When monetizing a website using an advertising network, understanding the fill rate is very important to find out your rate of return. Feeling a little bit lost in the language of digital advertising? Let’s begin with some basic explanations.
Fill rate is the percentage of ads served based on the total number of page impressions. For example, if you receive 1,000-page impressions where an ad-unit has been placed, and a total of 800 adverts were served per 1,000 impressions, your fill rate would be 80%: Ads severed / total number of ad opportunities = fill rate.
A high fill rate normally increases a website’s CPM and earning potential. As a European publisher, you should try hard to get the highest fill rate possible. But there’s something not many people tell publishers: It’s almost impossible to preserve a 100% fill rate, even if you do everything right.
Websites waiting time, visitors leaving before the ad has had time to land, or network errors between you and the ad network can result in ads not being provided.
There are a number of things that can affect a website’s fill rate, some of which you can control while others are out of reach.
Page load time
Users don’t like to wait, so every second count. Principally in the case of ad impressions, the representation of time is one of the most crucial components that can make you lose impressions, therefore revenue.
But load time is something you can decide. It’s really important to look up your website and the people working with you who should be able to help you achieve a load time which is convenient for you.
Interpreting how the demand and supply pattern works, you might see that there are moments when you are “helpless” in satisfying sufficient demand to fill your ad spots.
Jump on to header bidding
This is exactly why publishers are quitting old school techniques and moving to header bidding.
The thing is, these old methods can’t assure you of improving your CPM, are less automated, and extend your load time.
Location based targeting = Geo-targeting
Another thing you could do in order to improve your fill rate is targeting users not just by their interests, but also their geography. If you have no idea how to do this yet, you can use Analytics or any other tracking tool.
All you have to do is discover the regions that bring the maximum traffic to your website. Having targeted countries or regions is going to get you more traffic, hence increasing your ad calls and leading to more ad impressions
Change ad sizes when needed
Change is ceaseless. One suggestion we can give you is to have the flexibility of different ad sizes in case your primary sized ad slot isn’t in demand. A backup size will always help you. The advantage of flexible ad sizes is they let you easily satisfy the demand and achieve a better ad fill rate quicker.
Handle ad blocking
Ad blockers are the worst ones. Why? You follow all rules, carry out all good practices, but yet you get blocked instead. And this is something you can’t even manage.
Although with solutions like ad-block tools, Now, it is possible to rescue some impressions and revenue while not interfering with the users’ experience on your site.
But one of the best methods to impulse and maximize your fill rate is to use a well known and respected ad network that has great prestige and a vast selection of publishers. MediaFem, for example, is an advertising platform for publishers of websites and blogs, which allows publishers to generate revenue by offering advertising space between their content to place ads. For every impression or click that is made on these ads, the publisher receives a portion of the money paid by the advertiser.
You just have to put the ad code that MediaFem gives you somewhere in your blog and wait for any of the visitors to click on it. Best of all, MediaFem is smart and knows how to interpret the content of your blog, so the ad you put is related to what you write.
In this way, ads are integrated naturally and you get clicks much more easily while your visitors thank you for having made that recommendation.
In addition to all these recommendations, you can also focus on implementing increasing the reach of your website, the viewable positions of the ad slots, and avoiding pop-ups that may confuse the user. So, what are you waiting for to start increasing your fill rate and earning more revenue? Take the first step now! You can sign up to MediaFem here.
Also published on Medium.
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