If we knew of a tool that doubled ad revenue for a client, you’d want to know about it right?
If you read Mequoda Daily often, you may know about our Dr. Aliza Lifshitz and Carl Kravetz who run Vida y Salud, a Spanish-language health site. They’ve been the recipient of several of our Rocket Awards for growth and were inducted into our Mequoda Hall of Fame as Mequoda Masters back in 2010. It’s safe to say that Vida y Salud does a lot of things right and has seen tremendous success and growth over the years, and most recently they doubled their ad revenue.
Vida is sponsor-driven, and has several slots for ads on their website. They recently automated their ad-ops team by partnering with Sortable, a modern platform that allows advertisers to more quickly fill ad spots through a sophisticated header-bidding process. When Vida first started working with Sortable, we weren’t familiar, but we’re now suggesting them for all our clients to try.
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With most platforms, ads are served with a waterfall system. This means the system will go around fishing for ads to fill the spot on your website and not that efficiently, although it’s still only seconds. In a waterfall system, the server will pass around the ad opportunity to other ad servers until someone is willing to pay, say a $1.30 eCPM or whatever you’ve set as your rate. All this pass-around results in a loss in impressions as time passes.
The way Sortable works is more in real time. Their header-bidder system makes the call for an ad and completes the transaction immediately. It reaches out to all the ad servers at once instead of passing it around, which means they can fill the ad in 2 milliseconds. The result is that you fill ad inventory more quickly and at higher rates, based on the data you’re passing back into the system about each user.
And the result for Vida y Salud is that after 1 year with Sortable, they have doubled their ad revenue. The majority of their traffic comes from Latin America, which is typically difficult to monetize, and is why they saw such a drastic improvement. However Marina Parejo, Senior Publisher Consultant Manager at Sortable, tells us that a 30-40% lift with North American publishers is very common after switching to Sortable.
Sortable has spent the last 3 years building out their dynamic header bidder system. They are able to analyze a user as soon as they hit the page to determine if they are, say, a $3 eCPM and to set a dynamic price floor so that when the call goes out for ads, they can ask for a minimum of $3 and they need an answer in 2 milliseconds. This way they can squeeze the most revenue out of each auction, making it a super efficient stack that is entirely machine-operated.
Their rate is a flat 15% of revenue share, and only on ads their technology is optimizing, not direct campaigns you set up yourself. If there are any issues, or you need support optimizing ads, Marina tells us that Sortable is so confident in their system that they may drop the rev share rate until you see higher returns.
From our perspective, this solution seems like a win-win for most publishers to try out if you’re ad-driven and want to improve ad revenue.
To discuss how we can help you grow your audience, revenue and profits with a Mequoda System and through trusted partners like Sortable, schedule a free introductory conversation with Don Nicholas, our Chairman & CEO.
