Backfilling: how to sell your remnant ad impressions?
Every impression is valuable to publishers and advertisers, regardless of how quickly programmatic technologies and strategies evolve. It is standard practice for publishers to seek the highest possible price per ad impression when selling their Inventory. However, there is unsold Inventory in the advertising market for various reasons. Let’s take a few examples and figure out their optimal backfill configurations.
What does it mean when an advertisement leaves a “remnant impression”?
Typically, publishers will charge high cost per mille (CPM) rates when selling their ad inventory to advertisers. For various reasons, however, some advertising space will go unsold. Remainder impressions are the name given to those stocks.
The cases come first:
Case 1: You work for a publishing house that relies on direct sales. And they couldn’t sell all of the ad inventory through direct deals. The money you could be making with AdSense is still being lost.
Case 2: You use Ad Manager, AdX, and AdSense as a publisher. Your next move could be confusing.
Case 3: You work for a publisher that uses a waterfall to offload unsold ad space. Your setup isn’t efficient enough to maximize the fill rate because the conventional method calls the ad networks and exchanges in sequential order, making it more difficult for the ad networks (at the bottom of the sequence) to buy relevant impressions. Otherwise, it’s possible that ad networks have restricted the visibility of their advertisers.
So, how can you maximize your ad revenue by selling the unsold Inventory? In this context, the term “Backfill” first appears. Any advertiser, yield group, demand partner, or in-house ad can be called a backfill (or passback). A backfill, in this context, refers to any of the methods above of filling unpurchased ad space on a website.
When a publisher has unsold ad space, how can they fill it?
AdSense is, without a doubt, the best ad network out there for helping publishers of all sizes sell their ad space. However, it does not guarantee a full load of ads like some other networks does. As a result, many website owners sign up for an Ad Manager account to manage their ad channels, add new demand partners, and serve ads to their site visitors.
Google Ad Manager is the most popular ad server among publishers, so we’ll use it here and see if we can figure out how to configure it best to backfill our ad inventories.
CASE 1: Google Ads > Waterfall > AdSense
Direct deals can be effective for a publisher with between 500,000 and 1,000,000 monthly website visitors. With time, you can start making money off of AdSense to sell off the remaining ad space.
The best part is that Google Ad Manager handles ad serving for publishers and can even optimize your demand for maximum earnings. For this reason, if you find yourself in a situation where AdSense isn’t filling your ad inventory, you may want to consider adding in some additional ad networks and creating a waterfall.
If you’re just starting, try these steps:
- Communicate with top-tier ad exchanges and networks to have high-quality ads shown on your Inventory.
- Position them in a cascade and have them compete for your attention. However, the ranking will be determined by past results.
- A request can be given higher priority than another.
- Take note: Make sure your ad networks support the priority orders.
With a “House line item” priority order, you can serve your ads or AdSense ads if no ad network can deliver the ads on the inventories. House line items are only used as a backfill for ad impressions when all other line items (in this case, ad networks) have failed to deliver.
An in-house ad promotes your goods and services.
CASE 2: Google Ad Manager Is Better Than AdX/AdSense
You’ve likely got more than just AdSense and Google Ad Manager under your belt as a publisher if you’ve made it this far. You are now a member of Google’s advertising exchange. Let’s dive into the advertising option that makes use of Ad Exchange. More than half of the revenue made by medium-sized publishers comes from Google AdX, the largest ad exchange on the market.
Because your Ad Manager and Ad Exchange accounts are already connected, Google will now randomly choose between AdX and AdSense to bid on your ad impressions. Google will pick one of them to participate in an auction because they can’t compete with each other.
An alternative approach is also possible. Maximizing revenue of unsold Inventory with AdSense is what you’ll want to select in Inventory> Network settings if you want AdSense to backfill everywhere on your network.
However, having an ad exchange in place is no guarantee that all available slots will be utilized. Unsold Inventory can remain in your ad stack even with a waterfall configuration. Due to this need, header bidding was developed. It can boost the fill rate by facilitating simultaneous connections with multiple demand partners and selling ad impressions at the highest possible CPMs.
So, this is the best plan for replenishing the remaining stockpiles.
CASE 3: Header Bidding Via Google’s Ad Manager To An Online Auction
Reviewing quickly, header bidding is a method by which publishers can create competition between the Guaranteed and Non-guaranteed line items in real time. Header bidding sends an ad request to all networks simultaneously and sells the impressions to the highest bidder, as opposed to the traditional waterfall setup, which calls network A first, then network B, etc.
After header bidding, what comes next?
Assume you work for a publisher that uses header bidding to conduct open auctions to purchase advertising space. If no demand partners respond to your bid requests in the allotted time or if they do not have any valid ad creatives, you may not be able to fill the available Inventory with ads. Indeed, even with header bidding, a backfill is required. If the unthinkable were to happen, we’d be ready.
In this case, Prebid will send the empty response from the buyer to the ad server. The ad server then scans the bill for AdX and other line items it can serve. If there is nothing in the queue, AdSense can be used as an emergency measure. We covered the steps required to get AdSense running as a backup.
However, you can still use AdSense as a backfill if you’re employing Exchange bidding (S2s header bidding). However, we recommend shifting your top demand partners over to the client side for a more favorable match rate and, consequently, fill rate.
So, what do you do if backfill networks aren’t meeting their quotas?
By displaying a fallback advertisement. You can still serve backup ads if an inventory in Google Ad Manager does not have any available ads. The catch is that you have to have a Backup ad, which could be an image or a full HTML page. Publishers can display ads in GIF format by selecting a static image from any URL.
HTML backup ads allow you to upload a clickable HTML page that can send users to any URL of your choosing. Doing so can boost a page’s engagement and drive traffic to the destination page.
Please note that this option is restricted to publishers with access to the Google Exchange demand.
So, now what?
It bears repeating that any advertiser or demand partner can backfill unsold ad space. It only takes a passback of their ad tags during setup to begin earning money from them. Some publishers use their unsold stock to promote affiliate programs..
