Marketing.fm – Eric Friedman

I have been using yield optimizers for awhile such as Pubmatic and now YieldBuild, or Google Ad Manager. My primary reason for using them is to understand some of the optimization techniques used by big publishers who have a number of different programs available to them. I use them on my sandbox projects which really do not make a whole lot of money, except for covering their costs – and to get a better understanding of what these systems do and how they behave “in the wild”.

Using these services gives some transparency into how and why a company would choose one service other another and also provide real life info of whether they work or not. There is also usually a big difference between a canned demo and getting things working correctly. (All the services I mentioned above have worked well for me)

So what to look for in choosing an ad optimizer?

1. agnostic support of platforms and ad networks
2. Easy to drop in code and or a built in plugin for your system
3. Great reporting (ability to export and show data many ways)
4. API integration to ad networks so you are not manually entering eCPMs
5. Support for outside ads or selling your own (FYI: many do not do this)
6. Good support
7. Limited points of failure
8. Redundancy – the last thing you want is for your ad server to go down
9. Variable colors and styles (part of #4 the system should rotate color schemes, styles, and fonts to optimize)
10. It works! (you spent the time rotating out all your code – make sure 24 hours later you are getting results better than no yield optimizer)

Some of these are more important than others and all introduce more variables to ad serving. It is important to remember that introducing a yield optimizer brings in another point of failure to serving your ads correctly. Whether you are using Google or a startup, you risk the service going down and showing no ads at all, so its a good idea to have a fail safe house ad or default ad you are comfortable with.

While these systems should provide a 24/7 rotation of ads to get the highest yield possible, don’t forget that along with spreading impressions across networks you are also spreading account balances. Some networks have a minimum of $100.00 before monthly payouts (like Google) and this means that you can end up with a few dollars in accounts you are “testing out” and have to run them for awhile before you can actually get paid. (although this is probably not a big deal for big sites.)

What else should you look for?

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