If you’ve been blogging for any considerable length of time, you’ll know that one of the biggest challenges bloggers face is figuring out how to increase the revenue from their blogs.
One seemingly obvious method to do this might be to increase the traffic to your blog, but seasoned bloggers know that increased traffic is no guarantee of increased revenue.
In the case of bloggers who have ads as one of the monetization models on their blog, in addition to trying to increase their site traffic, a few other things they might look into doing are diversifying and/or increasing the number of ad networks that serve ads to their website and trying to increase the revenue they earn from the same amount of traffic, in other words, increasing their RPM.
If you are unfamiliar with the term, RPM stands for Revenue Per Mille or Revenue Per Thousand Impressions and it essentially means the revenue earned for every 1,000 page impressions a blog gets. This is exactly what this article is about: Resources or tactics you can employ to increase your RPM.
Before we dive into the topic, let me start by laying some basic foundational knowledge about how your RPM may or may not affect your site’s earnings.
Remember that the income a blog earns from adverts placed on it usually comes from a variety of advertising models such as Cost Per Click (CPC,) Cost Per Mille (CPM,) Cost Per Action (CPA) and a few others. All of the above income models, in addition to the amount of traffic is what goes into calculating your site’s RPM.
Now one important thing to note about the previous statement is that specific ad networks only work with specific models. So some networks will only work on a CPM basis and others only on a CPC basis. Sometimes with mixture of both, and so on.
In the case of CPC and CPA, the user’s interaction (clicks, signups or other actions) with the website is also factored into calculating the RPM of the site. In these cases, if the RPM of a site is to be improved, these user interactions also need to be improved upon.
However, traditional or standard ad formats have generally been proven to command limited user interactions, coupled with the ever increasing use of ad blockers and general user apathy towards ads, resulting in ever reducing publisher earnings.
What Are These New Non-Standard Ad Types or Formats?
There is a new generation of non-standardized ad types or formats that are slowly making their way into the industry and slowly growing in popularity among advertisers, publishers and ad networks, and in many cases, is proving to be much more effective than traditional ad types in both communicating a brand’s message, and earning more revenue for the publisher.
Some of these new ad formats, designed for various platforms, are: Skin or Wallpapers, anchors, interstitials, in-read and out-stream ad formats, rising stars, native ads and more.
I will briefly describe these ad formats and how they behave.
- Skin Ad Format: Also known as Wallpaper or “background takeover,” this ad format is less intrusive as it covers the entire background screen of the user’s device (usually desktop,) leaving the main content to remain in the fore, unobstructed.
- Interstitial Ad Format: These are full-page ads that cover the entire web page, often preventing the user from doing anything else until they engage with the ad in one way or another, either by closing the ad, usually by clicking the X button, or engaging with it in some other way.
- Rising Stars Ad Formats: These consists of a group five new formats developed by the International Advertising Bureau (IAB) in conjunction with several companies and other stakeholders. These formats all have their individual names such as: Billboard, Filmstrip, Portrait, Pushdown and Sidekick.
You can read more about these new ad formats on the IAB website.
- Native Ad Format: This format has perhaps been in existence much longer than all the others in this list. This format basically consists of paid adverts that are organically and naturally blended within an existing content, making it look as if it is part of the editorial and much less like an ad.
- Anchor Ad Format: As the name suggests, anchor ads is a mobile web ad unit that “anchors” itself (usually) at the bottom on a mobile web page, and would often sit there as the user scrolls down the page. There is usually a button to close or dismiss these ads at any time.
- In-Stream Ad Format: Exclusive to video, these are basically those commercial ads that you would typically see that play either before, during or after a video that you would watch, say on YouTube for instance. These can show up as “pre-roll” (Before the video content), “mid-roll” (In-between the video content) and/or “post-roll”
- In-Read Ad Format: Often referred to as Out-Stream advertising, this format refers to video ads which are essentially embedded within the editorial of a web page and which automatically begins to play as the user has arrived on a certain part of the page to trigger the ad.Making it much less intrusive or disruptive as In-Stream ads can sometimes be, as the user is able to quickly scroll past if they wish, without being forced to wait several seconds to continue viewing the rest of the content they want, as happens with In-Stream.
Now that we have covered the basics of this set of new non-standard ads, I will now proceed to give you tips on how you can increase your blogs RPM using these ad formats.
First of all, I should remind you that one of the reasons for the creation of these new ad formats is because of the ever increasing ineffectiveness, reduced ROI and revenue that traditional ad formats continued to experience among advertisers and publishers. Which led the industry to find new ways to effectively communicate their message while creating value for the audience.
The message you should take away from this is that these non-standard ads are great sources of new revenue. When you then combine this with the below tactics I am about to mention, your RPM is has a much higher chance of improving.
Three Advanced Tactics to Increase Your Blog’s RPM.
So what are some of the ways you can increase the RPM on your blog?
- Use AdTags Ad Network: Adtags.pro is a creative way to increase your RPM. Below is how it works:
- You take the current tag given to you by your current ad network.
- Sign into your Adtags account and paste this tag into the Adstag dashboard.
- Copy the modified, generated tag.
- Replace the old tag on your site with the new Adtags tag.
And how exactly will this increase your RPM? Basically, the original tag from your other ad network will still serve ads to your site making you money. However, 60 seconds after this original ad network’s ad has displayed, yet another ad from Adtags will be served on the same spot.We should perhaps stress the fact that the first advertiser has a whole minute for his ad to be served on the publisher website, giving his ad more than enough time to communicate its message to the reader, before Adtags Pro ads kick in.What I would recommend you do is to notify your ad network and inform them that you are using Adtags.pro. In the case of Google you would simply need to declare that you are using refresher ads within the AdSense/AdX interface.
This in effect means that you are potentially doubling your earnings from the same user if your site has high average time on page. This no doubt a clever way to increase the earning from your blog, and when you factor in what I (and all the research) previously said about the new non-standard ad formats being more user friendly, it potentially means your site’s users might be more inclined to engage with these ads on your site and consequently make you more money.It costs nothing to sign up to Adtags.Pro. If you’re interested to try it out, you can sign up here.
- Use Contextual Display Ads: As the name implies, contextual ads are ads that are either related to the theme of your website or the particular page the ad displays on. Think about it; what value is it to your site visitor if they come to your site looking for specific information which they find, but on the same page they see adverts about unrelated topics. Surely, you can expect that the chances of such a user clicking or interacting with those ads is very minimal.Ad relevancy is highly correlated with click-through rates (CTR) and ultimately how much you get paid at the end of the day.
- Split Test Your Display Ads: The benefits of split testing is known to most people in the internet marketing space, but it is safe to say that many people do not split test the ads they display on their websites.By split testing and rotating the ads you display on a certain spot, you can determine what ad network is earning you more money by serving more valuable ads to your site users.Ad Injection is a free plugin you can use to rotate these ads and determine which network makes you the most.In conclusion, the above tactics are perhaps some of the most advanced strategies you can use to increase the RPM from your blog, and more so without needing to increase the amount of traffic going to it. Of course, the smart thing to do would be to both increase the traffic to your site and use the above three tactics we have discussed.
No doubt increasing the traffic to your website is easier said than done and we know a lot of bloggers still struggle with this, which is why we have a ton of material here on MonetizePros that provides multiple tactics to increase your website traffic.
Additionally, if you are looking for more things and tactics you can employ to improve your site’s RPM and generally earn more money from your blog, feel free to read this article.