LeoFinance Site Metrics | Bounce Rate | Time On Site | CPM & Ad Revenue

over 3 years ago

In the November LeoAds Report we could see how tips and ideas to raise CPM was requested and even though I am not an Ad revenue expert, I have talked about some of these things previously as well, so I figured I could step up my game a bit and share some more details about this.

21 days ago I shared an article where I talked about site metrics. I compared the stats from LeoFinance with Hive.blog and Peakd.com, and I focused on Time on Site and Bounce Rate. I explained why we have the results we have and how engagement plays a major role.

From The Post 21 Days Ago

This Is From Today

We can clearly see that we have managed to increase our engagement and our time spent on site, and that we have been able to reduce the bounce rate during these last 3 weeks. This goes well in hand with the traffic, new users and the overall marketing we see, but the overall engagement is what truly affects our time on site. The more engagement we have, the longer a person will stay on the site.

LeoFinance had only a fraction of posts being made compared to peakd and hive.blog from October to November, about 500% less, but we still had better results when we compared the stats 21 days ago.

If we compare the results from these different front-ends today, we can see how LeoFinance continues to have better numbers than both hive.blog and Peakd.

Ad Revenue

If we dive into Ad revenue we could clearly see the results in the previous report. We could also see the following being stated:

"We brought in almost the same amount of ad revenue this month as we did last month. The total numbers tell a story of how our ad impressions are continually increasing, but there were less users who clicked on ads coupled with a slightly lower CTR. Our CPM this month was considerably lower than our CPM last month."

Before anything else, I want to explain what CPM means.

CPM is cost per mille, also called cost per thousand, is a paid advertising option where companies pay a price for every 1,000 impressions an ad receives. An “impression” refers to when someone sees an ad on LeoFinance, which is also the reason for the topics about not using ad blockers.

The above shows you an impression.

That being said, we had a lower CPM this month compared to last month, which obviously affects the total earnings. Even though there are some things you could do to raise the CPM, it still comes down to the price advertisers are willing to pay AND the number of advertisers willing to pay that price.

Something important to remember is that the price advertisers are willing to pay is dependent on a number of factors, many of which are out of our control.

There are some things you could do to influence the CPM though, and I'll cover some of them below:

Audience
Context
On-page

Audience

As a general rule, audiences in English-speaking countries tend to command the highest rates, and traffic from the United States are worth more than traffic from other countries.

Geographic differences in CPM rates are influenced not just by the spending power of the individuals living in those countries, but also by how established the online advertising market is.

Long story short, the more traffic you have from english speaking countries, the higher CPM you'll have, so growth is not necessarily a good thing, if you are generating a lot of traffic from non-english countries.

Another factor is that people leave behind a trail of Cookie crumbs that smart advertisers can use to better target ads towards them. Advertisers who are more confident in being able to convert a user will bid more, so these Cookie trails help increase CPMs.

Google announced plans to phase out support for Third-Party Cookies in Chrome by 2022, meaning that they can no longer be used to track and target users across the web.

Although the value of mobile traffic is rising, we are more likely to complete transactions on desktop devices rather than mobile devices, due to the way the user experience differs. This means that desktop users tend to command higher rates. So, less mobile traffic is often better in terms of CPM.

Context

Contextual and placement targeting allows advertisers to reach audiences with known well-defined interests, who they might not otherwise be able to identify. This is why sites about certain topics (such as finance) can command high CPMs, because advertisers know that conversions will be of higher value, even if that same user could be reached for less elsewhere.

Advertisers want to be sure that their ads appear in quality locations. Well designed, quality websites with brand safe content are a more attractive prospect and attract rates to match.

The depth of a session will impact the average CPM rate across impressions. High-bidding advertisers who win an impression early in the session will often have frequency caps that mean that they won’t bid again on later pageviews. The impact of this is that the final CPM of impressions will, on-average, decrease with each pageview of a unique user.

On-Page

The most significant elements that impacts CPMs are the format of the ad. Larger ads tend to attract higher bids. Generally, large formats tend to perform better as there is strong and consistent demand. The format type also has an influence. Video ads for instance, will attract stronger bids than images.

The key is to have ads where users linger. You want to place ads where people spend time as you earn money each time a user views a banner placed on your website.

Google for instance, counts impressions as viewable when 50 percent of your ad shows on screen for one second or longer. Coinzilla on the other hand doesn't count views if the ads aren't seen at all.

This means that if a banner is placed on the bottom of a page and a visitor doesn’t scroll that far, the view won’t count. This measure was implemented in order to make sure that advertisers pay only when a user interacts with or views their ad.

Something else to have in mind is that you will be rewarded with a lift in CPM if you send quality- and converting traffic to advertisers. If you send them junk traffic, (bot/poor traffic), and accidental clicks, you can expect the opposite.

This basically means that you will earn less for each person who just randomly clicks ads because it's fun or for whatever reason they might have to click the ads if they are not interested.

This is also a reason for why you should never ask people to click on ads.

Asking your users to click on ads will result in advertisers paying for low-quality traffic, and will get you banned from our network. - Coinzilla.

The number of ads makes a difference too. For instance, if you earn $1000 for one ad, it's unlikely that you will earn $2000 just because you add another ad. It is more likely that each additional ad pays less than the last and lowers the average CPM. Each additional ad to a page might increase earnings per page viewed, but will likely lower impression CPM at the same time.

Last but not least, even when publishers are paid CPM, those rates can often be influenced by Click Through Rate. The CPM of any publisher receiving significant CPC bids will be greatly influenced by the CTR of their ad units. While an ever higher CTR doesn’t always equate to long-term increases in CPM, a unit receiving fewer clicks than it legitimately could will certainly earn less. Even in pure CPM networks many advertisers will bid higher for impressions in placements with stronger CTRs.

Even though this might be more for what LeoFinance can do to increase Ad revenue and raise CPM, each user can help LeoFinance by not using Ad blockers.