Guides and Ebooks for Publishers

Owning a publishing business is undeniably tougher than it seems. Even the publishers that generate millions of dollars during the peak time have a concern of a recurring issue. That is, a drop in ad revenue. You can see that we mentioned it as a “recurring” issue, as it happens every year.

After the holiday season, most publishers have to deal with the downturn in ad revenue. For this reason, it is essential to have a proper strategy not only to thrive during peak season, but to survive during the low times.

Even though seasonal drops are common, there is always a way out for publishers. In this guide, we’re going to discuss why traffic and revenue dip in January and what you can do to improve the revenue throughout the month.

As a publisher, you’ve to be thinking about the holiday season right now. After all, Q4 is the busiest period of every year and the majority of eCommerce sales and retail advertising happen on Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday.

This year, Covid-19 has accelerated many online consumer and advertising trends including holiday shopping. The competition among advertisers has become fiercer and the ad spending is expected to increase substantially as consumers are avoiding visits to physical stores and prefering online shopping.

Though in-store sales will decline by 4.7% to $822.79 million, online sales will make up for the loss and result in a growth of 0.9% to $1.013 trillion.

Looking at the holiday shopping trends, we’ve discussed importance of seasonality and strategies in this guide. We aim to help you start planning early before the time arrives so that you’ll be fully prepared to generate the maximum revenue during the period.

Google Ad Manager (formerly known as DoubleClick for Publishers) has played a significant role in monetizing a website for the publishers.

Being an ad server, Google Ad Manager paves a path for publishers to connect with multiple demand partners (SSPs and ad exchanges) and maximize their ad revenue by selling a pool of ad impressions. Since Google Ad Manager works with numerous ad networks, exchanges, or other third-party partners, it becomes too difficult for publishers to keep a track of the performance of various inventories, demand partners, etc.

Therefore, in an effort to simplify things for publishers, Google’s DFP added its Reporting feature to the interface that helps the publisher to check almost everything related to the performance of an ad campaign.

So, if you’re not aware of the types of Google Ad Manager reports or how to generate them, this eBook will help you to understand different report types available in the Google Ad Manager and how to extract the reports easily.

Google Ad Manager, also known as DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) is one of the most preferred ad serving platforms in the industry. By helping publishers to connect with several ad tech partners (including ad networks, ad exchanges, SSPs, DMPs, and header bidding wrappers), Google’s ad server maximizes the yield and manages the ad inventories effectively while delivering campaigns as expected.

Over the past few years, Google has made a lot of changes to its ad server. Though changes are meant to improve the product and ultimately, the user experience, small and mid-sized publishers, most often than not, find it difficult to identify what went wrong with their ad campaigns or how to troubleshoot the thousands of line items. The more complex the campaign, the more complex the setup on DFP and the harder it becomes for AdOps engineers/account managers to get to the issue quickly.

As you know, every minute delayed will have a direct impact on the bottom line of the publishers. Agreed, Google has been updating its support documents consistently. But you don’t need to go through countless pages on the support forum and skim the help guides.

Pass this handy guide to quickly troubleshoot and resolve the most common errors/hiccups you confront on a regular basis. We’ve surveyed our account managers and publishers we work with to come up with a list.

CHECKLIST TO IDENTIFY THE BEST DMP FOR YOUR BUSINESS

As the digital advertising industry continues to evolve, there are certain measures both publishers and advertisers need to take, so that the landscape will be in balance. Audience data is becoming one of the important factors in determining the value of any inventory. Buyers shifted to programmatic media buying as they realize the scale and targeted reach.

Now, they want publishers to offer their inventory with sufficient data about users to properly weigh the value of each impression. The market is looking to gain more clarity and transparency in what they trade through accessing the audience data.

Leaving the pros and cons behind, publishers should be focusing their strategy to access, manage, and store user data (Non-PII). This involves investing in the best Data Management Platforms (DMPs).

The purpose of this playbook is to help you begin the DMP evaluation process. The playbook details out the process a publisher should go through to invest in DMPs. This document doesn’t get into any specific solution provider.

A publisher-made guide to evaluation of DMPs.

In this e-guide, you’ll learn how Gen Z readers play a vital role in your revenue (Ad and Subscription) and what all needs to be done to get started with Gen Z Marketing. In addition, we’ll explain the steps you can take to make sure you’re ready to reach and retain Gen Z readers.

Despite the differences in field, geographies, product, or service, there is one common desire for all the businesses out there in the market – ‘Customers’. Be it an Online Shopping Site, a Bookseller, Automotive manufacturer, Microsoft, or Google, everyone needs customers.

In Online Advertising and Publishing landscape, we call our ‘customers’ as ‘Readers’. They’re the ones who’s powering all of our businesses and let us thrive in this super-competitive market. Although, there are many ways to monetize your content, as Jim Norton, the former chief business officer at Condé Nast says “No single stream of alternative revenue will equal the revenue generated by advertising”.

As a Publisher, your focus should be on attracting readers and engaging with them. If there are no readers, there are no advertisers, which in turn, means you may take a deep cut on your revenue.

‘Viewability ’ is quite tricky. Even though the underlying principle seems simple (Viewable Ads drive better ROI and UX), it is hard for publishers to accept and endorse it at scale. When you take a high-level view from the buy-side, your purpose is lucid.

It might be to drive awareness or gain subscribers or improve conversions. At the end of the day, you try to buy a better inventory (programmatically) which can deliver acceptable viewability metrics as suggested by the MRC.

But for a publisher, ‘Viewable Ad’ doesn’t just end with a straightforward solution. There are a ton more factors involved in delivering and maintaining viewable impressions. Starting from design to user interface changes, you as a publisher have to analyze and account many distinct factors while working on ‘Viewability ’.

Besides, focusing solely on viewability alone can result in terrible user experience and increased drop-offs.

So, we’ve researched, amassed, and explained a step-by-step procedure to improve your inventories ’ viewability and thus, increasing CPMs and user experience.