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Optimized Ad Experience Analysis

Details on evaluating performance after enabling Mediavine's Optimized Ad Experience (OAE). 

The goal of Optimized Ad Experience is to reduce the number of in-content ad placements on your site. In-content ads tend to be the lowest value placements on the page, and also tend to have the lowest viewability. When you reduce in-content ads by enabling OAE, demand shifts to other, higher viewability, higher value placements on the page.

The goal with OAE is to lift site-wide viewability, CPM, and eCPM, and it can often improve other metrics (higher impressions from other ad units due to increased refreshes and a longer session duration, better affiliate and email conversions, and increased return visitors). OAE creates a better user experience and helps you to find the balance between revenue, RPM, and UX on your site.

To Evaluate the Performance of Optimized Ad Experience on Your Site

Be sure to note the date that you enabled OAE.

The date range you select to evaluate performance should begin with the first full day after you've enabled (Example: You enabled OAE on the 15th, so your date range should begin on the 16th). 

The comparison date range should compare to the same days of the week in the previous period. 

If you are selecting a longer date range, note whether that date range includes the end of the month, quarter, or any holidays, as these can affect spend.

Note the traffic trends for your comparison date range. 

Scroll to the Ad Unit Breakdown. 

In most cases, you are looking for In-Content Ads to decrease as a % of revenue, and for the Universal Player, Adhesion, and Sticky Sidebar Ads to increase as a % of revenue. If you serve Recipe Card Ads, you should likely also see those increase as a % of revenue. 

Metrics that Matter

Avoid focusing only on site-wide RPM. That is one metric you can use, but a higher RPM does not always indicate increased revenue, and other metrics are better indicators of long-term performance. Metrics to check in the Ad Unit breakdown are: 

  • Site-wide CPM (in the Totals row)
  • Site-wide viewability (in the Totals row)
  • In-Content CPM 
  • Universal Player, Adhesion, and Sticky Sidebar performance


In the above example, you'll notice that In-Content Ads increased by 12.09%. 

Sessions for the selected date range increased by 37.39%, which tells us that in-content ads did not increase at the same rate as sessions, indicating an overall decrease in the number of in-content impressions per session. 

If you are looking at these metrics and are not seeing improvements, you also need to look for any meaningful changes to traffic that can influence things. 

  • Did devices change for this time frame? Were there any changes to Countries of Origin? (Example: an increase in mobile traffic, a decrease in US traffic, etc.)
  • Changes to top posts. (For the posts that are trending up during the selected time frame, is viewability up? What about CPM? If CPM did not increase, can you look at the traffic sources for that post specifically (in GA4)? What about countries?

If sites do not see a marked and consistent improvement after enabling OAE, traffic changes or reader navigational shifts are typically the reason. 

Important Notes

  • Be sure to run OAE for at least 2 weeks before evaluating performance on your site. 
  • Viewability is cached server-side with many advertising partners, which means that though you may see an increase in your Dashboard reporting, advertisers may not react to your improved viewability for 30 days or more. As advertisers react positively to higher site-wide viewability, spend typically follows. 
  • If you use "jump links" (a table of contents or a jump-to-recipe functionality), be sure to check the jump function on your top posts. You are looking for the jump "anchor" to accurately land the reader in the right place.  
  • If your theme or recipe card plugin has a "smooth scroll" function, performance, and overall viewability tend to be better with that feature disabled. 
  • Use any Table of Contents (ToC) features wisely. It should be easy for the reader to select the answer they are seeking from your Table of Contents. A succinct ToC does not have to default to being collapsed, but it also should not take up an entire screenview, or multiple screenviews. 
In general, if you make it easy for readers to get the information they need, OAE will perform better, but so will your site holistically.