Monetization

Don’t worry. We will answer all of them today. We are going to reveal the truth about all the shady practices of website monetization. Before that let’s get into some basics.

Firstly, publishers need to know which metrics are crucial to analyze their overall performance. Understanding that publishers will also have a simpler time picking the right partner to operate with.

Publishers try to use earnings as the key performance indicator (KPI) when analyzing various networks. However, it is more necessary to know more about additional relevant variables that affect publishers’ earnings such as ad impressions and eCPMs. 

Earnings = (Ad impression / 1000) * eCPM.

Ad views are known as an impression, used to present the data of how many times an ad shown to the user. The whole number of ad impressions depends often on the website’s audience size as well as the number of ad placements on the site.

And the fill rate is the metric that shows the ratio of number ad shown divided by the number of ads requested.

Knowing the monetization performance is key to producing a good balance among user experience and earnings. Therefore, producing good content and a high number of visitors isn’t solely sufficient to start monetizing. It is important to find an advertising partner who knows the value of user experience and offers you the most productive monetization strategy.

But, the extremely competitive online advertising aspect has triggered some professionals to utilize shady practices in order to obtain a competitive advantage.

As earlier mentioned, advertising platforms will suggest you to set interfering ad formats limiting frequency capping. That is given to find the perfect place within performance and user experience (eg. Pop-Under restricted to 1 impression per IP/day).

That being said, it is an “open secret” that in order to make more revenue, many networks who offer such interfering ad formats aren’t valuing the frequency capping rules that they accepted on with you. Oftentimes, the network should show 1 impression per IP/day, but this capping is only valued in some countries including the country the publisher is truly located in. Meanwhile, visitors from other GEOs (i.e. the USA) are viewing 2 or more Pop ads per day.

In that case, you will profit from this shady practice by getting paid for these extra ad impressions. But, it will damage the site’s user experience in the long run and you might lose more visitors.

You check out in various ways if your monetization partner is cheating or not. Use a VPN to check this. 

As earlier mentioned, Knowing the monetization performance is key to producing a good balance among user experience and earnings. However, this is true with any kind of advertising, this logic has gained reinforcement when it comes to more intrusive ads. A website using an abusive usage of full-screen ad formats should expect these things to happen:

there are some dishonest individuals who playing with their CPM to doctor their earnings. They just don’t reveal the 100% data of their publisher, which they generated in their dashboard.

Last but not least on the list, rendering “misbehaving ad tags” to publishers is a shady practice that appears to be getting some momentum in the last few years.

In order to build an ecosystem where they can get a competitive edge over clean platforms, some individual in the industry doesn’t seem to worry about the user experience of their publishers’ sites. As well as believing that it’s okay to accommodate their clients with ad tags that capture their sites. For example, ad tags that permit networks to trigger Pop-Under or Pop-Up ads into a tag that was only intended to display Native ads.

Such an ambiguous practice provides the advertising platform to:

Likewise to the frequency capping case, we recommend you to use a VPN (with a residential IP) to test various locations and the behavior of your ad tags.

These practices are profitable for the advertisers but publishers like suffers most from them. These practices will lose tons of visitors from your site. After reading this article, you now have all the knowledge about the most used shady practices of website monetization. You can now track all the shady players from the industry and make sure no one can fool you.

We believe that as an advertiser, you should earn by showing ads but no one has the right to make lose your audiences. Always be careful about with you are partnering. check their privacy policy and terms conditions. Research about them. make sure that there is no bad or scam review online about them. Also after partnering with an ad network, check regularly if they following any shady methods. These guidelines should save you from any shady player in the industry.