I’ve received quite a few questions from media companies recently and decided to tackle some of them during this session. Watch the video replay or read the summary below.
Is it is OK to rotate ads on our website?
This practice involves having ad zones on your site that refresh every 30 seconds or so to display a new creative. While many ad serving systems like Broadstreet and Google Ad Manager support this, I typically do not recommend it.
Publishers often do this to generate more ad impressions. However, this creates a situation where impressions are building up while the user might not even be looking at the screen, has scrolled down the page, or has even walked away from their device.
This leads to “phantom” impressions that provide no value to the advertiser.
First, is it ethical to charge for impressions that readers aren’t actually seeing? I strongly believe the answer is no. I don’t want to cheat my advertisers by charging them for impressions that are never actually seen.
Second, rotating ads tanks your advertiser click-through rates (CTR). You are inflating the impression count with unseen ads that no one ever clicks on. Advertisers see this low CTR and don’t want to spend money with you again.
When we have helped publishers move away from rotating ads, we have seen click-through rates increase significantly. Advertisers are happy with the improvement and we’ve found ways to keep revenue high.
The “juice isn’t worth the squeeze” when it comes to ad rotation. Stick to static placements, keep your advertisers happy, and get more repeat business.
Are Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) still important?
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) was a Google initiative designed to serve lightning-fast, stripped-down versions of web pages to mobile users. While the project is technically deprecated, it is not dead.
AMP still plays a role in Google News, Google News Showcase, and other aggregators like SmartNews. For publishers heavily focused on news, I still see significant traffic coming from AMP pages.
If you are a news publisher and already have AMP in place, I wouldn’t get rid of it. I would however, track AMP usage closely in GA4 and double-check your AMP templates regularly to make sure they’re optimized.
If you don’t already have AMP, I generally wouldn’t recommend adding it unless you are a true news-oriented site and want a better shot at being indexed in news aggregators.
Fast, modern, mobile-responsive sites have mostly replaced AMP and can offer a much more robust user experience without the restrictions and maintenance of AMP.
Why have my open and click rates increased?
Recent developments have made open and click rates very unreliable.
Apple introduced Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) in 2021. Since that time, email open rates have become effectively worthless. Apple caches images for all emails delivered to its Mail app (both desktop and mobile), meaning the email loads as “opened” even if the user never looks at it.
Nearly half of all emails are opened on Apple devices, so Apple MPP has a huge impact on open rates.
Most email service providers like HubSpot, MailChimp, ActiveCampaign and Omeda report these unknown Apple emails as opens by default which. This means your open rates reports are inflated. However, if they were to report Apple emails as unopened, open rates would be significantly underreported.
Before Apple MPP, I used to consider 25-30% unique open rate as good. With Apple MPP, however, I now consider 40% as the target for a decent unique open rate for most publishers.
Again, you must remember that 40% of people aren’t actually opening your emails … that number is inflated. But it’s a decent enough benchmark. Open rate is no longer reliable as an actual number, but it is still good directionally.
We’ve also seen an increase in email click rates over the past few years. Email clicks are not affected by Apple’s privacy changes, but the ARE being impacted by bots.
In the B2B markets especially, corporate security bots scan every link in an email to check for malicious links. The problem is these bots register as clicks in your ESP reports leading to artificially inflated click and click rates in email reports.
Some email providers, like ActiveCampaign, offer tools to filter out suspected bot clicks. Check with your ESP to see how they handle bot clicks and if they offer bot click filtering.
Will blocking AI bots hurt my sponsored content programs?
As user discovery shifts toward AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini, publishers want to continue showing advertiser value in their sponsored content programs.
I generally recommend blocking AI bots to protect your content from being synthesized without credit or traffic back to your site. However, if you block AI bots from scraping your site will it also block advertiser sponsored content from being indexed by AI bots.
But is this a bad thing? Even if AI tools pick up sponsored content on your site, it is unlikely that your publication will get the credit in a synthesized answer which defeats the purpose and value proposition of your sponsored content program.
I believe the best strategy for sponsored content is not to rely on AI discovery, but to control the promotion yourself. Focus on getting views of sponsored content through your own channels: email newsletters, social media (organic and ads), and on-site promotion.
You can prove value much more effectively by showing direct engagement rather than hoping an AI bot surfaces sponsored content and gives your publication actual credit.
Why do I see different user numbers in Google Analytics?
Publishers often get confused by the different “user” metrics in Google Analytics 4. There are three types of “users” in GA4:
- Total Users: The raw count of everyone who visited your site, no matter what else they do.
- Active Users: The number of people who “engaged” with your site. An engaged user is someone who stays on your site for more than 10 seconds, looks at two or more pages, or triggers a GA4 conversion event (email signup, subscription, etc.). Your active users will be significantly less than the total users who visit your site.
- New Users: The number of people who visited your site for the first time. Keep in mind that this number can be very misleading and is overstated. If someone uses an incognito window, a different browser or different device, clears their cookies, or uses ad blocking software, they will be counted as a new user on your site even if they aren’t.
When looking at reports in Google Analytics, make sure you understand which “user” metric you’re looking at, otherwise you could be making conclusions from incorrect data.
I typically recommend using Total Users when generating KPI dashboards or executive reports. Total users are the most accurate number. And every user, whether they are active, new or otherwise, contributes to total site traffic and ad impressions.
Why is my site failing Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)?
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is a part of Core Web Vitals … metrics that Google uses to measure real-world performance of your website for people visiting it.
CLS specifically measures visual stability. If you’re reading an article on a website and the text suddenly jumps down because an ad or other element just loaded above it, you are experiencing Cumulative Layout Shift.
It is incredibly frustrating for users and is a negative ranking factor in Google Search.
One of the biggest culprits for CLS on a publication website is ads. Publishers often allow for different size ads to load in different zone and thus do not hard code the heigh of the ad position on their site. This leads to poor CLS scores for your site.
You can eliminate CLS caused by ads on your site by:
- Standardizing on two ad sizes: 970×250 billboard and 300×250 rectangles. Use only 300×250 on mobile.
- Since both of these ad sizes are 250 pixels in height, you can now hardcode the ad spots to be 250 pixels high on desktop and mobile.
Now, when the page loads, that 250 pixels space is reserved immediately. The content doesn’t jump when the ad fills in.
This simple change can help your site pass Core Web Vitals and potentially improve your search rankings.