As February comes to an end and I’m two months late with this post, I ask, what have you done with your Q1 inventory?
As many experienced advertising insiders know and many new ad professional are learning…Q1 effing sucks. You can reasonably expect to make somewhere between 20-40% on the same audience, engagement and performance as you saw in Q4, so is advertising the best use of your ad-inventory?
How do you get value from your users?
If you’re operating a free, advertising-based site, you receive value by having data on your users and being able to serve them relevant ads based on that data. The more data you have to serve ads, the more value you can receive from the users.
Do you require your users to log-in prior to using your site? If so, congrats, you won the battle with your product team (i mean you all agreed during a harmonious decision process :) If you don’t, you need to understand how your users get value from being logged-in (so you have more data on them). My favorite method, is to ask my users who log-in, ”what’s you’re favorite part of (service)”?
Educate Your Users:
The more educated your users are on your product, the more likely they are to use and engage with it. After asking your engaged users what they love about the product, it’s time to educate your low-engaged users why they will find value in logging-in / registering for your service.
How do you educate?
Let’s see, you’ve got all this inventory that no-one will give you fair value for, you’ve got users who have low-engagement in your product, which means they probably won’t read an email (if you even have their email) or spend time reading/watching a video on the product…HOUSE ADS! (did you see how I just brought that full circle? i know super impressive…)
Freemium Services love to advertise their upgrades - seriously Spotify, I know that Spotify Premium has no ads, but what else? Ask your users, build the ads focused on what the users love and fill your unsold inventory with those ads.
How do you serve the ads?
There are multiple benefits of serving house ads:
1) Educating your users on your product: (I don’t have to go into this again, do I?)
2) Set a hard floor price in your exchanges: If the exchange can’t get you higher than this floor price, you serve your house ad. Also reduces your inventory, creating more competition and higher prices for the ads left.
3) Set soft-floor prices: Set a direct campaign to serve 5% of your indirect inventory at 70% average network price - this again will create more competition, but at the top of your inventory, again pushing networks higher. (push from the bottom and pull from the top - yes that’s another blog post…)
4) Performance: House Ads are no different than brand ads, you need to track their performance, optimize the ones that perform well and re-evaluate the poor performing ads.
Barter:
You want more users? Get yourself out there and trade your inventory with other smart publishers - you’ll find more value by bringing new users now, which you can monetize later (Q4). hint: other publishers want this too!
Ideas are worthless, here’s how to get started:
Most of this post was based on things to do, but…
1) Determine the value of each ad. If you can’t get that value now, use it to trade for new users or educate to build engagement and data that you’ll monetize in Q3 & Q4.
2) Determine the value you’re providing to users. From THE USER perspective.
3) Educate your users on the value they can receive, through house ads. a) survey b) design c) serve ads d) optimize campaigns
4) Trade that inventory for more users
Slightly more obvious to-do’s:
5) Discount your direct inventory (if it isn’t already algorithmically priced based on sell-through rate - that’s another post)
6) Give bonuses to your direct sales team for Q1 sales (yes, in addition to commission)
