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Ad Stack Hacks: 5 Yield Optimization Tips to Drive Ad Revenue

Learn how to optimize your ad stack and boost your revenue with these 5 yield optimization tips for publishers.

Updated on October 14, 2024

Header bidding opened the door to new paths to revenue for publishers, but it also added complexity. As time-consuming as managing your ad stack can be, optimizing yield can be an even larger challenge. But, with the right strategies, it’s easier than it looks.

What is yield optimization?

Is the art (and science) of managing ad inventory to increase revenue per impression.

It’s about adjusting aspects of your ad stack—like the number of bidding partners and timeout rates—to get the best price for each ad slot. The goal is to balance fill rate and CPM (cost per thousand impressions) without compromising user experience. By testing and fine-tuning your strategies, you can ensure no potential earnings are left untapped, turning every ad impression into a revenue opportunity.

5 yield optimization strategies to drive ad revenue

Here are 5 straightforward yield optimization strategies you should be using as a publisher to ensure you’re getting maximum returns for every one of your ad units.

#1: Discover your perfect number of demand partners

Conventional programmatic wisdom holds that the more demand partners you add, the worse the user experience becomes because of the latency involved in the bidding process. But the extent of this latency will be different for every website. That’s why it’s a good idea to test the impact of adding more bidders to your ad stack.

To test this, you should add demand partners (or bidders) until it negatively impacts either bounce rate or revenue, then roll back as required. The average number of bidders in a publisher’s header stack will vary depending on the size of the publisher, but between 5 and 20 bidders is a common range.

#2: Experiment with timeout rate

With header bidding, publishers specify a specific amount of time they’re willing to wait for a valid bid response from their demand partners.

The longer this timeout rate, the worse the experience will be for the user, and the higher the risk of lost traffic—and therefore lost revenue. It’s a good idea to experiment with longer timeouts or leverage parallel auctions until you find the perfect balance between revenue and user experience.

#3: Test out different line item priorities

If you’re using Google Ad Manager (GAM), you’ll know that direct sold line items using the top Sponsorship or Standard tiers are prioritized during ad serving—even if a higher CPM exists in a lower tier.

#4: Analyze unfilled impressions and fill rate

If you are anything like 73% of the world’s digital publishers, you’re probably already using Google Ad Manager, but did you know that it offers a range of in-depth reporting options to help you optimize yield?

Here are the metrics that are most likely to reveal yield optimization opportunities:

• Unfilled impressions. This metric is perhaps the best indicator of where to focus your attention because it’s a direct representation of lost revenue.
• Coverage (or fill rate). This percentage-based metric represents the amount of digital ads that were served on a page vs. the number of ad requests that were processed.

#5: Optimize video ads with the VAST waterfall

Whether you already leverage video ads, or you’ve merely dabbled in the past, you might be familiar with the IAB’s VAST specifications. VAST helps publishers deliver a consistent video ad experience across websites and devices.

Are you tapping into the full potential of your inventory?

Implementing one or more of these strategies should help you unlock incremental lift for your site’s ad revenue stream—and become a more effective yield optimizer—but it doesn’t end there. If you haven’t already, we’d encourage you to integrate with Commerce Grid, the world’s first commerce SSP. Enhance your ad yield management and maximize returns with instant access to exclusive demand from over 18,000 brands, retailers, and agencies spending billions annually across our commerce ecosystem.