How to Run an Ad Unit Exhaustion Analysis Using AdNgin

How to Run an Ad Unit Exhaustion Analysis Using AdNgin

If you’re not any of the above, ad exhaustion analysis is the process of testing ad creatives — the design and text of ads — to learn more about which perform the best not just on the first impression, but over time as users are exposed to them repeatedly over a specific period of time.
What is ad exhaustion analysis used for?

Usually savvy advertisers with ninja like qualities will perform these tests frequently. However, large publishers are quickly adopting new tactics to increase ad revenue and catapult their ad operations into the innovative front lines of Ad Tech.

With dozens or hundreds of employees and a very comprehensive list of expenses, they’re under a huge amount of pressure to maximize the revenue they earn from direct advertising clients and networks.

But that doesn’t mean that money matters more to them than it does to you. Right?!

So let’s lift back the curtain on their operations. We can usually see that direct ad buys make up the majority (or at least a significant portion) of their ad revenue. As such, optimizing this source is a crucial part of optimizing earnings as a whole.

As an AdSense publisher, you can apply the principles of ad exhaustion analysis to earn more from your traffic and generate a higher RPM from AdSense, even if you don’t have the traffic of a Diply, BuzzFeed, or BBC.
How Google AdSense publishers can perform an ad exhaustion analysis using AdNgin

Well, the principles laid down by the big publishers can be used very effectively to guide you in your AdSense optimization, even if you can’t control the exact creatives that are shown on your website.

Using AdSense, you can still control which advertisers you let onto your website, which ad sizes you choose to display, and in which placements you choose to show them.
Performing an ad exhaustion analysis for specific advertisers

To do this, you don’t actually need AdNgin [don’t tell our boss we told you that]. Just log into your AdSense account and remove any advertisers that don’t perform well using the Advertiser URLs filter in “Allow and block ads.”

Performing an ad exhaustion analysis for different ad sizes

Could you earn more from AdSense by replacing your 300×250 ad units with 336×280 units? If you don’t test, you’ll never know. AdNgin lets you test different ad sizes to learn which perform better, helping you optimize your website’s ad units for a higher RPM and more revenue.

First, if you don’t already have an AdNgin account, create a free account or ask for a demo to learn more about how AdNgin can help you optimize your website’s AdSense earnings.

Once you’ve finished installing AdNgin, start your ad exhaustion analysis by navigating to the Experiments page in our interface. Click “Add Experiment” to create your new experiment.

Open the Editor, then drag and drop new AdSense units onto the page to create a new layout.

Once you’ve dragged the ad units on the page, select the first ad group and click the + icon to add a new ad unit to each group. Make sure you choose a different size for the second ad unit so that you can compare their performance.

Now that you’ve created your experiment, it’s time to determine how much traffic you’ll send to your existing page (control) and your experiment. The more traffic you send to each variation, the more reliable your data and insights will be.

You can set the percentage of traffic being sent to your control version through your setting page:

Once you’ve sent traffic to each variation, you’ll be able to see which achieves the higher RPM and earns the most revenue.

Using this data, you can optimize your ad sizes to increase your earnings and generate more revenue from your website.
Performing an ad exhaustion analysis for different ad placements

Start by following the same process as you would for an ad size analysis. Click the Experiments link in the AdNgin interface, then click “Add Experiment” to create your new experiment.

Open the Editor, then drag and drop AdSense units onto the page to create a new layout. Now here’s the difference: place each ad group in a different location on the page so that you can test the effects of different ad placements on clickthrough rate and RPM.

Just like before, you can monitor your experiment’s progress and performance from the AdNgin dashboard.

Once your experiments are complete

We cannot stress enough just how important it is to run these analyses on your ad units. It does a lot more than just make you look like you’re running with the big dogs. It actually produces results. You can check out our case studies page to see for yourself how other publishers used AdNgin

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