This is a guest post by Kathleen Booth, VP of Marketing at clean.io.

Whether you consider yourself an online publisher, a content creator, or an app developer, your key money-making drivers start with traffic, the volume of ads, and your user engagement.

But great content doesn't come cheap, and if you're spending money and time driving eyeballs to your site or mobile app, keeping them there with a flawless user experience should be your number one priority.

Even if you have curated the perfect browsing experience with subtle ads that delight your users, if you aren't protecting your site from malicious advertisers you can lose your users to harmful experiences that will turn them away from your brand and cut into your overall advertising revenue.

Making sure your methods for monetization include the management of malicious ads is incredibly important in keeping your ad revenue secure.

Playwire is so invested in ensuring that publishers can maximize their yield, that we've taken steps to ensure that all of our publishers are protected from day one. By partnering with clean.io, a highly effective anti-malvertising solution, we keep our publishers safe.

Read on to learn more about how malvertising negatively impacts advertising revenue in this post by clean.io VP of Marketing, Kathleen Booth.

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The Complete Ad Revenue Resource Center

Protecting Your Ad Revenue

Making the most of your ad inventory means keeping your bounce rates low and your session lengths long. Ultimately, if you win with these metrics, you'll increase the overall number of impressions delivered to each user.

But it also requires demand density - creating more competition for every eyeball on your site. And when you work to maximize yield, sometimes bad actors find their way into your party.

Bad ads come in a number of ways and will wreak havoc on your user's experience, your website KPIs, and your ad revenue.

Malicious ads like these, or really any ads that result in a misuse of the original intent of an ad unit, fit under the umbrella of malvertising.

Disruptive Ads

The first kind of bad ads are ones that are disruptive to your content. This means that they don't match your website's messaging, are advertising for a competitor, or take the form of pop-ups and redirects that frustrate your user.

While not particularly threatening to the user, they can do serious harm to your website's KPIs and brand reputation. Users will relate these frustrations and shady advertisements with your brand, and are likely to steer clear from your site in the future - or even worse, decide to use an ad blocker.

Malicious Ads

The second kind of ad offers real risks to those visiting your site. These ads are purposely deceitful and are usually affiliated with online scams and viruses.

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Read the publishers' guide to ad revenue.

The Negative Effects of Bad Ads

In both cases, not only are these ads ruining your site experience, but they are also destroying your ad revenue.

Your site KPIs are closely tied to your ad revenue. Simply put:

  1. The more traffic you have, the more ads you are serving.
  2. The longer a user stays on the site, the more impressions you can serve them.

So as a publisher, you want to have as many page views and the longest session lengths you can in order to boost your revenue per user.

But if a user that would normally spend three minutes browsing your content (and over that three minutes visit multiple pages and view dozens of ads) arrives on your site and is redirected right away, your session length is going to go from three minutes down to 20-30 seconds.

And the number of ads you serve is going to go from dozens to just a handful, making these bad ads a direct threat to your monetization strategy and ad revenue.

Listen to your customers, check your KPIs, and take the time to explore the front end of your site.

If you are struggling to explain drop-offs in session lengths and spikes in bounce rates, it's likely your website is being attacked with bad ads.

Prefer not to have to think about the negative effects of bad ads? We've built protection right into our monetization platform. Contact our team to learn more about how you can increase yield and protect yourself from bad ads!

Fight Back With Your Wallet

Here at clean.io, we believe in the philosophy that the only real way to solve this problem is to make the bad actors pay for the ads they're buying and destroy their ROI.

Our code uniquely fires at run time, and behaviourally blocks malicious experiences from disrupting your user experience.

So not only are you and your users protected, every time you serve an ad you're going to get paid. The bad actor buys an ad, we render their image but prevent the malicious JavaScript from taking over the user experience.

Eventually, these malvertisers will see they're buying ads that aren't producing any engagement for them and will stop targeting your site because cleanAD has crushed that part of the value chain, bringing their ROI down to zero. Bad actors are the most sophisticated 'performance advertisers' on the planet. If their ROI is not there, they will stop their ad spend - which means they'll stop attacking sites protected by clean.io.

With cleanAD, not only are you protecting your ability to create content for your audience, as well their ability to safely and pleasantly enjoy that display or video content, but you are also joining a campaign that will disincentivize malicious advertising as a whole.

Summing Up

One of the greatest benefits of Playwire is its ability to maximize your ad yield, but increasing that demand doesn't come without risks.

Luckily, if you have Playwire you are automatically protected with cleanAD and are saving your users from harmful and disruptive experiences, protecting your site KPIs, and still getting paid for any ad impression claimed by malicious ads.

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