How to Optimize Your Website's Ad Revenue with Paul Bannister and Courtney Kahn from AdThrive

One of the follow up questions that I have on that is around the balance between usability and ad optimization and knowing that the best performing ads probably maybe not, but it seems like the best performing ads are also going to be the ads that are most visible, which means they're taking up the most screen real estate. Maybe it's in a place where somebody's spending a lot of time preparing a recipe. So how do you advise people when they are struggling to make decisions around that balance? Because you could go on one extreme, the most usable site from an advertising perspective has no ads on it and you're not making any money, then that's not gonna work. And on the other extreme, and a site could become so inundated with ads that it makes for a poor user experience and then those people won't come back, which also isn't optimizing your revenue. So do either of you have thoughts on how publishers can find their like advertising Zen in regards to optimization for user experience and revenue?

I really think what you said about your audience and even thinking about what you and Lindsey do for Pinch of Yum in terms of like serving your readers on social media and on the blog and you know, in lots of different places, getting their insight is so important. And I don't think enough publishers spend time figuring that out. I think a lot of publishers have created content from a passion place and haven't necessarily evolved to think about who's coming to the site and how they can adapt the content for them. So I think that is really an important piece of it is learning what your, your readers care about and what is going to bug them about your ad experience or not bug them. And I would say, you know, with ads there are certainly lots of people who don't, don't love them initially, but getting feedback from a lot of people and not just letting like one or two people be the decision makers for what happens on your site, I think is really.

And then can you talk about that piece? Because that's come up. I think for me personally, for us, sometimes you have a really squeaky wheel and it could impact you insofar as like making a drastic decision. Is that kind of what you're getting at?

Yeah, yeah. I mean there are definitely. You get some feedback from readers that really hurts. It kind of gets you to your core. And I think sometimes it's hard to put that in perspective of everyone coming to the site and thinking about how, how it all comes together. But I think there's a judgment call you have to make and Sometimes it requires talking to your audience, but then it also is like the gut check of like, you know what? This ad layout does not feel right to me. I'm not comfortable running, you know, lots of ads in the content. I'm not going to do it. I'm going to focus on, you know, I know a lot of readers come to my recipes and so they're sitting there for long periods of time. That's where I'm going to have an ad. Or, you know, someone who's comfortable running a sticky footer or sticky video ad, they may choose to run something that's a little bit more invasive in one place, but not going to cause. Yeah, yeah. Feel heavy everywhere else.

That makes sense. And I think to your point about audience makes sense, where like, let's say you have a site all around minimalism, like your audience's take on esthetic and clutter and is going to be different than, and I don't know, these audiences, these are just pulling out of the top of my head. But like a coupon site, like maybe that world, you just kind of expect more to be happening there and, you know, more offers, so to speak, if you're in the mindset of couponing. And so maybe you might be able to have a little bit more prevalent ads in a layout like that. Speaking of optimization and revenue, when it comes from ads, what are the things that people can be doing to earn more? Because a lot of times we think about increasing traffic, which is important. How do I get more people to my site? But one of the things I've tried to encourage people to think about, whether it be ads or other revenue sources, is what are the ways that you can, let's say you never increase traffic again. It's an interesting thought experiment for creators and business owners. What if you never increase traffic again? How could your business continually grow from a revenue perspective? And one of the ways that it can grow is you can change how you're optimizing ads. So, Paul, do you have any recommendations for things that people might be able to consider in regards to increasing their ad revenue on their site?

You know, I can. I'll like Courtney chime in on this too, because she knows a lot about this. Like, you know, I can only speak for like us and like, how, how we do it. I think, you know, for us, like, we try to take a very consultative approach to working with each publisher and really trying to, for them, like adapt and change over time because they'll be, you know, like, you know, there's, there are Ad units that we ran a couple of years ago that were great at the time, and over time they become less and less valuable and we've like basically sunset them and get rid of them and replace them with new things that are more modern and work better. So. So I think part of it is.

Do you have examples of those, like the ones that you've sunsetted and ones that are kind of more newer, modern?

We used to run these like in image ads that like sat on top of the photos on your site and you know, five years ago, something like that, they were a big deal. And like, I think they may be completely gone at this point, but we may have like, literally no one left with those. So those are something that like, at a point in time they were doing pretty well. Whereas, like, you know, Courtney obviously mentioned, like, video is a huge thing and that continues to be a huge thing. We continue to evolve that and create kind of new types of players and new opportunities. And that's a place where advertisers, you know, advertisers love video. Like, they love TV ads. And this is, you know, the equivalent on the web. And so that's like a big focus that we spend a lot of time on how to new video ads. So it's like, you know, it's a mixed bag, but I think it's like working with a company like ours to help advise you on what the right things to do are because like, that changes over time. It's not, it's not kind of a one, it's not a set it and forget it. Like we, we can happily take that over. But like, it is something that needs to evolve and change over time.

Yeah. The only other thing to say is, you know, we're able to have good data on our ad performance here so we can kind of keep track of like, okay, we tried out this, this ad placement, it didn't work very well. So let's, let's get rid of it. And so that's really nice to do. And so if you have someone to help you dig into that more, that's great. But you know, I think ad types that we've seen do well for a lot of publishers are the sticky types. So either video or something that's going to stick either to the bottom of the page or if you're on your phone, stick to the bottom of the phone and kind of hang out with the readers.

Sticky. Sticky meaning that like is you'd have, let's say imagine you have an ad in your sidebar or if you're on mobile, which is probably a better use case. You have something injected into your blog post, you scroll past it so it's like maybe on there for a little bit, but then you go past it versus you pull up the site and then overlaid over your content is an ad, a really small one at the bottom. Again, I'm thinking mobile, but it could be desktop or the video player example you gave, where there's a little, in the lower third or whatever, kind of almost like picture in picture, there's a little video player playing. So, Paul, you had mentioned this, but Courtney, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts around it. This idea of. And I think you mentioned this earlier too. Video is a big deal. And I think people hear that and they're like, video. Like video, video, video. Lindsey had a joke when I owned 3 bitcoin 3 years ago where like anytime you, you'd end, you'd start any conversation. I would just reply by saying, bitcoin, bitcoin, bitcoin. Like, I was kind of stuck on it. And. But she said that like, as a joke around this idea of like, that just being a thing that's always happening. But I feel like in this world, video can be that. And suddenly it just becomes this thing where everybody's like, video, video, video. But what does that, what does that actually mean? Like, is it, is it important because of engagement? Is it important because you, you're able to earn more from it? Like, why is video a big deal and what does that practically mean for a publisher in regards to where their focus should be and what they should be doing?

Yeah, engagement is, you know, the number one thing. I think a lot of advertisers want to either be close to video that you've created or their own video ads that they can, can for your readers, like, whatever is going to be most engaging and have them kind of keep an eye on things, you know, And I think, I think about like, whenever I'm making a recipe myself, like whenever I get there and I'm in the thick of it and there's something complicated that happens and I'm like, oh, no, I don't know how to do this. Yeah, being able to go to a video first, maybe. No, if you have a video at the top of your, your recipe or something like that, you know, that's a really great place for a lot of advertisers want to, to spend their money. And, you know, it just helps bring things to life so much more than regular content can. And I think that is A big piece of it in terms of why it's such a focus and trying to. So much of content has been written for a long time and moving towards this in the future I think is really where they're hoping to go.

This being video? Yeah, like there's a shift towards advertising dollars being more effective is what I hear. If in the context of a video and you think about even on a, on a general trends like people are consuming more video undoubtedly than they were 10 years ago. And that also looks different. Like it might be video on a blog post, like in the lower third, but there's also video content within reels or you know, like ads inserted and YouTube shorts or whatever it might be. So is there, is, is part of the reason why that's advantageous for a publisher. Is it because there's like a supply and demand issue around video where there's a lot of demand from advertisers to run video ads, but is there enough supply to meet that or is there an issue kind of on the macro level, Paul, when it comes to the general trend of video ads and the ability for advertisers to actually get those in front of people, I think your.

Supply and demand point is right there. Simply there's far more banner ads on the Internet than there are video ads. And so you've got less supply. And then advertisers value video more because they can, you know, you can tell a better story, you can sell better in a 30 second video than a, you know, flat or, you know, slightly animated banner ad. So there's, there's like more value there also. So I think to your supply and demand point, like that's a big, a big piece of it I think also like to add on like the video thing. There's also like, I think from a publisher perspective when it comes to ads and when it comes to video content, like there's sort of like a continuum. Like, like there's ways to get started and ways to evolve to like you can get started with video ads. Like we've got a player that just runs ads. It doesn't even need content and that's not going to necessarily drive engagement, but it will bring, it brings value that's, that's incremental to the publisher and that's good. Um, the next step is like, if you've got some videos but like not that many that match all the content, like we've got a player that will, you know, play, you know, any video you have against any content and that, that has some engagement value to the user. Because now, now at least there's some opportunity for them to see a piece of content that you've created that's different than what they're looking at and that might be engaging to them and also make money from the ads there. So that's good. And then like the next layer on top of that is like related video content where, you know, I'll use my chicken Parmesan example. You go to the chicken Parmesan recipe and you've got a chicken Parmesan video that's actually literally what the user was looking for. And it's like much more engaging. And we're starting to do some testing and it's early, we don't know what the answers are yet. But like, can that drive more SEO even? Can that drive users spending more time on the page and like bring even more value on top of the ad revenue? I think again, like, like it's about like kind of like that continual like getting started with something basic and like moving further and further up the path of like, kind of like, I don't say more advanced, but like creating more video content and ultimately bringing more value to users.

Yeah. So if I'm understanding that right, there's kind of these three tiers that you could consider and important with the first two tiers that use as an example, the idea would be that would be a switch that you'd turn on or like a setting where it would inject a video player potentially across all of your pages. In the first example would be one that would just run ads. So like, let's say you're, you want to be strategic and you're saying like, hey, November, December, really high performing months. I want to make sure that I capitalize on revenue. So I'm going to run an ad player even though I know it's going to be a detrimental user experience potentially. Unless they're like really awesome ads. Right. Like super bowl ads that you're going to love. Like, you know, you're going to take a hit from usability standpoint, but you're going to say, hey, this is justified based on doing this for a couple months maybe. I know that I'm going to have high earning potential in November, December, I'm going to run these ads, this ad specific video player and you can run that across your entire site. It's injected into a post and people scroll by. It starts playing, it drops to the lower third, continues to play until somebody closes it out if they want to do that. That'd be tier one. Tier two would be you have a thousand blog posts, but you've only have five videos. So you put all of those into like a related player and you say, play this across my site and it's my recipes. But you might go to a chocolate chip cookies post and it will play a chicken Parmesan recipe video, which it's like, hey, still correlation there. It's still food, it's still your content, but not the exact piece of content. The third option would be the most aligned and potentially upside from a usability standpoint in that, as you were talking about before Courtney, it's going to provide you some visual examples of how the recipe's made and you're going to have the advantage of the recipe player along with it. And that actually ties into a question that came from our Food Blogger Pro podcast Facebook group. Heather was asking, does a recipe video of the recipe provide higher RPM or more revenue? So what she's asking is in that third case scenario where the, the, the recipe video matches the recipe that people are on, does that provide higher RPM than, let's say, an unrelated playlist of like your five recipe players or five recipe videos and just a player that's uncorrelated to the recipe itself?

Today, I would say no. In the future, I think that's going to change. I think that buyers are going, advertisers are going to want, you know, like we were talking about before, like, they want the most engagement. They want to be in the best places, and the best places are going to be content with a match video and ads against it. Like, that's a really good user experience and that's what they're going to want. Again, like, that's like, I think for the longer term, we're definitely encouraging our publishers to make more of that match video content because I think it's going to be better over time. But today I don't think there's, I mean, there might be some minor difference, but it's unmeasurably low today.

Yeah. And the related piece to that that you had mentioned is this idea of SEO benefit of video. And if you're doing video right, there's two things that you should note for anybody listening. You should make sure that you have structured data around that recipe. So in the same way that you have a recipe with structured data, you can do that for a video. You can say, here's what this video is about, here's how long it is, here's the description for it, and you can put that in with the. And I Think you can do that with like a Net Thrive player too? If you have an individual video. Right. And the second piece is you should have a site map for your videos. And this is something we didn't have for a very long time, but sitemap essentially you would load, you'd load that in and you'd have, you'd put it into Google search console and say like, here's a list of all of my videos. So Google knows like, great, here's the video. So I can crawl those. So if somebody's looking for a video, a specific video, then we can surface that like in a video search. Anything else from a technical standpoint that would be important for people to know from a video standpoint or anything that you can think of that you'd add on there. Courtney?

Can't think of anything else to add to that right now.

Cool. A follow up question on that then again from Heather. So we've said at this point probably not a huge difference from an RPM perspective if you have a specific video for the specific recipe versus like a playlist player or even just the ad player. But we do know based on just our gut as creators that it's probably going to be a better experience for somebody to see the video that matches the content. I've done that before where like I'm reading an article about iguanas that are falling out of trees in Florida and then it's like a story about koalas. And I was like, I wanted to see the iguanas, but. And I was like, and then you just kind of lose a little bit of trust with the site. Yeah. And so there's some, there's a usability piece for sure that I think is worth considering and that needs to factor in. But Heather's follow up question is she said, I have a bunch of videos, but obviously not covering all my recipes. Does creating a video for a recipe help you earn more than the videos already on the page? And so if in that specific question the answer to her would be, and it's kind of what we were talking about before, hey, if you want to, if you're thinking about optimizing revenue and you're okay with a little bit of a usability hit, put all of those into a playlist player and then inject that into your site throughout as a revenue optimization strategy, is that generally aligned kind of in that second bucket of kind of plays that you could have in this category? Is that sound right, Courtney?

Yeah, I think just being open to. And it's different for everybody. So it's kind of difficult to blanket statement. But I think for the most part, creating video, getting it on your site and in mass isn't bad in any way. And it's going to help. It's going to help advertisers figure out what works best for them and understand kind of what the right approach is for them just to spend on the videos and the site itself.

Sam.