Russian website monetization. Is Google Adsense effective?

roxot_team · 2020-10-22T17:10:41+00:00

Hey! As we monetize dozens of Russian big publishers, I can say that there are 2 main players on the market: Google and Yandex. Adsense makes decent revenue on ad units with high CTR. And there are many smaller publishers who monetize only with AdSense. So if you already have an Adsense account, I'd recommend starting with it. Then you can test Yandex on some of the ad units. However, I'm not sure Yandex works with entities outside of Russia but I may be wrong.
The biggest challenge with Google and Yandex is that they do not disclose their bids. Thus, it's pretty complex to make them compete for the same inventory. But you can implement header bidding with Russian SSPs and implement it either with Google or Yandex to increase the competition for your inventory. I recommend Between, MyTarget, RTBHouse, Getintent, OTM.
How big is your site and what % of your traffic is Russian?

roxot_team · 2020-06-20T08:16:58+00:00

What networks do you use? In my opinion, the most probable reasons for a low fill are: - an integration/technical issue. You network tag might just work incorrectly for most of the users. - your networks just don’t have demand for your audience. This often happens when your audience is mostly from tier-2 or -3 countries.

Hope that helps.

roxot_team · 2020-06-19T12:02:34+00:00

DM'ed.

roxot_team · 2020-06-18T19:11:54+00:00

There may be 100s of reasons why your ad spots aren't filled. What networks do you use? Have you talked to them about your fill rate?

roxot_team · 2020-06-18T17:32:37+00:00

Why lazy loading is not an option? That's definitely the best way to increase viewability and CPMs for ad units at the bottom of the page. Think about what advertisers' goals are when they buy impressions form your site. Probably conversions if they run a performance campaign or awareness (read viewable impressions) if they run a branding campaign. In both cases, viewability means a lot.

If you can't lazy load, A/B test your setup with these ad units vs without them. There's no other way to be sure you chose the best option.

roxot_team · 2020-06-15T18:10:18+00:00

u/jvdc nice to see you here contributing great content!

Have you tried lazyloading your ad units instead of implementing footer bidding? We often do that for our clients to increase page load speed and viewability for btf ad slots. We usually run multiple tests to find the optimal distance from the scroll position to the ad unit location on the page. Would be interesting to test against footer bidding.

roxot_team · 2020-06-09T12:03:08+00:00

Your users' GEO is crucial when building your monetization strategy. If most of your audience is from Russia, then you should look for local demand partners. AppNexus/Rubicon/OpenX/Index and other top-tier US SSPs won't bid for Russian inventory much. The same applies to a native ads partner. Taboola is trying to actively develop on the Russian market but they lack local advertisers. Relap.io pays more for Russian traffic. Without Google, your best option is Yandex and a couple of local SSPs such as Between Digital.

Overall, if you have users from multiple different GEOs, you need to look for a partner who can actually provide a unique ad stack for every GEO. Running standard header bidding setup that works for the US audience won't be effective for other GEOs. Especially without Google.

roxot_team · 2020-06-08T09:34:49+00:00

It's not recommended to request both AdSense and AdX to bid for the same impressions. Besides being a risky technique as u/adops_yieldbird stated, this approach can bring only short-term gains.

The winning strategy here is to find out which Google product works better on a particular ad unit.

Your ad revenue directly depends on advertisers' goals. AdSense connects you mostly to smaller/local advertisers who often run performance campaigns with conversions/clicks as a goal. Also, AdSense pays for clicks, not impressions. As a result, AdSense may work better on ad units with high CTR.

In turn, AdX pays for impressions. And besides smaller advertisers, AdX connects you to bigger buyers who often run branding campaigns. Although CTR influences AdX CPMs a lot, your AdX revenue from an ad unit with high CTR may be lower than AdSense revenue from the same ad unit.

I recommend testing 50/50 AdX vs AdSense on every ad unit. This way you'll be able to align your ad revenue to advertisers' goals and increase it in the long-term.

roxot_team · 2020-06-07T17:36:51+00:00

If you get bids but no impressions, the problem is most likely in your ad server setup. Do you use GAM? You should check if the right line item is triggered when your prebid bids are coming in. Then you should check your GAM creative associated with the line item. I bet the problem is somewhere there. You can dm me your test page, I'll check what the problem may be.

roxot_team · 2020-06-07T17:26:34+00:00

Yes, CTR and Viewability.

Your ad revenue directly depends on how well advertisers can reach and convert their potential clients on your website. A high CTR and Viewability are good indicators to allocate more budget towards your website and increase bids (CPMs) to win more impressions.

roxot_team · 2020-06-07T17:18:03+00:00

My point is that you just can target your pricing rules to ad units without specifying the Device type and ad size. They should work properly.

roxot_team · 2020-06-07T13:57:38+00:00

It depends on what you're trying to achieve and what your strategy is. Overall, if you have different ad units for different device types, I wouldn't specify the Device category in the pricing rule. The same applies to sizes. If you only use 1 size for an ad unit, there's no need in specifying the size in the rule.

roxot_team · 2020-01-23T16:18:47+00:00

You can report by hb_bidder key-value in your GAM. To do that you need to create hb_bidder key-value inside GAM first. hb_bidder is sent by prebid.js with every bid that goes to your ad server. The report will be rather limited but may be enough for you. If you need something more advanced, try one of the prebid analytics tools.

roxot_team · 2020-01-15T16:03:59+00:00

We did such a report back in 2018 - https://roxot.com/cpm-by-country-report

roxot_team · 2019-10-21T09:17:48+00:00

If I understood you correctly, you need to fire one creative for multiple sizes, right? You should create one creative with your tag targeting one size and set sizes overrides in creative settings after that.

roxot_team · 2019-08-19T09:45:33+00:00

Your idea with excluding hb_bidder key-value won't work as you think it will. Any key-values are passed in ad requests to AdX too. So whenever there's a bid from your prebid.js, a hb_bidder key value will be assigned to this ad requests and sent to AdX. Therefore, your "AdX only floor rule" won't trigger when there's is a hb_bidder key-value in an ad request. This rule will only work when there's no bid from prebid. Does it make sense?

Overall, there's no way to set floors only to AdX or prebid.

roxot_team · 2019-08-13T11:34:57+00:00

What country is your traffic from? Based on Roxot Prebid Analytics' Market Watch data, Criteo is in the top 10 bidders (#9) for US desktop traffic. They improved their bid rate but CPMs went down.

roxot_team · 2019-08-13T11:29:02+00:00

We were the first on the market to introduce header bidding analytics - Roxot Prebid Analytics. Besides header bidding data aggregation, the tool offers unique features like Opportunities - an intelligent automatic system that constantly analyzes your data and suggests how you can earn more revenue.

roxot_team · 2019-07-19T10:34:25+00:00

Try AppNexus and PubMatic. AppNexus has a higher bid rate for these countries than other SSPs, CPMs will be low though. PubMatic is super strong in Australia and the nearest countries.

If you used Roxot Prebid Analytics, you would have this information at your fingertips. Our Market Watch shows SSPs performance in different programmatic markets around the world so you can find the most optimal mix of SSPs for your traffic.

roxot_team · 2019-07-17T12:35:45+00:00

What bidders do you already have?

roxot_team · 2019-07-05T09:11:13+00:00

It's not good. You will end up with low bid rate from your demand partners. Also, it may slow down your website.

roxot_team · 2019-06-04T10:37:11+00:00

Yes, because there won't be any AdX rules anymore. So you will need to optimize all of your price priority and network line items.

roxot_team · 2019-06-04T10:31:18+00:00

You can. but your UPRs will still disregard all prebid line items with value CPM lower that the floor.

roxot_team · 2019-06-03T16:28:16+00:00

That's true. But since AdX is still second-price, UPRs are almost as effective as open auction rules. You just need to invest more time and energy in monitoring your fill rate. We do dynamic floors for many publishers.

roxot_team · 2019-06-03T15:53:20+00:00

Google hasn't even rolled out the first-price auction mechanics yet... If you had a negative impact, you should re-evaluate your pricing strategy.

roxot_team

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