HOW TO ELEVATE YOUR BUSINESS DURING THIS GLOBAL PANDEMIC

Businesses are crashing. People are losing jobs. By the time this is all over, this will be the largest economic hit since the great depression. No industry is escaping, not even the digital publishing space. With business now moving in a direction which decreases human interaction, it seems that a catastrophe could have been avoided. In fact, some optimists speculated that web-based businesses could flourish due to the coronavirus, with people spending more time online in quarantine than ever before. Some businesses are benefitting, with giants like Amazon capitalizing on non-essential stores closing, but what about advertising and the publishers who rely on marketers budgets?

According to Ezoic’s Ad Revenue Index (https://adrevenueindex.ezoic.com/), the value of ads has consistently decreased since the beginning of March, which is when the pandemic started to really make a dent on the US economy. This can be attributed to a variety of reasons including a decrease in general recreational consumerism, and certain large industries such as events and travel withdrawing their ads altogether, ultimately resulting in a less competitive bidding environment.

So what now? Any self-respecting business owner would be spending this time trying to stay in the green while waiting for the storm to pass and it certainly will. Fortunately, in online advertising there are services in place that can help mitigate damage and even potentially increase profit. Header bidding/wrapper/analytics and ad operations services such as Adapex and Sortable are more relevant than ever. For those who do not know, header bidding is an automated system consolidating different programmatic demand partners allowing them to bid on inventory simultaneously, resulting in more yield for the publisher. Combined with real-time reporting and robust analytics, they are tools that are essential to a publishers monetization strategy especially during the choppy waters of today’s environment.

Header bidding services are generally considered to be the most sophisticated and modern form of monetizing a publishers ad inventory in today’s online marketplace.  Combined with these companies’ expertise in ad operations, there are a number of benefits to those who make use of their services:

1.    A reduction in costs.

These companies generally work through a revenue share model. They are highly incentivized to ensure that your business is generating as much money as possible. They are often well-connected and have their finger on the pulse of the industry. They are staying up-to-date and optimizing in this ever-changing field so you don’t have to. An organization dedicated to this practice may result in more bang-for-your-buck than hiring an in-house staffer.

2.    Save time by outsourcing

So let’s say you don’t hire a personal Ad Operations expert, and you are a jack-of-all-trades. How much time do you spend on your advertising operations? Is it 1 hour per week? 5? Maybe 10? Depending on how you answer this question, you are either spending too little or too much time on this. If you are doing this yourself, are you certain you’re doing it according to best practices and squeezing out every last dollar from your inventory? How do you know? Perhaps your time is better spent on other elements of your business, such as managing your content, traffic acquisition strategy or finding new opportunities and retaining new clients instead of focusing on existing operational tasks. Surely, you’re smart enough to fix a pipe in your house by watching a YouTube video. But if you don’t do it every day, this will take you exponentially longer than hiring a plumber. Leave Ad Operations to the pros.

3.    Improved reporting/analytics

Knowledge is power. It goes without saying that reporting is critical to your performance. Quality reporting can give you insight about what demographics to target, most effective ad placements and using that data to determine what content is monetizing best and at what times. Without exaggeration, capitalizing on your analytics can make or break your business, and without good reporting especially real time reporting, you are operating blind.

4.    More revenue

With header bidding, it’s not just a matter of how many demand partners are competing for your inventory, but also the quality of these partners. Often, these header bidding companies are in existing relationships with premium networks who are exclusive in who they do business with. It is an understatement to suggest that it is difficult to have a direct deal with them, as your site needs to meet certain stringent thresholds relating to niche, volume of traffic, and other specific metrics. In some cases, it is impossible to work with them directly.  In short, working with header bidding companies guarantees that higher quality ad units will appear on your site.

5.    Premium service

The added benefit is that you are often assigned a dedicated account manager who is an expert in ad operations. S/he has a strong familiarity with successful layouts and other techniques that have worked for other websites. By taking their advice, you would be pulling from their experience that has been obtained by working with 10s or even 100s of other websites of all sizes, many of them similar to your own. It would be a mistake to assume that someone with this kind of relevant and current expertise would not bring ongoing value to your operation.

Overall, there are a lot of benefits to working with these sorts of companies, and they are often confident enough in the services they provide that they do not demand daunting contracts. If your business is taking a hit by Covid-19, then it’s time to explore some changes that can help elevate your operation. It’s as good a time as any, CPMs are low and we’re just exiting Q1. It’s an ideal time to experiment.

They are easy to implement.  Based on my research, the top companies in this space are as follows:

1.    Adapex.io (Selected #1 for overall customer service, premium network relationships, and sophisticated reporting)

2.    Freestar.com

3.    Ezoic.com

Good luck, and stay safe.