For these reasons, YieldBuild was excited to launch its Premium Text Ad Program to offer Web publishers an ad source that consistently delivers outstanding contextual relevance and high publisher value. Across sites dedicated to topics as varied as automobiles, wine and product reviews, both large and small, publishers have seen impressive improvements to their overall online ad revenue without compromising user experience nor fully cannibalizing their revenue from their other ad networks like AdSense.

Most publishers using the Premium Text Ad Program see an immediate improvement to their revenue by simply adding an additional ad spot to their page, giving YieldBuild the opportunity to serve up an additional Premium Text Ad unit alongside AdSense. Three publishers, PrimaryGames, RateMyTeachers and HubPages, have all added the YieldBuild Premium Text Ad Program to their ad network mix, and all have seen strong revenue enhancement through the addition of a superior ad source as an adjunct to other ad networks they work with.

PrimaryGames

PrimaryGames.com, an educational gaming site popular with elementary-school children, came to YieldBuild with plenty of ad experience under their belt. Having tried a wide range of ad formats and networks, they knew what worked for their site’s traffic and what didn’t, but were open to working with YieldBuild to optimize their current ads and to try out the YieldBuild Premium Text Ad Program.

“It’s clear to us that no single ad network can fill all of our ad real estate, so we turned to YieldBuild to most effectively manage our inventory and identify those networks that perform best for each open ad spot,” says Susan Beasley, creator of PrimaryGames.com. “I’ve been pleased with the YieldBuild Premium Text Ad Program’s ability to deliver high-performance text and image ads which appeal to our younger viewer base. And, importantly, the ads are high quality, important since parents and teachers are frequent users of the site, as well.”

The Premium Text Ad Program now comprises slightly more than half of the text ad revenue PrimaryGames is generating through YieldBuild.

RateMyTeachers

RateMyTeachers.com is the premier online destination for students and parents to connect and share reviews and ratings of middle and high school teachers. Online since 2000, Ratemyteachers.com boasts over 11 million ratings of over 1 million teachers. The content-rich site is a perfect match for contextual ad networks like Google AdSense, and Aaron Altscher, Managing Director, was looking for an additional high-quality contextual ad source to complement them.

“YieldBuild’s Premium Text Ad Program has been a terrific complement to other text ad networks we’re running through YieldBuild on RateMyTeachers,” says Altscher. “The Program has allowed us to serve more highly-relevant ads alongside our content and boost our revenue significantly.”

With a fill rate higher than that of any other network they are optimizing through YieldBuild, the Premium Text Ad Program now comprises almost a fifth of the revenue generated for the site.

HubPages

HubPages is a wildly popular social content network that allows anyone to create rich-media articles on a topic they know and love, and earn ongoing royalties through ads served up on what they’ve published. The site attracts more than 16 million unique monthly visitors, primarily from search engines, and enjoys almost 70 million monthly page views.  85,000 authors have published more than 430,000 articles since the site’s launch in August 2006.

HubPages’s content richness and heavy traffic from search engines has made text-based contextual advertising the ideal monetization vehicle for the site. “In a short time the YieldBuild Premium Text Ad Program has grown to comprise almost a third of our site’s total revenue.  YieldBuild’s ability to automatically allocate the best paying ads for each ad spot has been critical to the implementation,” says Paul Deeds, HubPages’s general manager. “The Premium Text Ad Program serves up highly-relevant text and display ads that complement other ad networks’ ads across our wide range of topical content. We’re also impressed with the Program’s fill rate and revenue per click (CPC), even better than AdSense’s. The YieldBuild Premium Text Ad Program’s ability to deliver great contextual ads beyond the three ad-units of running AdSense alone has really helped us increase our revenue per page.”

Optimizing Premium Text Ads alongside AdSense has allowed HubPages to continue impressive month-over-month revenue gains despite a general softening of the online advertising market. YieldBuild has placed Premium Text Ads alongside the other ads on HubPages, increasing revenue 44% over the revenue generated by all other networks HubPages works with combined.

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Particularly as an adjunct to other networks like AdSense, with which publishers have trusted relationships, YieldBuild’s Premium Text Ad Program delivers a reliable additional revenue stream and highly relevant ads that complement page content. The Premium Text Ad Program draws from a variety of high-quality text ad sources.

Paul shared his thoughts on fluctuations in RPC payouts to publishers, explaining that changes tend to be gradual, with the recent turbulence rather unusual.

Full article at Wired.

What does the Heat Map tell us?

First, header position ads, and sidebar ads (particularly on the right side), are popular, and ad density also decreases as you go down the page. The darkest portions of the Heat Map are to lower-left.

This is not to say that this a protocol for placing ads if you want to maximize performance. Generally, ads should be within a users’ line of sight, close to navigation elements, and embedded in read content. But site-specific recommendations are usually the result of careful testing (or implementation of YieldBuild, which finds the best-performing regions for each page algorithmically).

Interesting, Google’s own recommendations for AdSense publishers suggest heavier weighting towards the top of content (although not necessarily the header) and also favoring the left more than the right.

If Google’s recommendations for AdSense publishers prove to be generally true for publishers using other networks as well, then that darker-red zone to the middle-left probably presents some opportunity to increase revenue, although without YieldBuild or testing, there’s no way for a publisher to know.

But CTR is only part of the revenue equation. RPC (revenue per click) determines how much the average click is worth to a publisher. Interestingly, the data we’ve assembled shows that RPCs are rising among the most popular contextual ad networks. Looking at data drawn from a publisher base comprising over 4 billion monthly page views shows a steady climb—about 60% over a seven-month period—in RPC among publishers using the most popular contextual advertising networks in use today.

Why? There are two possible explanations. First, the contextual ad networks are giving a greater share of advertiser revenue to publishers, to counterbalance fears that tightening CTRs will lead to losses of revenue and prompt searches for alternate ad networks. Second, we might be seeing the effect of rising competition among online advertisers, as advertising spending continues to move online. Contextual advertising gives advertisers the option to pay only when a user expresses interest in an ad (by clicking), so it’s a natural pick for advertisers with performance goals in mind.

We have no idea if the rise in RPC makes up for—or exceeds—any losses through lower CTRs, and, regardless, the situation will be different for any particular publisher and their specific content and traffic patterns. Again, these are aggregate trends from a pool of publishers, and each publisher might see data that deviates from this trend. Each ad network calculates RPC in a different way for each publisher. But the trend for this sample of publishers is clear: when visitors click, expect more, not less.