What Makes a Good Publisher

As part of our mission at Ad.net we cast a wider net for our advertisers by continuing to grow our network of unique publishers and continuing to create innovative products that increase brand engagement. Publishers are a huge part of what we do and how we do it so well. So, we thought we’d take a moment to shed some light on what it is we look for in a good publisher and offer some advice on things to consider when partnering with an advertising firm.

What do we look for when reviewing a new pub website?

Content

We like to see that content is constantly being updated. It’s important to see that there is someone behind the website. Another thing we look for is when a site has different post types. For example, if all posts are a slideshow or just images, it’s definitely concerning.

In terms of the type of content, it really doesn’t matter. A website can focus on any topic: automobiles, celebrity gossip, fashion, sports. As long as there’s a demand for that content it doesn’t matter. However, we’ve found that certain niches like mommy blogs and fashion blogs tend to generate higher CPM’s and demand. This is the case because people are more likely to convert. Visitors are usually searching for a product suggestion or review, and they are more likely to follow the visit with a purchase.

UI / UX

If we can barely find your content amidst a plethora of ads, it’s a red flag. We can tell pretty quickly if we’ve come across an arbitrage site.

Also, make sure to maintain your site and make sure load times are reasonable. Advertisers want to know they’ll have no problem with their campaigns loading quickly and properly on your site.

Another indicator of a good publisher, ANALYTICS. It’s important to see that your traffic and/or visitors stay a while and look at several different pages on your website. The number of page views and the length of time spent on each page definitely matters.

Traffic

Is your traffic real? Traffic that comes organically or from social are indicators that your traffic is real and not tier two traffic. Other things we look for include the number of backlinks, history, and is your content searchable / findable on Bing and Google.

Partners

We want to know who your other advertising partners are (if you have any) and how many you are working with. If there are lots of other companies it lessens the real estates for our ads and we, in some cases, end up competing for your traffic or visitors.

Things to keep in mind when becoming a publisher

• Page load times – The quicker your page loads, the lower your bounce rate will be which leads to happy advertisers!
• Content rich – Lots of different posts types + updated / maintained content = A+ publisher
• SEO – If you use WordPress to build your sites you might want to consider installing Yoast or a similar product. Yoast helps to optimize your content, meta descriptions, etc. and in turn this helps you rank better on Google. You can also install searchIQ which indexes all custom post types and custom fields instantly, making all your content searchable in no time.
• Traffic – Good solid traffic is what advertisers want to see, and the better your traffic is the more they will pay you.
• Good text to picture ratio – Make sure you don’t have too many pictures or too many videos. Try to keep your content balanced.

Things a publisher should consider before working with an ad network

• Ask to see their daily stats.
• Find out what their fill rate is.
• Make sure they are easy to work with and responsive.
• Get a designated rep that you can work with directly if and when you have questions.
• Ask about how and when you will receive payment.
• And lastly, for those of you who want their entire stack managed because you don’t want to have to worry about it, see if they offer something similar to Ad.net’s fully managed option.