Competition is the name of the programmatic advertising game. In the ad auction, competition means higher CPMs for your ads. Between ad managers (like Mediavine and our competitors), it means innovation and striving to offer our best to win your business.
As the owner of a popular website with engaging content, you have likely been contacted with offers from competing ad managers or products and services. Any savvy business owner would entertain the prospect of earning more money! But to make informed decisions for your business, you have to look to the data.
Here's How
Typical sales emails will promise a % of increase in RPM, so the first thing you need to do is look back to last year.
How much did RPM increase over the course of Q1 (January -March)?
How about Q2 (April-June) or Q3 (July-September)?
If you were using AdSense or another solution (all affiliate revenue, etc) to earn last year, you can calculate RPM using this equation:
REVENUE / TRAFFIC * 1000 = RPM
RPM will increase as you head through the year no matter who is managing your ads, unless something is throwing that off. Here is a typical dashboard, where the publisher's RPM increased by 231% over the course of 2021:
Is this year higher than last year? By how much?
Did your traffic grow? By what percentage?
How much did your REVENUE increase compared to the increase of your traffic?
PAY ATTENTION TO CPM
CPM is how much advertisers are spending per 1000 impressions.
CPM is one half of the revenue equation. Higher CPMs are important. It’s why we always stress the importance of site speed and viewability: because advertisers spend more for it.
Knowing how much advertisers are spending gives you all sorts of clues about where to go with your business.
You can’t make more when advertisers are spending less without balancing the other side of the revenue question which leads me to …
IMPRESSIONS!!!!
Know how many impressions you are serving:
Sitewide
Per page
Per Session
Impressions can be found in your Mediavine dashboard in the Ad Unit Breakdown.
Divide impressions by sessions to know how many ads per session you are serving.
Divide impressions by page views to know how many ads per page view you are serving.
(Don’t count ad spaces. That's not how many ads you are running.)
The number that you come up with per page or per session includes EVERYTHING - every refresh, every video ad, desktop ad, in-content ad, universal player impression, recipe or how-to card ad - ALL OF IT.
Get comfy with the numbers beyond pageviews or RPM so that you can continue to grow your business. Know how much advertisers are spending. Know where the $$ is coming from. Set some good goals and let us help you get there.