How Plays Well With Butter increased RPM with a lighter ad experience

About Plays Well With Butter

Plays Well With Butter creates bold, flavor-filled recipes for home cooks who want meals that work in real life. Founder and recipe developer Jess Larson has published more than 500 thoughtfully tested recipes, each cross-tested in three or more kitchens. Alongside Jess, her husband, Chris Larson, works as the site’s Operations and Tech Lead, helping keep the business side of Plays Well With Butter moving.

Putting the recipe experience first

Like most recipe publishers, Jess and Chris understand that an intuitive, easy-to-follow page layout is an important part of the recipe experience. Readers come to the site to plan dinner, so the recipe steps, photography, and user experience need to work together.

Jess and Chris have clear standards for their ad experience: ads shouldn’t interrupt recipe steps, separate the instructions from their images, or make the page feel heavy. 

“The first thing we think about is how a decision will impact user experience,” Jess said. “Our belief is that optimizing user experience is maximizing revenue health long term.”

That philosophy shaped every decision around layout updates. Any change had to earn its place by helping readers move smoothly from searching the site, to following the recipe, to getting dinner on the table.

A partnership that keeps evolving 

Plays Well With Butter joined Raptive as an Insider seven years ago and has since reached Platinum Elite status. The partnership started strong—in the team’s first week with Raptive, they ran fewer ads compared to their previous ad provider and saw a 37% increase in RPM.

That immediate positive result established a collaborative decision-making process: Raptive makes recommendations, Jess and Chris evaluate each one (weighing them against the experience their readers expect), and together the teams test the options that make the most sense for the site.

While creators at every level have access to Raptive support and resources, those at Platinum and above receive a dedicated Creator Partnerships Manager, access to additional tools, and invitations to exclusive opportunities.

Raptive’s scale points to a lighter layout

Today, Raptive continues to identify new optimization opportunities for Plays Well With Butter. Raptive’s scale helps make that possible. Insights from more than 7,000 websites and billions of ad impressions help the team spot performance patterns and turn them into recommendations that fit each creator’s site layout and preferences.

For Plays Well With Butter, a recent Raptive analysis showed an opportunity to improve ad performance without increasing the overall ad load. It gave Jess and Chris a clear reason to explore a lighter layout that could improve the user experience as readers moved from the introduction into the recipe.

“The Raptive team was able to provide us with more detail on the underlying drivers of RPM and the metrics buyers use to price ad space, and how making slight tweaks would improve those metrics,” said Jess.

The recommendation challenged a common assumption among creators that earning more in digital publishing requires running more ads.

Refining the ad layout together

Rather than focusing on ad count alone, Raptive’s ad performance team looked at how each placement fit into the natural flow of the content. The team recommended moving away from placements that could put an ad directly after an image. Instead, their guidance was to place ads after text-based elements, such as paragraphs and lists, where they would feel more natural. The team also adjusted the video player’s placement to create a smoother reading experience within each post.

Before moving forward, Raptive shared the proposed layout with Jess and Chris, giving them the opportunity to review the changes in context and make sure they aligned with their readers’ needs.

Testing a lighter ad experience 

Before rolling out the new layout sitewide, the teams tested it. The A/B test, available to Platinum creators or above, removed approximately one content ad per page and reduced ad density by 20%. After running the test for two weeks, the results were positive. Viewability increased by about 2% while RPM remained essentially flat. 

Those results showed that Plays Well With Butter could earn more per pageview with a lighter, more consistent ad experience, so Jess and Chris felt confident going live with the updated layout across the whole site. Two weeks after implementing the new layout across the site, the results spoke for themselves.

“The ad experience actually got lighter and more consistent while RPMs increased,” said Chris. “This increased our ad revenue per page while simultaneously improving reader experience.”

Ready for an ad strategy built around your site?

Every site has its own mix of content, readers, and revenue goals. Raptive’s performance insights can help you make more informed decisions about your ad experience and your standards. Explore what a Raptive partnership could mean for your site by filling out the form below.