In-content ad units are important units for your overall monetization strategy. Especially in the mobile space, where in-content units one of the only ways to monetize that traffic, knowing that your units are healthy and performing at their peak potential is going to be essential to making the most out of every single pageview.
The site health checks are our way of letting you know how your ads are doing.
How do in-content ads work?
Our CBA in-content ad logic intelligently spaces your in-content ads to ensure we are always within the CBA guidelines. These state that ad content can not be more than 30% of the total page height.
What do the colors mean?
TEAL STAR: You hit the goal!
GREEN LIGHT: You can take steps to improve, but overall you're doing great.
Time to go for teal!
YELLOW LIGHT: Room for improvement.
RED LIGHT: Action Needed!
What do the site health check goals mean?
Site Health checks are showing how many ad impressions per session each unit needs to receive to achieve each respective level. These scores reflect the last 3 days of site data.
How do I get to teal?
Optimizing your site for your ads will always help. Ads can only appear between "paragraphs" (in HTML our script is looking at <p>, , and sometimes only text paragraphs based on your ad settings, so it’s important to create more “places” where in-content ads can appear. Changes you can make to improve your score include the following:
Lengthen your content.
Remember, more post height = more ads, so anything you can do to make your posts longer in pixels is paramount to in-content ad performance.
Add more big, beautiful, vertical images to your posts. This is an easy way to get a lot of length, very quickly.
Add more text to your posts. As well as lengthening your overall post length for your in-content ad performance, Google also loves long-form content.
Break up your existing paragraphs into shorter segments. They should be no more than 2-3 sentences long. This also follows best practices for how your readers actually ingest your content as well. For more information on this, please see this help guide.
Consider adding long pins, infographics, charts, or block quotes. Any elements that’ll add value to the content and increase the overall height of the post.
Increase your body copy size. Increasing your text size and/or line height by just 1-2 pixels could make all the difference in adding more in-content ads. Consult your theme developer or a graphic designer for help on how to adjust this.
Make sure your “focal point” of the post is at the very end.
Ask yourself: Why are readers coming to this post? Whatever the "focal point" of your post is, make sure it's at the end of your post. Some examples:
Recipe cards
Free printables / downloads
DIY instructions
Once you figure out WHY the reader is clicking over your post, place that thing at the very end to encourage readers to scroll to the end of your content and spend as much time as possible with your in-content ads.
Test it out!
Once you’ve made changes, test your post. Look at it on your computer and on your phone. Are you getting at least 3-4 in-content ads in both places?
Bingo! you’ve just optimized this post’s performance!
If you have any questions about this, or would like some further examples on ways to improve your site and optimize your ads, please email us at publishers@mediavine.com.