As a publisher, you understand how important it is to measure the performance of your website(s). This allows you to see if your users are loving your site, or if there are opportunities for you to optimize. Lots of data points are available to a publisher, like CPM, eCPM, overall revenue, page RPM, and fill rate. We know that it can be challenging to determine which metric matters most—at Sortable, we recommend our publishers focus on session RPM to realize where you can improve your site(s).

Ad placements tend to be one of the most overlooked aspects of running a website. When publishers place banner ads wherever they feel like it, they won’t realize how effective the careful placement of ads can be. Every website is different and you need to consider multiple factors when optimizing your ad layouts. Here are a few guidelines for ad placements:

Your website may look fantastic with a 970x250 banner ad, but it may not be the best size for monetization. Optimizing ad unit sizes based on advertising demand can be a quick and easy way to increase yield.

Monetizing a website can be a difficult and arduous process, and can often take a fair amount of time out of a publisher’s day. Here at Sortable, we believe a trusted ad partner can be extremely beneficial for your business, taking the stress out of selling ads, allowing you to put time back into creating content and improving your website.

Ad Ops is constantly evolving—the industry isn’t what it was a year or even two years ago. Big data is a large driver of this evolution with its increasingly important role in the latest technologies available. Ad ops professionals are now responsible for overseeing data and providing insight into measuring ad effectiveness and recommending strategies for ad optimizations. Data has become vital to Ad Ops.

At Sortable, we value our participation in conferences and industry events as they are crucial for ad ops and our publishers. The industry is constantly evolving and it’s important to discuss the latest trending topics and be inspired by thought leaders in the industry.

Viewability is one of the most important metrics publishers can optimize towards because the first step in driving brand engagement for advertisers is to ensure campaigns are seen by users. Advertisers use several key performance indicators (KPIs) to help measure the performance of their digital campaign spend. Compared to traditional advertising forms like radio and print, digital advertising offers unique opportunities for brands to understand how audiences engage with a brand via an advertising campaign. Advertisers measure performance through metrics that promote interactions with a brand such as the number of clicks on a banner or the amount of on-site purchases made after seeing an ad campaign. Since publishers often don’t have insights into the performance of advertisers’ campaigns, the best approach is to optimize for metrics that publishers can control which encourage buyer KPIs are met (such as viewability).

As the new quarter begins, you may have noticed a drop in your CPMs. Seasonality (looking at how you—and the ad industry—are affected by the time of the year) impacts advertiser spend and thus, CPMs. While some verticals are impacted more than others, it’s important to understand how seasonality affects CPMs as they play a key role in forecasting and predicting revenue, and benchmarking.

User experience (UX) refers to an end user’s interaction with a brand, its products, and/or its services. For publishers, good user experience means that visitors will read a whole article, enjoy it enough to share or come back for more, and view some ads along the way. Ads must be relevant to a publisher’s audience and in particular, unobtrusive. The last thing a publisher wants is for a reader to be offended or aggravated by an ad, causing them to leave.