4 Factors to Determine the Value of your Ad Inventory

What is your ad inventory worth

Important factors to estimate the value of your ad inventory

If you are a website owner, you know the revenue potential a site can have with healthy traffic and relevant, engaging and fresh content. It is sometimes hard to understand just how much your web traffic is worth. Here are 4 ways to determine the value of your ad inventory.

1. Display Inventory – Digital Ad Location

Ad Networks and media buyers greatly value transparency when buying a display placement on a website. Certain locations have varying click through rates, CPM bids and conversions based upon where they physically appear on a web page. Generally above the fold inventory garners higher performance and hit’s KPI’s easier for advertisers who buy ATF inventory. Inventory can usually be first split into two segments: Above the Fold and below the FoldThe ad location should always be clearly visible and view-able to user with no content obstructing the ad itself.

2. Rich Media Units

More content publishers are beginning to understand how valuable their traffic really is with the competitive rates programmatic advertising provides and have adopted a wide array of non-traditional display units. Rich media slider units move on to a user’s screen and grab their attention with some sort of call action such as a hide button or other form of engagement. There are many variations of the slider unit and other high performing rich media units which can be found on the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Website. These units are sometimes considered intrusive which allows the publisher to charge premium rates such as over $5CPM’s to allow an ad network to implement on their sites. Pop up and pop under advertisements also generate very high CPM’s but receive complaints from users as they are intrusive and unwanted at times.

Value of dd inventory iab

Courtesy of the Interactive Advertising Bureau

3. Geographic Location of the User

In the past US traffic was widely regarded as the only valuable source of supply for advertisers. In today’s digital advertising landscape there are countless advertisers who have offerings for all sources of traffic by utilizing programmatic exchanges and direct CPA offers. English speaking and eastern European countries generally generate similar CPM’s to US traffic such as the United Kingdom, Canada, Sweden and the Netherlands. Programmatic advertising gives publishers the ability to have demand for every country and user no matter how obscure the location.

value of ad inventory geos

4. Historical Performance of Ad Placement

If you decide to sell your inventory directly to an ad network it is imperative to understand what performance you have seen historically with your own demand sources and understand the trends and factors that affect performance. If you have a placement that performs at $1.00 CPM for all US traffic that is seen by that placement you should only sell for a CPM that will definitely create value and not take up too much time managing the buy, such as $1.25 in this case. The industry standard discrepancy between ad servers is around 10% so you should have a discrepancy clause in the IO that nets you agreed upon eCPM.

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