What are Advertisers Looking for in Q4?

What are Advertisers Looking for in Q4?

Guest Post By Snack Media

We are now two weeks into Q4, CPMs are ramping up and set to continue doing so for therest of the quarter. Seasonality is important in the ad market, it’s just a fact! With Amazon Prime Day complete, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas all follow in quick succession during this period which guarantees increased ad spend and therefore greater ad revenue for publishers if you play your cards right.

Top 5 Factors That Influence Advertisers and their Decision to Spend

1. High Quality Content

First and foremost, all publishers should know that content is king! If publishers are producing clickbait articles that do not fully engage their users, you can bet that advertisers are going to pick up on this. According to Sweor (2020) 38% of users will not return to a website if they feel the content quality is poor. Advertisers always look for evidence that a website provides high quality content for their audience and will be more likely to spend as a result.

SNACK MEDIA’S SOLUTION: As content creators and owners of over 200 sites ourselves, we can offer what very few other ad partners can – first-hand editorial consultancy straight from our editorial team. With editorial resources at hand and tools to measure content’s commercial worth we can help elevate your quality of content as well as its commercial value.

2. User Engagement

Advertisers and marketers can obtain information about a site’s performance metrics via first-, second- and third-party data. On websites, user engagement levels can be measured in the form of: time of site/page, bounce rate, exit pages, pages per session, page/scroll depth, new vs. returning visitors, conversion rate, abandonment rate and the list goes on (SEJ, 2019). This extensive list highlights just how deeply involved publishers are in dissecting whether ad spend on a site is going to see a positive return on investment. Quite simply, the more time highly engaged users spend on site, the more likely they are to engage with the ads placed alongside its content.

SNACK MEDIA’S SOLUTION: We have developed our own suite of Fan Engagement Tools that are completely free of charge for all partners. By pairing these tools with our experts’ best practise, we aim to help all our publishing partners exceed the industry standard of 2+ minutes when it comes to session duration.

3. Ad Viewability

We never stop banging on about this one because it is one of the most important metrics for advertisers these days! Ads that are in more viewable positions and are seen for longer will naturally see more competition from advertisers and higher CPMs as a result. Having ads in viewable positions and an average viewability of 60- 70% (The Drum, 2019) will ensure more premium advertisers engage with the site which will result in even more impressive CPMs.

SNACK MEDIA’S SOLUTION: We employ a range of tactics to improve viewability scores, while balancing this with revenue generation. This includes strategically lazy-loading and refreshing units as well as adding sticky functions to some bespoke and standard display units to keep them in view. In addition to this all partners are assigned their own account manager and receive regular optimisation advice from the Ad Ops team especially when it comes to ad viewability!

4. Site Speed & Responsiveness

The introduction of Google’s Core Web Vitals which measure site speed and responsiveness has emphasised the need for publishers to be aware of the implications of having a slow site on overall ad revenue as well as user experience and SEO ranking. Advertisers are aware that if a site is slow users are more likely to click off it before seeing their ad load, which essentially means money down the drain for marketers and advertisers alike.

5. Volume and Quality of Traffic

Perhaps the most obvious factor of all – the more traffic a site has, the more people are going to see an ad. So long as the traffic is not fraudulent, advertisers will be looking for sites with consistently strong traffic and demographics to match the audience they are looking to reach.