Understanding inventory optimization: How to increase ad revenue by making inventory work for you

Competition for digital advertising dollars is intensifying as digital publishers challenge both traditional online content providers and ecommerce sites including Amazon and Walmart for advertising spend. However, publishers can boost onsite revenues by maximizing online inventory along with website performance and usability. This post explores associated strategies to increase ad revenue on your site.

Optimize your ad inventory

Dynamic pricing can help alleviate declining ad revenues. Methods involve analyzing ad space bids and setting minimum pricing rules per device, content category, type of bidding, advertiser, and many other parameters. You can use this to increase revenue by continuously analyzing bids for your ad space and creating opportunities to set minimum prices based on customer demand.

In addition to dynamic pricing, publishers can also optimize ad inventory per session by:

• Designing and testing alternate story layouts
• Prioritizing larger ad formats that command higher CPMs
• Using default pagination for longer stories (or story comments)
• Testing new user interface (UI) elements that increase engagement (New UIs and interactions can persuade visitors to spend more time per session.) 

Enhance your website engagement and performance

Advertisers aim to maximize their digital advertising campaign performance and gravitate toward websites that can help them attain a high return on their investment. Audit and optimize the following website elements to make your site more alluring to site visitors—and the advertisers who want to reach them.

Visibility: Make your website easy to discover so search engines can find and index your site.

Search engine optimization (SEO): This remains one of the most important activities to drive relevant traffic to your website.

Accessibility: Ensure your website follows accessibility best practices so that all visitors see your site’s advertisements. This includes considering how visitors navigate and consume content and addressing how people communicate and interact on your site. An accessible website can help advertisers expand their reach.

Speed: Optimize your website for quick loading speeds to inspire more visitors and enhance their attention. According to MachMetrics, it takes an average of 4.7 seconds for a webpage to load on a desktop and 11.4 seconds on a mobile device.

Engagement: Boost ad revenue by experimenting with ad locations, sizes, and placements to ensure visitors see and engage with the ad. A well-positioned ad lets the advertiser know that they can get a high return on their investment.

Cybersecurity: Employ a cybersecurity solution that can detect and reduce cyberattacks. Hackers can rob and manipulate data, change a website’s appearance, redirect website traffic, hijack or disable the site, and steal customer information. In addition to a potentially significant financial cost, cybersecurity breaches can also tarnish your company’s reputation and your website’s appeal.

Responsiveness: A responsive website automatically scales images and other content to fit the screen on which it’s viewed—PC/laptop, tablet, or mobile. This website flexibility can help convert and retain customers and boost performance, which can drive more ad revenue and partners.

Website optimization is an ongoing process. Legacy strategies and measurement criteria don’t necessarily provide the most telling characteristics about audience response as more advanced solutions provide. To gain more control and leverage over inventory—and drive new programmatic ad sales—connect your campaign to data that reveals meaningful impact.

How to gain meaningful measurement beyond verification

1. Establish baseline metrics: Two primary benefits emerge from consistent monitoring and accounting for viewability, invalid traffic, and brand-safety reporting across your campaigns: protecting your advertisers’ brand dollars. Effective brand safety should be dynamic. Instead of relying on rigid blocklists, brand suitability should understand page context and intent to address continuous content evolution.

2. Life beyond verification: Connect your campaign to data sets that reveal meaningful impact so that attention becomes an outcome to pursue in tandem with traditional KPIs such as viewability and verification. More broadly, marketing campaigns need an industry ready for new metrics to gauge cross-channel impact beyond just verification.

3. Measure across channels: Publishers and platforms will look to brands to maintain consumer loyalty and trust in their expertise. This calls for both robust content and multichannel dissemination. Innovative marketers who experiment with formats beyond traditional social media posts and editorial-style content learn more because verification alone won’t tell you about impact post view.

As marketers seek further control over their ad spend and a better understanding of campaign efficacy, measuring advertising outcomes like consumer attention will become crucial. When you move measurement beyond ad verification to attention, you’ll show advertisers how your inventory helps them drive success and hit their KPIs—a surefire way to keep them coming back for more.

Drive more revenue through agility

Changes to ad targeting, data collection, and privacy regulations will continue to challenge the digital advertising ecosystem to evolve and bring new solutions to market that support its future. The ability to stay agile and adapt to the changing industry will be critical for publishers. With no single solution to attracting advertising partners, successful publishers will adopt a combination of the thoughtful strategies in this article.

Interested in learning more about Oracle Moat? Schedule a demo today. And to learn how to measure consumer attention, read our how-to guide here.