Are You Using This Ad Placement at the Right Times?
Are You Using This Ad Placement at the Right Times?
Our data science department has access to data from thousands and thousands of large digital publishers. They often share some interesting insights with us around things like a particular ad placement, layout style, or publishing strategy.
Below, is **a case study on the floating anchor ads**. Our data scientists learned that when anchor ads are broadly implemented without considering data — across an entire website on all the pages — that this typically results in much lower total session revenue and fewer pageviews; due to poorer [UX metrics](http://blog.ezoic.com/ux-metrics-changing-view-visitors/).
Below, we dig deeper into the data on this particular ad placement.
What are anchor ads?
What did we learn from studying bottom anchor ad placements?
As you can see in the graph above, EPMV (or earnings per thousand visitors – also referred to as session revenue) was about **30% lower when the anchor ad was present** on a publisher’s website without consulting which pages it would best perform.
The **anchor ad group was observed to have an 8% higher bounce rate** in this study as well; meaning that — on average — it likely provided a worse user experience for visitors.
Why are many publishers missing this?
It is actually really easy to miss and hard to identify unless you are consistently measuring session revenue, which is why we suggest studying your analytics to know which pages anchor ads would best perform.
If you are a publisher that is only looking at RPMs and CPMs when optimizing ads, you would definitely miss this observation.
What’s more, ads affect other ads, and if an anchor ad is taking away from visitor attention, they are likely diluting the value of other ads as well. That’s why it’s important to test and check analaytics.
This is something we [recently presented at Google](http://blog.ezoic.com/website-visitor-segmentation-offers-big-ad-earnings-value-little-work/). It’s why we believe many publishers claim to see lower and lower ad rates over time.
Should I remove bottom anchor ad placements from my site?
The answer is actually a bit more complex than you might think.
In some cases, it probably makes sense to show anchor ads, but our study proves that **broadly applying them across your site to all visitors on all pages will likely lead to less revenue and annoyed visitors.
**
Anchor ads make sense sometimes because they are a highly viewable ad (it is always in the viewport). This is important to some advertisers. Additionally, their CTR (click-through-rate) is typically a bit higher as well. This means they likely produce better outcomes for advertisers and have a bit higher value than some other ads on your site.
This means that if a visitor has a low likelihood of visiting other pages on your site anyway, showing them an anchor ad would be really smart.
However, if you believe the visitor will visit more than one page, you could be sacrificing higher overall revenue — and the visitor’s experience — in favor of short-term page revenue.
So should you take all the anchor ads off your site? It depends on your data. However, you would need to make sure that it was what is best for your total EPMV.
The ideal solution would be to identify the [highest bouncing visitor segment and only deliver the anchor ads to them](http://blog.ezoic.com/website-visitor-segmentation-offers-big-ad-earnings-value-little-work/). This would give you the page-level revenue benefits of the anchor ad without the consequences of its negative user experience impact.
Wrapping it all up
Anchor ads are not bad. They are a tool like all other ads and elements on your website.
Just like any scenario, you want to apply the right tool to the right job. The data shows that anchor ads aren’t a great tool for broad use.
Interested in automatically testing thousands of ad placements on your site to see how they affect user experiences? [Ezoic](/?page_id=1148) will allow you to quickly access all of this data and deliver your visitor’s different ad treatments based on their behavior.
Other questions about the study? Leave them below.