This year is very tough for publishers due to this Covid-19 pandemic. The economic impact of Covid-19 is getting serious day by day. Publishers are facing a new paradox — Increasing traffic and decreasing revenue. Generally, whenever there is a rise in traffic revenue tends to proportionally rise as well. But it’s different at this time.
With every news site and local outlet covering information about pandemic, there is a surge in traffic. Both the number of the weekly page views and published articles have been constantly rising over the last few weeks.
On the other side advertisers and brands are pulling in ad budgets. Businesses have started cutting costs from advertising and marketing. Publishers should try to figure out ways to minimize impact of Covid-19 on their bottom line. Here are the strategies that will help you to do so.
Demand:
It is important for a publisher to diversify their demand stack. The more demand partners bidding on your ads, the more cpm and revenue you get. Having various demand partners allows you to display different ads and different types of ad formats on your sites. There is a vast range of cpms between formats, a banner ad could have a $1.00 cpm, while video ad could be over $10.00 cpm so choosing between formats can have an impact on your bottom line.
Ad Refresh:
The strategy which refreshes ads within each ad slot is ad refresh. This can exponentially increase a publisher’s overall ad inventory. That means you can produce more revenue per session. Ad refresh is especially beneficial for the sites with users that spend a longer time on pages.
Ad Formats:
It’s important that you leverage a variety of ad formats, as the digital advertising is moving beyond the simple static display, and formats are constantly changing.
Invest in Paid Media:
You can leverage paid ad spend towards search and social media platforms to recognize and target new audiences that will find your content valuable.
Consider allocating at least portion of your marketing budget to paid search after identifying your top working content pieces. You can then promote your work across social media to identify new segments. By gaining new audiences you can increase your monthly page views and you’ll be able to diversify your revenue stream and stem any decrease in overall return on investment.
Keyword block lists by Advertisers:
Advertisers have started to add Covid-19 related words to their keyword blocking lists for safety of their brand. If Covid-19 does not fit into your content, do not publish content related to it.
If you have any questions on how to mitigate the effects of Covid-19 on your ad revenue? Get in touch with us.