Programmatic advertising remains a mystery for many media companies, even those actively using or selling it. To simplify the landscape, we can break programmatic advertising into two distinct buckets: owned media and non-owned media.
Today, we are focusing strictly on owned media—placing programmatic advertising on your own website or within your own email newsletters. The primary goal is to generate additional revenue beyond what your team sells directly.
Before diving into specific tactics, there are three fundamental issues with owned programmatic advertising to understand:
- It typically does not work well for B2B media companies.
- You generally need a high volume of traffic—at least a million page views a month—to make the revenue worthwhile.
- Ad quality and user experience can become highly problematic if not managed carefully.
Website Programmatic Backfill
Programmatic backfill targets your run-of-site inventory, filling in the gaps when you do not use up all your ad inventory with direct-sold campaigns. Because most programmatic backfill solution are consumer-oriented, programmatic backfill is usually not suitable for B2B publications.
When it comes to backfill, you have a few levels of sophistication:
- Google AdSense: This is the most popular and simplest option to implement. However, the revenue is low, typically yielding a revenue per thousand page views (RPM) of $1 to $3.
- Managed Publisher Ad Networks: Platforms like Raptive and MonetizeMore are more sophisticated and can generate significantly better RPMs, often ranging from $8 to $25.
- Header Bidding: This method runs an auction among multiple ad networks for your inventory. Header bidding is harder to implement, but can boost RPMs a couple of dollars higher than managed ad networks.
To make programmatic backfill truly viable, you realistically need between half a million to a million page views per month. But while it can provide a nice supplementary revenue stream, your primary focus should always be on better selling own inventory directly to advertisers.
Monetizing Email Newsletters
You can also monetize unsold inventory within your email newsletters using third-party networks like LiveIntent or Passendo. Here’s how it works:
- You define specific ad positions within your newsletter layout.
- Your direct-sold campaigns get first priority.
- Any unsold inventory is backfilled through the programmatic network.
- If no programmatic backfill is available, these systems can display your own house ads.
Again, email programmatic backfill is better suited for consumer media, not B2B. You can expect low cost per thousand impression (CPM) rates in the $2 to $4 range, based specifically on “rendered impressions”. A rendered impression only counts when an email is actually opened and fully completes the display of the ad image. This is a much lower number than how many emails you send out, and lower than your actual opens.
Content and Native Widgets
Content widgets are native advertisements embedded directly into your website layout from companies like Taboola, Outbrain, or the Disqus commenting platform.
These widgets typically deliver very low RPMs, hovering around $1 to $2 per thousand page views. Ad content can be low quality, so be sure to examine that closely before implementing. Furthermore, these types of ads encourage readers to click away, interfering with your site’s recirculation and audience development goals. However, if recirculation is not a major concern and your site drives a massive volume of page views, these native widgets can bring in decent incremental revenue.
Ad Overlays and User Experience
Ad overlays are units that sit outside of the normal page layout, including video overlays, adhesions, sticky ads, and interstitial pop-ups.
The biggest risk with overlays is overcrowding your site, leading to poor user experience particularly on mobile devices. You also need to balance programmatic overlays with your own internal overlays like email sign-ups, web app notifications, and direct-sold overlay ads. Bombarding a user who is just trying to read an article will quickly become annoying. That said, if you manage overlays carefully and do not get too greedy, they can be an effective monetization tool.
Automated Affiliate Links
Automated affiliate link solutions, such as Skimlinks and Sovrn, use code on your website to automatically scan your content and insert affiliate links. If a reader clicks that link and purchases a product from the e-commerce merchant, the publisher receives a share of the revenue.
While common on large consumer websites, this rarely drives significant revenue unless you push over a million page views a month. If you use automated affiliate links, there are also risks you need to mitigate.
The Federal Trade Commission requires disclosure of affiliate links. This disclosure must be clearly visible somewhere on the page where the links appear, not just buried in your terms and conditions.
Affiliate links can also affect your search engine visibility. Google has launched spam updates to their algorithms that penalize publisher sites using unmarked affiliate links. This has caused entire sites to experience massive traffic drops. To avoid manual Google penalties, have a clear disclaimer of affiliate links, and include a rel="sponsored" attribute on every affiliate link. This signals to search engines that the link involves monetary compensation.
The Bottom Line
Programmatic advertising on your owned and operated website and email newsletter can generate additional revenue streams if you are a consumer media property with enough page views and/or email opens to make it worth your effort, and can manage the website user experience and business risks appropriately.
If you are a smaller site (less than 500,000 page views per month) or are a B2B media company, it usually doesn’t make sense to pursue these types of solutions.