Using one ad format, however attractive or non-intrusive, leads to certain visitors simply never reacting to your ads no matter where they are placed. Whether because they have grown accustomed to ignoring them due to their presence in the site’s design or because the ad’s appearance fails to catch their attention as something desirable or different, you are losing out on potential revenue.
The psychology of banner blindness
Users and readers are not consciously choosing to ignore your ads. In fact, their brains have been conditioned to disregard the majority of the stimuli around them in the same way that they have been conditioned to mostly ignore traditional media. A person in one of your target demographics probably encounters several thousand different ads per day, so they have learned to not engage with the vast majority of them, including most billboards and TV ads.
However, it is now your responsibility to overcome this hurdle if you want your ads to be effective.
One way to do that is to use something like in-page videos that cannot be scrolled past, requiring the user to interact with the ad. Another is to use the same technique as with endlessly scrolling article pages that place the ad at the bottom so that the user has no choice but to see it before continuing. Simply putting the ad in the page is no longer enough if the user is going to actively move past it without interacting.
The issue with creative fatigue
However, putting the ad in the page is not enough either if you are using the same exact creative for everyone that views it.
This is the point at which click-through rates stop being useful as a metric. The first time the user interacts with your ad, you have their attention, so there is value in using the same creative again, but after the third time, engagement usually drops off significantly.
That is not because the message in your creative changed, but rather because the user no longer pays attention to your ads at all. The user should not be shown the same ad multiple times throughout the same browsing session, especially within a few minutes of each other, because that leads to the user ignoring the ads entirely. The same can happen on subsequent visits, where the user engages with an ad for the first time on the first day they view your content and then sees it again in the following days with no reaction.
This is the main driving force behind automated creative rotation: every time the user views an ad, it should be rotated out to display something new. With some advertising platforms, your own publisher-side ad serving logic can be used to rotate creatives with similar characteristics to the one that the user has seen previously. On a more granular level, you should decide that a particular creative is seen only once every three impressions within the same session as a way of maintaining variety while advertising.
A revenue-focused analysis of single and multiple formats
Having only one or two standard ad formats is actually detrimental to your ability to monetize in addition to worsening the user experience. From the publisher perspective, if your ad zones are only accepting one specific type of ad, namely 728×90, then you are limiting the number of advertisers interested in using your platform as well. Native advertising and video formats would be unable to compete because they do not have a place in a 728×90 ad zone.
A greater number of viable advertisers can lead to higher CPMs, so working with multiple ad formats increases competition for each individual slot and drives up the rates you can charge, and therefore your revenue. Working with an ad network with multi-format ads will give you the best possible pool of advertisers to choose from while letting you compete for each impression you receive.
When you work only with a handful of standard formats, such as leaderboards and rectangles, you are competing with everyone else for those as well, thereby reducing your potential revenue. If you diversify your formats, you open a window to a new pool of demand that should increase the value of your impressions in most cases.
A balanced approach to aggressive formats and UX
Not all of these extra ad formats are equal, with some severely impacting the user experience when implemented at scale. While popunder ads and interstitials may be highly lucrative, a sudden increase in their use may lead to an increase in the bounce rates as well, which is counterproductive to the overall pageviews and impressions you can serve over time.
Your aggressive formats should be high-touch, interstitials being placed only when a user has reached a natural stopping point in your content consumption and popunders capped to a single use per session. They capture the attention of the user by virtue of being present and intrusive, but their overall impact is reduced when they are used constantly. On the other hand, base formats should be less intrusive and designed around contributing more to the overall inventory, pushing native notifications or content recommendation widgets that only rarely appear, but do not hurt the experience when they do.
Generally speaking, a balance between highly intrusive, low-volume formats and less intrusive, high-volume formats is the most effective way to maximize impressions and revenue. It has to be implemented carefully, but the long-term gains outweigh the risks of overusing aggressive formats and losing potential users with an uninviting experience. A publisher that leans exclusively into one strategy usually suffers from the drawbacks of its approach, especially when considering yields. The value of one pageview from lower-value users is much lower compared to the potential revenue from a single impression viewed by a high-paying advertiser.
The mechanics of responsive ad tag format selection
Some advanced advertising technologies can take advantage of responsive tags that allow you to change the ad format dynamically depending on the user and the device that they are using to consume your content. In particular, it is crucial to consider the screen resolution in order to serve the most relevant content to each user without hurting the user experience.
A 1440px screen on a desktop is not going to have the same requirements as a 375px screen on a mobile device in terms of what can be shown within the viewport. On the desktop, you can show a leaderboard or a large display ad, while the mobile user will have to be served either a sticky footer or an interstitial to fill the screen. Responsive logic can switch the ad unit depending on the resolution, replacing a leaderboard with the native push notification on mobile where the latter is available and replacing interstitials with other formats on the desktop for performance reasons.
A multi-format ad network can both automate the process of determining what device the user is using and what resolution it has, and optimize which ads to show for each viewport size. A multi-format advertising network has the tools to match the format, rotate creatives, and implement the responsive logic on the network side, which removes the responsibility from the publisher’s end.
eCPM considerations on a multi-format setup
One of the largest mistakes that you can make when operating a multi-format setup is trying to analyze the performance of different ad formats in terms of CTR. While CTR is a good metric in general when analyzing any particular ad, it is misleading when comparing performance across formats.
Native advertising usually delivers much higher CTRs than display banners, and interstitials are much lower compared to native ads. However, a single interstitial impression can provide much higher revenues for the publisher compared to a CTR-driven display ad, especially if the interstitial is serving video inventory that is several times more expensive than a standard display click.
The eCPM, or effective cost per mile, is actually the right metric to use for comparing the performance of different formats, as it takes both the CTR and the overall value of the impressions into account. It is, in effect, a weighted average of impressions, where higher eCPMs are attributed to formats which deliver more value per impression. A 0.1% CTR with a $12 CPM is significantly more desirable than a 0.4% CTR with a $2 CPM due to the increased value per impression.
Publishers that configure the reports for a multi-format setup to analyze revenues in terms of eCPM rather than raw CTR will be much more likely to make revenue-maximizing decisions, such as not eliminating low-CTR-high-revenue formats simply due to their inferior performance on the surface.
How multi-format support fills impressions
The fill rate is determined by how many ad requests actually result in impressions. If you have limited options, then potential advertisers that cannot meet your format requirements will be unable to fill your inventory. An inventory slot that cannot be filled only has the potential advertisers that have the ability to fulfill the request at a given moment in time, so in the off-peak hours, you may find yourself unable to fill even a single impression if no one is interested in your inventory at that time.
A multi-format advertising setup has the ability to fill impressions with demand from multiple sources rather than just one. If an inventory slot can be filled by native, display, and video ads, then there are three distinct demand sources rather than just one in the case of a single-format setup. Having multiple avenues for filling the slot reduces the likelihood of a low fill rate since there is always someone willing to fill the impression, and it reduces the likelihood of wasting impressions due to them being irrelevant to the current user.
The IAB has conducted several studies, and they have found that multi-format ads lead to significantly higher brand lift than single-format campaigns, with lifts being 50% higher on average.
Creating an actionable structure for your ad monetization strategy
While transitioning from a single-format to a multi-format inventory setup will require you to make a number of changes, it is crucial to keep in mind that the longer you wait to make them, the more revenue you lose. A good way to start is to look over your existing ad inventory and see which placements are using single-format ads and can be replaced with responsive or multi-format tags with minimal disruption to design and overall layout.
The next step is to introduce impressions capping and rotation rules so that the same creative is not shown to every visitor. This will ensure that the user gets a different ad every time they come to your website rather than seeing the same one, which reduces creative fatigue and encourages engagement. It will also help you reduce the overall number of impressions wasted on the same user within a single session or day.
The publishers with the highest CPMs across their inventory usually do not have the largest number of ads, but rather the most competition per impression, which comes from a combination of supporting multiple ad formats and rotating creatives while using more relevant metrics to measure performance.
