In the fast-paced, ever-changing world of ad operations, I would be lost without my to-do list. It’s there for me to plan my day, prioritise the important bits and give me a sense of satisfaction when I cross something off. As we move towards Q4, here is what is taking the top spots on my list:
1. Encourage consumers to turn off adblockers
There is quite a range of quoted stats for adblocker usage, with Statista highlighting 45% of users employing adblocking software in some form worldwide1, and Kantar claiming that 31% of UK-based users have prohibited ads from displaying2. Additionally, it’s not just ads that can be blocked too; in our testing, we’ve found that non-advertising functionality has been inhibited too. Even though it’s hard to pin down the exact percentages (which can, of course, vary from site to site), discovering that you may not be monetising around a third of your revenue can be a bitter pill to swallow.
There are many factors that contribute to adblocker usage. I am a firm believer that there is a disconnect between online content and how it is funded for many of our content consumers. Traditionally, a consumer would go to a newsagent, hand payment to a cashier, and leave with a solid, tangible product in their hand; they themselves have paid for the content. Online, there is no exchange of cash and nothing to hold afterwards, so consumers haven’t directly paid for it but don’t necessarily consider how online content has been funded.
Additionally, there are bad actors out there with an excess of disruptive ads, causing users to block ads indiscriminately. Whilst in the past, the technologies used to combat adblocking were essentially adblock blockers designed to circumnavigate the blocking script and deliver an ad anyway, this method didn’t respect the user’s decision to switch ads off, didn’t help users consider how online content is funded, and didn’t weed out the bad actors.
Luckily, new technology allows us to take a more consumer-focused approach. We’ve been testing a solution that grants us the opportunity to engage with the consumer by displaying a message to those using adblockers to encourage them to turn it off. This has been a joint effort with our editorial teams, who have curated on-brand messaging to encourage our users to consider turning their adblockers off to help fund responsible, high-quality journalism. In our testing, we’ve recovered 25-30% of adblocked traffic and are now working to roll this message out to more users.
A word to the wise: this isn’t a blanket solution to recover adblocked traffic. If your users respect your content and trust you enough to remove their adblockers, then make sure their ad experience is a good one and make the recovery effort sustainable.
2. Optimise our content recommendations
The beauty of online publishing is that we have the opportunity to see data in real time and optimise our content and revenue streams with little delay. It’s not unusual to see suggested content under an article, powered by algorithms that determine which content a reader may enjoy based on the behaviour of other users with similar interests. As our industry evolves, we also have ever-changing opportunities to diversify our digital revenues, with subscriptions and affiliate models joining advertising.
This summer, I am on a mission to work out if we can fine tune our content recommendations so that, in addition to ensuring our users are consuming more content than they would without the recommendations, we are also maximising our revenues to invest in more quality content. This is the sort of project where collaboration is important, particularly to analyse data to understand where most value lies.
3. Automate reporting for 3rd party stats
3rd party creative and tracking tags have been an integral part of the digital ecosystem for well over a decade. There have been platforms enter the market, platforms leave the market, and platforms having a face-lift, but the tags are still with us.
Despite the longevity of 3rd party tags, and the impact that they have on billing processes, managing the stats that have been generated by using these tags hasn’t got any easier. In fact, as ad serving has evolved and what we can measure has become more extensive, there are even more fields to tackle on these reports.
We find ourselves having to manually transform the reports to make the data useful, whether it be for delivery reporting or billing purposes. I do concede, there are platforms that can help with this. Some of the more established platforms have publisher-level access to view 3rd party stats for tags trafficked using that system. In some cases, this is free to use but in some cases, publishers need to pay to subscribe to access the data. There are some great platforms out there that will collate and visualise the data but are reliant on advertisers and agencies creating an API with their own servers for the data to populate for visualisation. Without this, publishers must manually transform the data to upload it to display, which is essentially the first option with extra steps and extra adtech subscriptions.
Of course, manually transforming the data is open to human error, and can be time-consuming, particularly if you need to update your reporting multiple times a week to monitor delivery. Publishers are, therefore, having to choose between reducing their net CPMs to conveniently access data, or risk errors made by copying, pasting and manually typing data from pivot tables in to reporting templates.
Is there another way to do this? I’m engaging with our internal data analysts at Bauer to understand if there is a way to do this by using macros alongside the tools we already have. While there may be an effort required to set this up initially, one could be forgiven for thinking that 3rd party tags will be in our lives for many more years and so the time saved, and risk mitigated, will by far outweigh the work created setting this up.
Moral of the story? There are many talented individuals in your businesses. Get to know them and collaborate with them to work smarter.
4. Finding a new way of attribution modelling
In February 2024, Google removed support for its Spotlight activities, meaning that publishers are no longer able to track conversions and activities as part of Google’s 3rd party cookie deprecation.
Speaking with ad ops professionals within other publishing groups, no alternative platform has emerged blazing from the ashes ready to pick up where Google left attribution reporting and this may well be due to no standardisation between platforms; while there are differing identification methods being explored, nothing has yet stepped up to fill the gap that 3rd party cookies are leaving.
This doesn’t mean the end of attribution reporting for publishers, though. Privacy Sandbox has an attribution API that we’re currently exploring and considering how we could use this as a post-cookie tool. As the dust starts to settle (which may take a while yet as the full deprecation has been pushed back to 2025) and there is a consensus on how best to proceed, I fully expect to see new technologies surface, so I will be keeping my ear to the ground. In the meantime, we should be working closely with our advertisers to ensure that we’re delivering the optimal number of conversions for our customers.
5. Immersive deep-dives with the team
Hands up if you work with an incredibly talented team of people. Keep your hands up if you’re giving those people the opportunity to really shine through.
I’m in the middle of a roll out of a refresher training program with our ad ops team. But it’s refresher training with a difference. The aim? To get the team to think about how we can use our technologies in different ways, work more flexibly and truly embrace our customers’ evolving needs. If I’m being really honest, it’s been less about training and more about providing the team space to deep-dive platform functionality with some guidance.
How has the training been delivered? I’ve made sure I’ve moved away from the method of talking through a PowerPoint presentation and replaced this with far more engaging methods. The team have been given open ended situations in sessions, with focused time and autonomy to explore the tools that they have at their disposal. After a period of exploration, they’ve then taken turns to present their findings to their peers or enter discussion around their solutions and compare different methods of reaching a conclusion.
Sessions have been rounded off using small quizzes; apparently casual competition for bragging rights is a great motivator!
I’ve made sure to collect feedback from the team after sessions to help me to understand what they find beneficial and what can be done better in future sessions and the response to the practicality, collaboration and discussion has been overwhelmingly positive.
Further Reading
2. James Powell, Kantar Media (2023): Ad blocking trends.
This article was first published in InPublishing magazine. If you would like to be added to the free mailing list to receive the magazine, please register here.
