never hurts to revisit the ways in which in-content settings work – and work for you.

A periodic self-audit is always a good thing, and you may be surprised at what you find out along the way – not to mention what a significant difference can be made by what seem like very small changes.

Before you begin, remember that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. You’ll need to consider your own site, goals and personal preferences so that you’re applying these recommendations as they pertain to you. 

Making Mediavine In-Content Settings Work For You

Start by opening up your Mediavine Dashboard and making your way to Settings, followed by the In-Content Ads tab:

Everyone begins with the same default settings, which we’ve found perform well on most sites. There’s room in both directions to tweak your ad setup, though, so let’s cover what the settings are and what they mean. 

First, we have separate controls for density and spacing for ads on mobile and desktop.

This is important because your content looks much different on mobile and desktop, and readers behave differently as a result. This is why the goals for each device type are separate on your Dashboard’s health check. 

Make sure you know what you’re changing and why, and check posts after you make changes to see the impact. You can test your posts using an incognito or private window, and the ?test=houseads query at the end of the url.

Don’t forget that part, it is important!

Ad Frequency

Also called ad density, ad frequency is the percentage, in relation to content, of ads allowed to run on your site. This takes into account the user’s screen size and device type, as well as your actual content length, including images. 

• For mobile, you can choose from 30% density down to 20% (in increments of 2%).
• For desktop, you can select from 30% density to as low as 10% (in 5% increments). 
• Our default is 28% for mobile, and 20% for desktop.

That means readers will never see more than 30% in-content ads up against 70% content, as measured by the total pixel height of a post … imagine printing out your post, from top to bottom, and taping it to the wall. (My brain is visual, what can I say?)

We didn’t pick that number out of thin air.

The Coalition for Better Ads, of which Mediavine is a proud member, set that limit as the maximum allowable to maintain quality user experiences while still effectively monetizing content. 

If you are at or below the default levels listed above and are looking for an easy way to increase your revenue, bump those up a notch or two and see if you’re happy with the results.

Ad Spacing

If you aren’t familiar with ad spacing, it’s what it sounds like. We measure spacing as the minimum number of paragraphs that must appear between two in-content ads. The default is 2, on both mobile and desktop, and typically works pretty well for most sites’ content.

There are some outliers, however, and occasions where you might want to consider adjusting. Such as:

If you write very long sentences or paragraphs …

If you get a little wordy, like I do, you may want to consider lowering paragraph down to 1. Content with long paragraphs that are more than 1-2 sentences long have a harder time reaching their monetization potential.

The best practice for ad revenue and readability is still going to be to manually edit those posts and add in more hard returns, but adjusting your spacing setting can sometimes give you a bump in the meantime.

… or if you write very short sentences with lots of returns.

Alternatively, some sites rely on short sentences. 

With a hard return between each one. 

Kind of like this one, actually.

See what we did there?

Unfunny blogger jokes aside, if your writing is anything like this, you’ll want to leave the paragraph setting at 2. If you still find the ads to be too smooshed together, you can increase it to 3, but watch your performance and site health checks carefully.

These are “global changes” — if one of your posts is written in super short fragments for effect, while the rest feature mostly normal-length sentences, altering the formatting may actually hurt the majority of your content.

Ad Limits

If you write SUPER long-form content, this section is for you. 

For a long time when a new site launched, the standard Mediavine ad limits were set at 12 for mobile and 9 on desktop. Those are reasonable numbers; very few bloggers are writing content long enough to even hit those limits. But if you’re one of those few, this is a setting you may want to consider adjusting.

You might think that running 12-plus ads in one post sounds extreme, but think of it this way: When you’re on Facebook scrolling for a while, are you counting the ads? What about Instagram? Do you notice that if you scroll long enough, or hit a certain of number of ads, they stop?

Spoiler alert, they don’t. 

Double spoiler alert, the only people counting ads are other bloggers or other ad companies trying to generate business with misleading information.

In addition to the frequency settings described above which limit the ratio of ads to content to preserve user experience, Mediavine ads are the fastest in the industry. We lazy load ads, so if a user doesn’t scroll near them, they don’t even appear. 

Here’s a secret …

With Mediavine, site speed has nothing to do with the total number of ads on a page. Repeat: Counting ads is irrelevant. The total number does not impact the overall speed or load time, thanks to lazy loading and the optimized code of our script wrapper. 

Here’s another secret …

Mediavine ads operate well within all given ad policy, and our partners — Google (we’re Google Certified Publishing Partners), Sovrn, Pubmatic, Appnexus, OpenX, Yieldmo, Rubicon, etc. — are by and large the same ones other ad management companies work with.

Basically, everyone you see running on the Ads.txt file on any given site (accessible by adding /ads.txt to the end of a domain. Check it out.) Same ones. If someone is telling you to adjust your ad settings so that one of them will approve you? That’s not the case.

Chances are that you are already approved and running those ads, and if not, this isn’t due to your Mediavine ad implementation. We work directly with each partner on your behalf to get you approved with as many as possible.

As your ad management providers, we take care of the relationships with these large ad buyers who don’t work with individual sites and ensure that your inventory is accessible, available and attractive in real-time auctions. 

We also have a whole team devoted to making sure you aren’t leaving any revenue on the table due to missing ad units, under-performing ad units, theme changes, site downtime, script issues and countless other issues.

Our team is there to make sure you get the most out of what you’ve got, and as we’ve discussed at length here, we also put you in command. Regardless of the changes you make, you will be compliant from any policy perspective.

A quick real-life example

To illustrate this, check out the dashboard of one blogger in the travel space who attended a Lunch and Learn in Minnesota this spring. After changing their ad limits from a numbered limit to “Optimized for Content Length”, and adjusting their ad density to the maximum, this happened:

You can see that the RPM jump was significant. Seasonality will play a role (you can see it in the blue line dipping at the end of June), but the overall RPM has stayed consistently, significantly higher since the changes were made.

This is not possible for everyone — this particular site is known for hugely long content — but as a demonstration of the impact these ad settings can have under certain circumstances, and when used in tandem, it’s worth sharing! 

The post Mediavine In-Content Ad Settings: How to Self-Audit For Best Results appeared first on Mediavine.