There are just too many indicators of why mobile-based clicks and impressions lead the pack in growth of digital advertising. Strong and powerful facts about internet usage including the 71% mobile users, more than $24 billion invested in mobile web and $18.9 billion Google’s share of expenditures in mobile web ad cannot be ignored.
A simple evaluation means that mobile has become the primary tool for web users and web publishers must be ready and willing to orient their ad revenue optimization on a mobile-first basis. Going forward, there are several key rules to be kept in practice for web publishers for mobile web monetization.
Stop Serving bad ads
Google Chrome will force your ad sales team to consider user’s experience whether or not they care about it. The safest assumption would be that users tolerate ads in direct proportionality to their device’s screen size which could explain why ad blocking is becoming a thing these days.
A bad ad filter under testing could spell the end for invasive and heavy ads on mobile. If launched, the filter will block all ads access by your site visitors altogether if it happens that you attempted to serve even a single bad ad of intrusive format. This will potentially affect all site visits made through Chrome, and although not all your audience will be using Chrome, it’s safer to assume so for remedial steps to be taken to avert such an eventuality.
Some of the tips to get you through the mess of bad ads include:
- Removing pop-up ads
- Stop using Creatives with rapidly background colors changing animations
- Prestitials should be avoided. These are basically ads that appear while content waits to load and they consume the entire screen. Such ads may or may not have a countdown
- Getting rid of Auto-played unmute programmatic video
- Non-dismissible postitial ads should be dropped
- Use ad layouts which take up less than 30% of the vertical screen-height, those that exceed this will be categorized as intrusive.
Publishers Need to Adopt New Platforms
There are specifically two platforms which have become available to almost every publisher: Facebook Instant Articles and Google AMP. Every publisher with a Facebook page will have the ability to use Facebook Instant Article, and although Facebook admits to non-prioritization of IA, there is no denying that it(IA) has the fastest page load time. Some adjustments have also been made by Facebook to increase monetization on Instant Articles which comes with customizable ad density, new ad sizes and ad placement among others.
Google’s AMP, on the other hand, has gone through massive transformations over time in an effort to address publishers’ concerns. The open source Accelerated Mobile Pages primary objective is to reduce page load times but with improvements such as new ad formats including carousels, Lightbox, and video parallax, ability to build creatives in AMP-HTML, expansion of AMP supported ad serving and third party viewability ; publishers will have more to benefit from Google AMP. The benefits would include beautifully designed and quick loading ads, opening up of AMP ad inventory to Exchange bidding and support for header bidding which collectively serve to increase revenues.
Header Bidding Implementation
The latest mobile index reports suggest that header bidding continues to push up revenues especially through monetized impressions and similarly, mobile web header bidding shows a hiked improvement.
What this means is that mobile header bidding has the same if not more value in terms of revenues and management compared to the typical desktop header bidding.
To start with, you need to add bidder adapters for your mobile web container which your developers will need to work with. Choose from the best suppliers of header bidding adapters and make inquiries about the adapter’s compatibility with your ad container.
You will also need to be considerate of page latency which plays a more significant role in mobile header bidding optimization.
Anyone can benefit from the ‘lift’ provided by mobile web monetization even though it looks like Google and Facebook are getting the largest share.
Non-social native spending is growing at a fast rate and is on course to increase by more than 50% this year compared to 2016.
Europe provides a hot market with its share of monetized mobile impressions tripling and eCPMs growing by 141% in a year. However, mobile web growth has been a worldwide phenomenon which seems to be endless at the moment, and therefore you need to be ready for the long haul.
