Our sales team brings publishers more revenue
To take home the most money for the ads on your site, you need to be earning from both open market programmatic advertising and direct-sold advertising campaigns.
Any ad management company can help you connect to programmatic advertising. Fewer companies are set up with an equally strong focus on sales. Without a strong ad sales team, publishers are leaving money on the table.
Our advertiser sales team has spent years building relationships that connect advertisers with our community of vetted, high-quality publishers. This large team of sales experts focuses on telling the stories of AdThrive publishers to ad agencies and buyers so they steer as much of their advertising budget to our publishers as possible.
We do this in three main ways:
- Bringing our family of sites to life for advertisers, aka featuring the types of content their ads can run alongside, what audiences they can reach, and what makes consumers so engaged in this content.
- Showcasing the ad formats advertisers can run on AdThrive sites and what sort of performance benchmarks they can expect.
- Building great relationships with advertisers over the years and delivering proven results. It’s what continues to drive partners to want to work with us time and time again!
This is no small effort — we get as creative and specific as possible to win over advertisers and deliver amazing performance.
And, why do we do it?
Because these deals are a win for advertisers and a win for AdThrive publishers!
Our sales team brings in higher ad spending for our publishers
We’re able to provide advertisers with the trifecta of 1) quality brand-safe environments, 2) curation to relevant content and audiences, and 3) highly viewable ads.
As a result, advertisers are willing to pay more than they would in the open exchange because these campaigns provide better results for advertisers.
Most campaigns we sell directly to an advertiser pay publishers 2-3x more than a typical ad.
Direct campaigns influence higher spending across the open market
In addition to this significant direct impact, there are other benefits you might not see on the surface.
Ad buyers bid on ad impressions without knowing exactly what it will take to win. They bid what they think will work best for their business but also win the impression.
Direct campaigns running on your site send a signal to ad buyers about how much they need to pay for the impression to win it. We call this a “win rate” curve.
When advertisers place bids on the open exchange, they use algorithms to identify what they should bid for a given site and a given site visitor. It’s harder to win ad impressions on sites running high-paying direct sales deals, so the algorithms learn to bid higher for those sites in general.
The more bids you have at higher price points (bid density), the higher the bid prices for all of your ad inventory.
The direct campaigns our sales team sets up mean every advertiser spends more to show ads on our publishers’ sites!
Direct campaigns get AdThrive publishers on Allow Lists and off Block Lists
Another ‘behind the scenes’ benefit:
Our sales team’s marketing to build more direct partnerships also helps us market publishers for open exchange spending.
Many advertisers prefer to run their open market buys on a more curated version of the web (versus the whole wide web) to make sure their ads run on original, quality content appropriate for their brand.
The code words for this are “Allow Lists” — where a buyer only runs ads on the sites included in that list — and “Block Lists” — where a buyer will run ads anywhere except the sites on that list.
When we set up a new ad campaign with advertisers, we share a list of AdThrive sites, so advertisers know exactly where they will be running. And advertisers often carry this list forward to every part of their media program, including their open exchange spending — not just the budget allocated specifically to AdThrive.
Working together with an advertiser not only gives us a chance to add sites to Allow Lists, but in the rare cases where AdThrive sites are inadvertently caught up in Block Lists, we can often work with our partners to remove those blocks.
That means our sales team’s work unlocks more opportunities for our publishers to earn across the board!
How much do sales add to RPM?
There are definitely a lot of factors that play into that, from the viewability of ad placements, to how many pageviews come from the US (although we do set up deals in other countries too!), to whether a publisher is running every premium video and high-impact ad format.
Sales campaigns ebb and flow, just like open-market spending, but taking a typical month and a typical publisher (and yes, I know that’s a misnomer because you are all extraordinary!), our sales efforts raise display and video RPMs by double-digit percentage points!
Interested in joining AdThrive? Apply now.
