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.

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.

If you missed the first two parts, or perhaps are like me and just really love to binge a series, it’s not too late to get started on optimizing your posts for the gift that is Q4 traffic.

This Challenge is good for any time of year, too, so feel free to challenge yourself to update your content any time of year.

In Part 1 of the Content Upgrade Challenge, Amber talked us through how to identify which content to focus on and we worked through the Site Checklist and Google Analytics Audit in our workbooks. (What workbooks? Scroll down to the end!)

Then in Part 2, Nicole gave us the low-down on optimizing your top posts as we walked through the Ad Income Audit and the Individual Post Audit worksheets.

Now we’re gonna talk about how to make the most of that optimized content through social media shares and tracking your growth.

October 2020 Update: We updated the Content Upgrade Challenge for the new decade. Within the Challenge you’ll find new optimization tips for your blog posts, changes to ad settings and recommendations, plus tips for using Mediavine’s WordPress plugins Create and Grow.

Making a Social Media Plan

Now that you’ve optimized your top posts, you’ll want to think about how you’re going to share those with the world. After all, the optimizations only work so far as readers actually see the content!

Your social followers and newsletter subscribers are the perfect place to start. There are undoubtedly new fans who haven’t yet seen all of your old content, and ever-changing algorithms mean that even long-time followers may have missed something the first time around.

We’ve created the Social Media Checklist worksheet (page 11 of the workbook) to walk you through what you need to think about for each platform.

Since you’re all certainly very familiar with each platform, I won’t bore you with too much detail on each channel, but I do want to hit on a couple of points for each.

Pinterest

Make sure — no matter what graphic design tools you use — that you’re creating vertical pins with a 2:3 ratio, for posts that don’t already have one. This is Pinterest’s current ratio preference.

Keywords are also key (no pun intended) for Pinterest, so make sure you’re using lots of descriptive keywords when you write your Pinterest descriptions.

Pinterest has stated that they have no preference between live pinning or scheduling, so long as you are pinning to relevant boards. But if you choose to use a scheduler make sure whichever tool you use is on Pinterest’s approved Marketing Partners list.

Check out our Pinterest Strategy episode of Teal Talk with the masterful Kate Ahl!

Instagram

Keywords are far less important for Instagram captions than for other platforms, so let your creativity soar as you write like-worthy captions for your Instagram content! (Which I know you’ve already cropped to square…right???)

Hashtags are important for Instagram, though, so take a few minutes to research some relevant ones. This is not the time to pull out random hashtags that are not in any way relevant to the photo — instead, look for relevant tags that have a good amount of posts, but not so many that your content will get lost within them.

Remember — it’s not so much about being seen by a lot of people, it’s about being seen by the RIGHT people. That’s what will translate into true engagement and new (engaged) followers.

Oh — and take a few minutes to respond to comments. People are more likely to engage with accounts who engage back!

Don’t miss our post on branding your Instagram account and our Navigating the New Instagram episode of Teal Talk with the awesome LaShawn Wiltz!

Facebook & Twitter

For Facebook and Twitter, caption your eye-catching photos with good, descriptive keywords, and make sure to tag any other accounts you mention. Don’t be spammy with your tags, but instead look at it as an opportunity to show your followers where they can easily find the people, places or things you’re telling them about.

And just like with Instagram — respond to comments and mentions. Show your audience that you care about them being there and engaging with them. Even if you don’t have time to write responses to every comment, a heart or a like reaction will let them know you saw and appreciate their interaction.

YouTube

If you’re creating videos, make sure you’re taking a few minutes to upload them to YouTube with a keyword-friendly description.

A custom thumbnail image will go a long way as well, and make sure you don’t get stuck with an awkward still from the video instead.

Also make sure you have your YouTube channel connected to your Mediavine video player in your dashboard so you can take advantage of new subscribers that way as well.

Also don’t hesitate to check out our Facebook Live about monetizing with video — there are tons of great tips for using YouTube alongside your Mediavine videos.

Email Newsletter

If you have an RSS feed set up, these optimized posts may have already gone out to your email subscribers, but that doesn’t mean you can’t send them again in a newsletter-style format.

Think about how you can position these posts within newsletters as you work on the challenge and in the quarter to follow. Perhaps you have a lot of popular pumpkin recipe content you can group together into a roundup-style newsletter. If you have a post focusing on holiday shopping tips, think of one or two more tidbits of info you could share with your email subscribers, and send them to your post for more.

Our Facebook Live about newsletters is not to be missed.

You can also check out our guides to managing the blogging chaos and maximizing your workflow for some more tools and tips.

Grow Social Pro

Our WordPress plugin, Grow Social Pro is a social sharing 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.  

Tracking All The Things

Admittedly, keeping track of your site/social growth and your RPM isn’t the sexiest task — it might seem a little tedious at first — but knowing your growth patterns and trajectory over time can actually be really helpful in knowing where to invest time, money and energy into your business and when to redirect your tactics.

(Because remember — you are running a business! Never forget that!)

I recommend setting a calendar reminder for yourself on the last or first day of each month to jot down your stats from the previous 30 days. Make sure to compare it to the same period of time from the year before.

Page 13 in the workbook provides a super simple chart for keeping track of stats across your site and your social channels. Page 14 provides a similar chart for tracking RPM — but in this case, we recommend jotting down your numbers weekly, since RPM fluctuates so much day-to-day.

Keep in mind that these charts are really just a starting point for tracking. You can track other stats that are valuable to you (such as organic search traffic) or expand upon these numbers and even calculate things like percentage change by using Excel or Airtable.

You Can Do It!

If you’ve been following along with this Challenge you probably have already learned — these optimizations are actually really quick and easy to do.

With just a few minutes of time, you can take simple steps toward a killer Q4 without throwing off your editorial calendar.

What do I do when I’m done with the Challenge?

Why stop with Q4? I’d encourage you to think ahead to Q1 — even if RPMs are decidedly less exciting at the beginning of the year, that doesn’t mean you can’t make the most of the traffic and RPMs you do have.

In fact, use this exercise leading up to each new quarter because ad revenue changes by the season. Within a year, you’ll have optimized a huge chunk of content without any great sacrifice of time or energy.

How Do I Find The Worksheets?

If you’re just joining in, we have been working through a book of worksheets for this challenge. There are two sets that are virtually the same, but one is in Google Sheets  and the other is a fillable PDF download.

I mentioned them above, but we’re finishing out the workbook with the Social Media Checklist, Social Media Planning, Post Growth Tracking and RPM Tracking pages.

Is There a Facebook Group?

Yes! We have a Facebook group just for anyone who’s participating in the Mediavine Content Upgrade Challenge, so check it out if you want some support as you work through this part of the challenge.

The post Mediavine Content Upgrade Challenge | Part 3: Sharing Your Work and Tracking Your Growth appeared first on Mediavine.

I’m taking a quick break from answering emails to give you guys a bit of a walk-through on specific things to look for when you are doing a self-audit and want to make your content work its very hardest for you.

If you’re new to the Content Upgrade Challenge, start with Part 1!

October 2020 Update: We revamped the Content Upgrade Challenge with an updated workbook and all-new recommendations to help you make the most of your content. Here’s everything we added.

The post Mediavine Content Upgrade Challenge | Part 2: Optimizing Your Posts appeared first on Mediavine.

While many of us think of Q4 as the quarter where we make all our money, it’s important to know that advertising spend varies by the season. Contrary to the calendar, Q4 advertising spend traditionally really ramps up in the second week of November, around the holidays, and carries on through the end of December — more like six weeks than 12.

On the converse, Q1 and Q3 often see a revenue slump at first because of advertisers’ budgets, so making sure your content is earning the best it possibly can ahead of these slower seasons is key to making the most of them.

October 2020 Update: You guys love this challenge, so we gave it a much-needed update for 2020. The new Content Upgrade Challenge has a ton of additional settings and recommendations, plus a brand-new workbook loaded with worksheets, all developed in collaboration with our incredible Publisher Support experts.

We’ve added lots of additional tips on page-level data, SEO optimization and video to help you not only make the most of the holiday season, but also to plan for Q1 and beyond! One of the best things about the Content Upgrade Challenge is that it’s perfect to work through year-round.

Take the Mediavine Content Upgrade Challenge

In the fall of 2018, we launched the Mediavine Content Upgrade Challenge to help you get ready for Q4 — or really, ANY quarter. This challenge helps you get your content ready for each season, because of how ad revenue fluctuates throughout the year.

It’s designed as a 3-part challenge with a blog post tutorial and worksheets for each section.

Here’s a quick breakdown about the challenge:

• Part 1: The post you’re reading right now — It’s all about identifying your top-performing posts that you will optimize in this Challenge.
• Part 2: Optimizing Your Posts — Learn where to optimize in your top-performing posts to boost SEO and ad performance.
• Part 3: Sharing Your Work and Tracking Your Growth — Get your work out there and keep up with your growth.
• See what’s new for the Content Upgrade Challenge in 2020!
• Worksheets: Scroll to the bottom of any of the posts for paper or digital worksheets — your choice.

You don’t have to be a Mediavine publisher to participate in the Content Upgrade Challenge. If you don’t have ads yet, or have ads with another provider, that’s totally okay! We’d love to have you work along with us.

Before we do anything else, I want to make sure you’ve read and implemented our CEO Eric Hochberger’s font size and line height recommendations site-wide. They are super important for user experience AND your ads!

In fact, he has a whole blog post series on increasing RPM that is a deep dive into all the things you can do to increase your ad earnings.

Now that you’ve made those changes for your site, we’re going to dig into the data to help you narrow down the posts you should focus on for optimization. Some of this is educated guessing — we’re going to assume that if a post was seeing traffic last October, November or December, it will hopefully do so this October, November and December (AKA Q4).

Same goes for any other quarter — just look at last year’s traffic!

1. Look at page-level data in the Mediavine Dashboard

Now that we have page-level data in the Mediavine Dashboard, you can use it for all kinds of things. We like to look at your top pages’ ad impressions. There’s a brand new worksheet in our workbook where you can write down a list of these posts to focus on.

Here’s how to find them:

1. Set the date range
2. Sort by top pages (default)
3. Sort by “impressions”

We want to focus on the posts that are getting the least impressions so we can see how to improve them.

In the above example, that would be the post getting 11.1 impressions per page and the two getting 13.7. The 19.4 post is doing really well, so we could also take a look at that one and see what we can do to make the others do just as well. (Your numbers might look different, and that’s OK!)

(Note: Page-level data in the Mediavine Dashboard only goes back to January 2020, but it can still help you see how your top posts are performing now or recently. Next year it will be handy for looking back on this Q4!)

2. Find your top posts in a Google Analytics report

We’ve created a Google Analytics report to help you narrow things down. Concentrate on your top 10-15 posts, keeping in mind that new content you create should be made with optimization in mind, and then if anything goes viral, you are SET.

To use this report:

1. Log into your Google Analytics account. Please make sure you’re signing into the base account that’s set as administrator for the Google Analytics you want to access.

NOTE: You may need to log out of all other Google accounts. You may also need to try in multiple browsers — we have had the best luck with Google Chrome. 

2. Now navigate to this URL.

3. Click the “Import” button. If you do not see the below dialogue, move on to Step 4.

4. The next screen will ask you to “Select A View” — choose your website and click the blue button labeled “Create.”

5. Set the date range to each month of the quarter you are after. In this example, we’re looking at last Q4, so we will start with October. Set the dates to Oct. 1–31 of last year and click “Apply.”

6. The resulting report will be your top posts for all of October of last year.

7. Print out the PDFs or email them to yourself, or just save them to your reports here in Google Analytics. Wherever it makes the most sense for you to be able to access the information as we move into the next part of the challenge.

8. Repeat this process for November and December of last year, too (or whatever months you’re diving into).

Now that you’ve got your reports, you’re ready to optimize your top posts for each month of that quarter.

More money in your pocket is our entire goal here — well, that, and making your content better for the long haul. So if this same content sees traffic again next year, you are completely ready.

We recommend taking the Mediavine Content Upgrade Challenge at the start of EVERY quarter. There’s money to be made in every quarter of the year, not just Q4.

Now let’s get into the goodies!

Worksheets

We have prepared two sets of worksheets for you. They are virtually the same, but one is in Google Sheets for the digital record-keepers, and the other is a fillable PDF download for you paper pundits.

Start out with the Site Checklist and Google Analytics Audit and move at your own pace from there.

Facebook Group

Lastly, we have a Facebook group for anyone going through the Mediavine Content Upgrade Challenge and are looking for a place to ask questions and find encouragement and support. Any content creators focused on optimization are free to join!

The post Mediavine Content Upgrade Challenge | Part 1: Finding Your Top Posts appeared first on Mediavine.