How a US news publisher raised native ad revenue by 43%
This data-driven, US-based news publisher uses content recommendation advertising to raise revenue through three high-traffic websites. They drive visitors via newsletters sent to their engaged user base. Before integrating WhizzCo’s platform in January 2020, the publisher worked exclusively with one content recommendation vendor.
Goals
The publisher was looking to significantly grow their content recommendation revenue across their domains and wanted access to all data related to their native advertising – something that was out of their reach with their existing vendor. Additionally, since they had a loyal but recurring user base, they wanted to diversify their native ad inventory to prevent ad fatigue.
Optimization strategy
Vendor-agnostic setup
The publisher selected their existing native vendor on the WhizzCo platform and WhizzCo activated 6 additional vendors from the connected vendor list. This enabled a unique, performance-based competition for each of the publisher’s native placements.
After 18 months of working with WhizzCo, data showed that the publisher’s original native vendor only delivered the highest eCPM for 25% of impressions. The remaining 75% of impressions were served by the 6 new vendors and saw higher eCPMs. This is just one way that WhizzCo’s optimization algorithm significantly grew the publisher’s revenue.
The end of ad fatigue
Since a large percentage of the three domains’ visitors are recurring, the publisher wanted to make sure that individual users don’t see the same content recommendations over and over again. With a diverse group of vendors in place, the publisher’s ad placements come from a larger pool of advertisers, ensuring variety and continued engagement.
Native video – click-free earnings
In March 2021, to overcome a seasonal decline in traffic volume, the publisher integrated a video placement from WhizzCo to the site. WhizzCo activated several video-specific vendors to compete for the placement and was able to increase revenue by an additional 27% within the first month.
Bottom line
After a year and a half of working with WhizzCo’s vendor-agnostic platform, the publisher saw a 43% increase in their content recommendation revenue. Thanks to the full access to their native placement analytics they are now able to make smarter data-driven decisions.