Ad Yield Ops 106: Identifying Underlying Issues

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Now let’s discuss Identifying the Sources of Ad Yield Performance Drops.

Now that you know there is an issue, you’re just at the beginning of your journey. It is now time to begin to diagnose the problem.

Let’s go through a list of potential areas where the performance issue may be coming from and an idea of how to diagnose if said issue is actually the one causing your performance drop. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it’s a great starting point for finding problems.

First, look for CHANGES IN USER BEHAVIOR OR EXPERIENCE. 

Often an issue with ad yield isn’t even an issue with ads at all. Check first to see if you’ve had major changes in site traffic or user behavior on the site. A good metric to look at as you check this is Ad Calls per Page View. If you see a huge difference in the number of ad calls you’re making per page view when compared to historical ad calls, it is a good indicator that something is off on the experience side of things.

Some other things you can look at which indicate a change in behavior or traffic unrelated to ads include:

• Geographical mix of the traffic
• Changes in traffic sources (e.g. Facebook users might be less valuable on your site than organic search traffic, and a surge in one may change your pageview RPM measurements)
• Changes in Page engagement: for this, you can look for changes in metrics like page views per visit and average time on page.

Next, look for ISSUES WITH A PARTICULAR AD UNIT.

Now you can step deeper into identifying if a particular ad unit is causing your performance problems. Look at the performance of each ad unit compared with historical performance to isolate if it is one unit that is causing a performance issue.

You may even want to dive one level deeper and check on the different creative sizes being called from that ad unit (as some ad units allow for calling multiple creative sizes).

After that, you can look for ISSUES WITH A PARTICULAR DEMAND SOURCE.

Check historical performance across each of the demand partners or supply side platforms (SSPs) in your header bidding stack. This will help you isolate if one SSP has stopped serving or is not performing the same as it has historically. You can look at the number of ad requests coming from each SSP and compare it to historical data to help as well. 

You may even want to go a step further and break down performance by SSP across different device categories as well, to see if it is one category of devices that is struggling on a particular demand source. 

These are a great starting point, and will help you diagnose many common problems. 

While the items we listed are some of the most common culprits for ad yield performance drops, they are far from the only ones. 

You can break down your page view RPM in a number of other ways in order to isolate problems stemming from other factors including device, country, browser, and more.

And, you may also want to look at metrics like viewability and click-through rates and compare them against historical metrics to look for any discrepancies that might provide insights into a performance drop if all else fails.