The most used shady practices of website monetization

The online advertising industry is extremely competitive and publishers are always on the lookout for ways to increase their ad revenue. But do you know what metrics influence your earnings? Do you know how much your traffic is really worth? Are you sure your monetization partner isn’t cheating? We are about to shed light on some shady practices that might seriously affect the process of picking your monetization partner. A bit provocative? Read more and find out if you’re getting fooled!

What metrics influence publishers’ earnings?

Before we can get to the “juicy” bit about shady practices, we need to go back to basics. Firstly, publishers have to know what metrics are important to analyze their overall performance. Knowing that publishers will also have an easier time choosing the right partner to work with.

Publishers tend to use earnings as the key performance indicator (KPI) when comparing different networks. However, it is also necessary to know more about other important variables that influence publishers’ earnings such as ad impressions and eCPMs.

Impressions also known as ad views, is a term used to show how many times an ad has been displayed to the user. The total number of ad impressions depends mostly on the website’s audience size (eg. number of page views/visits) as well as the number of ad placements on the site.

Also, fill rate is a metric that indicates the ratio of the number of ads displayed divided by the number of ad requests.

Alongside these two important metrics, publishers need to think about frequency capping. With more intrusive ad formats, most publishers tend to enable frequency capping to control their negative impact on user experience while maximizing their earnings. That being said, it’s important to note that frequency capping settings need to be taken into account when comparing ad statistics against your website analytics.

Lastly, let’s talk about eCPM (sometimes called “eRPM”). It represents the publishers’ average earnings per 1000 ad impressions. The eCPM of a specific ad placement mostly depends on the chosen ad format, its placement and how users engage with the ad. To get a more thorough overview of website monetization details, read our monetization guide.

What are the most common shady practices used in website monetization?

Understanding the monetization performance is key to having a good balance between user experience and earnings. Therefore, having a good content and high number of visitors isn’t simply enough to start monetizing. It is vital to find an advertising partner who understands the importance of user experience and offers you the most efficient monetization strategy.

However, the highly competitive online advertising landscape has triggered some players to adopt shady practices in order to achieve a competitive edge. Don’t let yourself be fooled – let the evidence reveal the truth!

Networks disrespecting frequency capping agreements

As previously mentioned, advertising platforms offering intrusive ad formats are usually recommending their publishers to set rather restrictive frequency capping. That is done to find the sweet spot between performance and user experience (eg. Pop-Under limited to 1 impression per IP/day).

That being said, it is an “open secret” that in order to generate more revenue, many networks who offer such intrusive ad formats aren’t respecting the frequency capping rules that they agreed on with the publisher. Oftentimes, the network should show 1 impression per IP/day, but this capping is only respected in some countries including the country the publisher is actually located in. Meanwhile, visitors from other GEOs (i.e. the USA) are seeing 2 or more Pop ads per day instead.

In this case, the publisher benefits from this shady practice by getting paid for those extra ad impressions. However, it will hurt the site’s user experience in the long run and the publisher might lose more visitors.

There are ways to ensure that your monetization partner isn’t cheating. Use a VPN to check the behaviour of the chosen ad format in different locations (we’d recommend using a residential IP to do so).

So, there you have it! Now you have all the knowledge to spot the industry’s shady players and make sure that you’re not getting fooled by your monetization partner.

Here at Adcash, we believe in honest business principles and for the sake of transparency, we felt necessary to share those bad practices.

Are you being fooled by your advertising partner? 

Our publisher team is here to help you find out whether your earnings are being shaved and share more tips on how to be more profitable.

Let’s investigate together!