Page RPM | How To Increase Your Ads Revenue By 40%

When it comes to Page RPM, the two most important metrics that matter to a web publisher looking to monetize their site is “Fill Rate.” Or rather the inventory percentage where ads can be shown by a partner advertising network.

And eCPM, which is the effective cost per thousand impression dollar amount that is paid out to the publisher for showing ads to their audience.

Additionally, aside from typical ad display and various advertising generated revenue, some webmasters or site owners utilize Lead Generation to monetize Internet traffic to a website.

By creating leads or inquiries from submission forms or phone calls from interested consumers. And then delivering those leads to a business seeking that type of inquiry.

Page RPM and Ad RPM form part of a publisher’s arsenal of metrics used to analyze and optimize ad performance.

While calculating and understanding these metrics might be easy; implementing the correct strategies to optimize your ad revenue is something entirely different.

Don’t leave it up to guesswork! Get the ad optimization experts to optimize your ads and help you maximize your ad revenue.

What Is Page RPM?

Page RPM stands for “Revenue per Mille” (Mille means thousand in Latin). So, page RPM is an estimated revenue you can generate by serving a thousand ad impressions (page views) to the readers.

It is calculated by dividing your estimated earnings by the number of page views you received, then multiplying by 1000.

Page RPM = (Estimated earnings / Number of page views) * 1000

For instance, if you’ve earned an estimated $10 from 500 page views, then your page RPM would be equal to ($10 / 500) * 1000, or $20. In other words, if you can deliver 1000 page views, you’ll be earning around 20 USD.

 

Note: Google uses the term interchangeably with eCPM. Both RPM or eCPM are essentially the same. Here’s a primer on RPM Vs CPM.

Sounds easy, right? However, it’s not as easy as it sounds to get an RPM of $20 and to consistently increase it over time. On the contrary, you can’t successfully run your website with the same revenue.

Here’s the good news. You can increase your Page RPM significantly without choking your readers with ads.

Which Factors Affect your Page RPM?

Before diving into the strategies to improve page RPM, you should understand the factors affecting the estimated metric.

Two factors primarily impact your page RPM.

1. CTR – CTR stands for ‘Click Through Rate’. Typically, advertisers measure CTR to know the number of clicks they can get from the ad for X impressions. So, if your website earned 5 clicks for 100 impressions, then your CTR is 5%. Higher the CTR, the higher the page RPM.
2. CPC – CPC stands for Cost Per Click. It says how much an advertiser is willing to pay you for a click. It varies based on the content of the ad, context, and the niche.

As a publisher, you should ensure that you’re keeping both CTR and CPC as high as possible. How to do so?

– Probably one of the boring yet underestimated tips you’ve heard – Publish quality content. Quality content is the one that attracts and retains a targeted niche.

– Find the right ad placements. Why? Ensuring you are placing the ads in the right placement increases your viewability, CTR, and CPC.

– Make sure the ads are highly relevant and resonate well with the readers. In case you’re using an ad network, check their targeting criteria and optimize it.

How is it calculated?

These are valuable metrics that publishers use to analyze their ad performance.

However, often, publishers are confused and wonder which of these metrics should be their focus. Let’s first quickly determine how each one is calculated.

AD RPM

Ad RPM or the ad revenue per one thousand impressions is calculated by dividing your estimated revenue by ad impressions and then multiplying by 1000.

See formula below:

Ad RPM = (Estimated earnings / Ad impressions) * 1,000

PAGE RPM

Page RPM is the rate that the advertiser has to pay for every 1,000 ad impressions viewed per page.

It is calculated by dividing your estimated revenue by the number of page views you received and then multiplying by 1,000.

Page RPM = ( Revenue / Number of page views) x 1,000

PAGE vs AD RPM

While these two metrics are quite similar, there is a substantial difference.

Ad RPM tells the publisher the cost that the advertiser will have to pay for every 1,000 ad impressions served on a website, while Page RPM metric helps publishers understand the performance of their ads on a page level.

Page RPM demonstrates the rate that publishers are paid for ad impressions on their web pages and allows them to identify low and high earning pages and strategize how to improve their performance.  By using this metric, you can evaluate the performance of multiple pages on your website.

So, the next question is, what is a good RPM?

While this is an excellent question to ask, there is, unfortunately, no generic answer to this question. Several factors determine your page RPM.

Here are some to keep in mind:

• Site niche
• Audience geographics
• Content quality
• Audience demographics
• General seasonality
• Audience seasonality
• Topic trends and breaking stories

How do I Increase my Page RPM?

Whether you use AdSense or any other ad network, you can implement all of them (excluding the last two as they require some minimum traffic) today to experience the higher eCPM.

And, it does take time to see results. So, the best way is to experiment, measure, and then decide the right ones for you. As always, consider the user experience and page load time in mind while adjusting your ad strategy.

1. Use the Right Formats
2. Enable the Right Ad Sizes
3. Optimize User Experience
4. Attract the Right Audience
5. Upgrade to Google Ad Manager
6. Implement Header Bidding
7. Try Ad Refresh
8. Increase Organic Traffic
9. Improve Content Suggestions.

So, increasing the CPC and CTR will definitely improve your page RPM.

But, that’s not all you could do. There are other ways you can utilize to take your RPM to the next level.

1. Use the Right Formats

Adsense doesn’t just offer the display ads. They offer a variety of ad formats including video ads, expandable ads, and text ads.

You need to experiment with the formats and then settle on the right ones.

However, there’s no guarantee that you’ll earn more if you replace display ads with video ads, but when you try a combination of the formats, you may find the sweet spot.

2. Enable the Right Ad Sizes

Not all the ad units will earn you the best eCPM. In fact, Google recommends the publishers to use wider ad units to experience higher CPMs and better page RPM.

For instance, ad units such as the medium rectangle (300×250), large rectangle (336×280), and leaderboard (728×90) are proven to yield greater results for both publishers and advertisers.

Here are the best performing mobile ad sizes and formats.

3. Optimize User Experience

If you follow our blog, I’ve shown you several times how enhancing the user experience resulted in higher revenues.

The goal should be providing a clean and acceptable ad-content and it takes some experiments to find the right number of ads.

However, start with a few and try to stay that way. Because we know increasing the numbers won’t increase the page RPM substantially.

4. Attract the Right Visitors

Agreed, I said it isn’t important to focus on traffic to improve page RPM. But, attracting relevant visitors is far more important than the other factors.

Besides, how you are supposed to scale up without increasing your visitors. The idea is to focus on the right audience rather than getting a ton of irrelevant hits.

The added advantage of attracting only the right audience is your eCPM will stay at its best value.

5. Upgrade to Google Ads Manager

If you think, you’ve done all the things you could possibly do and have good traffic (at least over 200,000 page views), then I advise you to sign up for Google DFP (now rebranded as ‘Google Ad Manager’). Why do you ask?

Google Ad Manager is an ad server that allows you to set up direct campaigns along with the ad networks (say Google AdSense).

If your sales team has any direct deals, you can deliver the direct ads first and then fill up the rest of the unfilled ad slots with the help of an ad network.

Even if you don’t have any direct deals, you can partner with multiple ad networks to fill up the ad impressions using Google DFP.

Let’s say if Google AdSense can’t find the right ad, the request is passed down to another ad network, thus, ensuring a 100% fill rate. Here’s a complete guide to help you get started.

6. Implement Header Bidding

As we just said, DFP would be able to help you get the 100% fill rate. But, it’s still inefficient in many ways.

First, it passes down the request from one ad network to another to fill the ad slot. This is known as the waterfall technique. The method reduces the eCPM and increases the page load time. Hence, header bidding was developed.

Header bidding allows you to call multiple demand partners simultaneously, thus, ensuring intensified competition and higher eCPM.

However, in order to get better results from header bidding, you need to cross at least a million page views per month.

I know you’re curious about it, so here’s everything you need to know about header bidding.

7. Try Ad Refresh

You heard us, right. Instead of increasing the number of ad units, you can implement the ad refresh.

But, you can’t refresh Adsense ads (Google restricts publishers from refreshing Adsense ads). And, that’s the whole point. You can partner with multiple ad networks and then, implement ad refresh without any issues.

Whenever Adsense fails to deliver an ad, you can let other ad networks to bid and win the ad impression. Those ads can, indeed, be refreshed.

8. Increase Organic Traffic

Organic visitors tend to stay longer and scroll throughout your page if you have the right content in place.

Besides, Google has more data about the visitor if he/she lands on your site via Google Search.

This, in turn, will allow advertisers (bidding through Google Ads) to understand the visitors and bid effectively to win the impression.

9. Improve Content Suggestions

Most of the publishers, I’ve worked with tend to overlook the impact of the content recommendation on their ad revenue.

Your users will be willing to read more when you let them know that you have what they are looking for. For instance, let’s say a user lands up on a page via Google Search Console and then, reads your content completely.

As a next step, you can recommend your users highly relevant content that will induce them to click and then, view yet another page.

The more the page views, the better the RPM.

Takeaway,

One issue that we frequently see with publishers who hadn’t optimized their ad stacks is that upon optimizing their ad stack, their page RPM increases while their ad RPM decreases.  Why does this happen?  One of the most common scenarios is that publishers with unoptimized systems often have substantial unfilled impressions.

Most ad reporting technologies, including Google Ad Manager, do not report these impressions as $0.  Instead, they’re not counted at all.  So if a publisher has a site with 70% fill at $0.40 ad RPM, I’ll frequently crank that up to 95%+ fill.

If the additional filled impressions average less than $0.40 ad RPM, then the overall ad RPM will fall, even though the site is making more money overall.  This is why although ad RPM is useful in ad optimization, it’s usually not a primary KPI for ad optimization.

In most cases, session RPM is the primary KPI for ad optimization.  This is because some ad technologies can be so abusive that they reduce the averages page views per session, reducing overall session RPM.

Resources;

Finally, I am hoping that the above-revised guide on Page RPM was helpful. But, for more related online FAQs, feel free to Contact Us.

Or rather, share your thoughts in the comments box below this blog. Below are more related to the topic links;

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