The Reasons for Drop in RPM or CTR :
A lot of publishers face sudden drops in their earnings, CTR and RPM. Why? Drops can be caused by anything from irrelevant ads being displayed, invalid clicks or even a drop in the cost-per-click for a particular keyword. Determining the cause must be done on an account-by-account or site-by-site basis.
RPM (page revenue per thousand pageviews) allows users to estimate earnings based on the number of page views received. This metric is not always 100% accurate because it can change drastically from one day to the next due to advertiser expenditures.
If the price of a keyword drops and your highest paying ad displays were based on that keyword, your earnings and RPM will drop.
A drop in traffic would be the first signals to evaluate. If there has been a significant drop in traffic, earnings will drop as well, but not necessarily the RPM. In the case of an RPM change, ask yourself the following questions:
Are site traffic levels the same?
Is a particular page receiving less traffic?
With both CTR and RPM, the content of specific pages will cause different ads to be displayed and can affect your earnings.
Let’s say you have two pages on your website. One particular page receives a high amount of traffic and typically displays higher-paying ads. The other receives only a small amount of traffic, and the ads are typically low-paying. If the page with the higher-paying ads suddenly sees a decline in traffic while the page with the lower-paying ads sees an increase, your earnings will suffer as a result. Despite this, your traffic will still remain the same. You can measure your page level earnings by integrating AdSense with Analytics.
11 Ways to Increase Page RPM :
• Focus on your content quality....
• Suggest relevant content to maintain user engagement....
• Increase site speed and fix technical issues....
• Increase ad viewability....
• Optimize your ad formats and sizes....
• Diversify your ad networks....
• Use header bidding....
• Implement ad refresh.
• Make sure the ads are relevant to your audience
• Deliver a great user experience for your readers
• Optimize traffic for quality
1. Focus on your content quality :
It may be a cliché at this point, but focusing on your content quality is the foundation that will allow you to command a higher page RPM. Having strong content that your audience cares about has a waterfall effect on all the other metrics and optimisations. True, having great content is not a guarantee for success. We all know great publications with high-quality content on their niches that disappeared.
2. Suggest relevant content to maintain user engagement :
Content recommendation engines are designed to provide navigational pathways to related content to keep users engaged and increase their time on page and throughout the site. Increasing the number of page views will drive up your page RPM, as it increases the chance that the user will end up clicking on an ad.
3. Increase site speed and fix technical issues :
Increasing your site and ads’ loading speed is a key factor for improving user experience and ad viewability. But you should also pay attention to any other technical issue which may hurt your performance, like mobile rendering issues or broken links. These technical issues have a gradual, accumulating negative effect on your SEO efforts, which will impact your page RPM as well.
4. Increase ad viewability :
How effective is an ad that is not seen by the user? Not very effective. Increasingly, advertisers and publishers are using this metric to evaluate ad campaigns. There’s a growing trend among advertisers to pay only for their viewable impressions. According to eMarketer, ad viewability on a desktop is around 50%. This means that almost half of the advertising investment goes to ads that are never seen by anyone. For publishers, this means that if the industry would switch overnight to pay only for viewable impressions, they would lose an important part of their revenue. So, it’s in everyone’s interest then to take measures to increase ad viewability.
According to our research, there’s a strong correlation between ad viewability and CPM, which means that increasing viewability will directly impact your page RPM. Reducing ad latency (increasing ad loading speed) is one factor that can impact ad viewability. Improving your ad layout and placement can also help you increase the viewability of your advertisements.
5. Optimize your ad formats and sizes :
There are a variety of ad formats you can accept on your site: text, display, video, rich media or expandable ads are some of the options you have. Some ad formats command higher prices per click and impression. That doesn’t mean that switching all your ad inventory to video ads will allow you to increase your page RPM. You’d need to experiment and find the optimal combination of formats that can allow you to maximize your ad revenue.
There is also a variety of ad sizes which are defined and standardized by industry bodies like the IAB. The Interactive Advertising Bureau released in 2017 guidelines which are based on image proportions rather than fixed sizes. Some ad sizes are used more frequently by advertisers, which results in a higher competition. Implementing these ads would drive the CPC of your ads up, which would result in higher page RPM. Some ad sizes are also more effective and have higher CPCs than others. You should conduct your own experiments to find out what ad size works best for you, but in general, wider advertising sizes tend to have higher CPC.
6. Diversify your ad networks :
Fill rate is an online advertising metric that defines how many ad placements a publisher can fill with advertisements. You should aim to have a high fill rate to maximize your revenue potential. Reaching 100% fill rate is impossible due to external factors like network issues or a visitor closing the site before the ad had time to load. One strategy to increase your fill rate is to work with an ad server that allows you to diversify your ad providers. You could serve first your own direct campaigns and then fill the rest of the ad placements with several ad networks. Doing this will allow you to serve the most profitable advertisement in each case, and also maximize your fill rate by having several options from where to serve an ad.
7. Use header bidding :
Header bidding is a programmatic advertising technique that allows you to offer your ad space to multiple ad networks, which then bid for the opportunity to place an ad in your content. Allowing ad exchanges to compete for advertisement placements is an effective way to maximise your advertising revenue. Instead of selling your inventory to the biggest ad exchanges, which was traditionally done using the waterfall model of ad selling, you sell your space to the highest bidding exchange. Switching to header bidding from waterfall will also reduce ad loading times, increasing ad viewability and effectiveness.
8. Implement ad refresh :
With ad refresh, you can serve multiple ads on the same advertising placement to the same user. After a condition is met, which can be time on page, an action performed by the visitor, or any other event, the current ad is refreshed and replaced with another different ad. You should only refresh the ad units which the user is currently viewing. Even though CPM for those impressions will be lower than for the first ad served, you will increase your page RPM.
9. Make sure the ads are relevant to your audience :
Setting up the correct targeting for your users is a critical step to increase your page RPM. Showing relevant ads to your audience increases their effectiveness as they’re much more likely to click on an ad. You can set up different targets for different sections or topics of your website to increase the relevancy of your ads.
10. Deliver a great user experience for your readers :
Your audience didn’t come to your site to be bombarded by ads and notifications. They came to access and consume the content you make. It’s difficult to quantify and measure, but great user experience will make your audience more engaged and loyal. Bounce rate and repeated visits are two metrics you can monitor to gauge improvements in user experience. Repeated visitors will increase your page RPM over time. It’s a more sustainable approach than suffocating your audience with ads or implementing obtrusive ad formats that interrupt the user on their task.
11. Optimize traffic for quality :
Your traffic acquisition efforts should aim to increase traffic quality and not just quantity. Organic users are usually high-quality, as the reason they visit your site is that they found your content relevant to their search query. But depending on the content, you may see a different picture on your site. The best approach would be to build a profile of your referral sources and see which traffic source brings the most engaged users. You can use that profile to focus your traffic acquisition efforts on high-quality traffic sources. A highly engaged audience will be more attractive to advertisers, which will increase their bids for ads on your sites, increasing your page RPM.
