According to IAB, the minimum requirement for an ad to be viewable is that at least half of any ad (regardless of size) is in full view in the browser. We’re striving for at least 70% of our impressions to meet this standard. To do so, we are “lazy loading” our ad placements, loading only ad slots within the current viewport or less than 1 scroll up or down depending on scrolling direction. We’re also allowing advertisers to target against their own elevated viewability thresholds, which may exceed our average.

What does this mean for WordAd users? Depending on the placement of your ads, you may see a decrease in ad impressions, particularly if you include a lot of ads lower down on your pages and below content. However, what you may also see is an increase in CPMs, as advertisers begin to see more overall value in the impressions they buy from you due to higher viewability. 

Overall, we anticipate these changes to be net positive, benefitting both our users and advertisers by increasing inventory quality and earnings.

WordAds aggregates and holistically evaluates demand from more than 50 programmatic partners. WordAds provides full yield monetization and demand mediation services to help publishers extract the greatest yield for every impression. We know that every WordAds site has options and they can run ads from other advertising partners so how does WordAds compare?

We set-up a test that would randomly select a statistically significant percentage of impression opportunities and give those to certain demand partners exclusively. Any time a partner was unable to fill the impression, an ad would be served at $0 revenue. We then extrapolated the revenue each demand partner was able to generate up to 100% and compared the results across all partners and to WordAds. 

In all cases, WordAds generated more revenue by at least a factor of 2:1 than the other demand partners tested, which included Oath, AppNexus, Pubmatic, Media.net, and Google AdSense.

What does this mean for site owners who run WordAds? Our take-away is that WordAds is delivering value by managing the auctioning of the 50 advertising partners. A site owner might seek to replicate the WordAds system but it would cost them a great deal to build the auctioning system, sign agreements with 50 ad partners and much more that the WordAds team does behind the scenes.

WordAds is now releasing an additional enhancement to the Gutenberg editor, called WordAds Blocks. Using the same block design and architecture, WordAds Blocks allows content creators to connect their content and ad placements in a more user-friendly and intuitive way. Content creators can decide where and how many ads they want to display on a given article page, what kind of ads (display or native), and when and how frequently the ads should appear – all with a few clicks.

WordAds then sources programmatic demand from our own supply side platform (SSP), which is plugged into 75 buying platforms, to fill the ads and create revenue for publishers. WordAds Blocks gives publishers much greater power and flexibility over their ads business, while also creating huge pockets of new native inventory for brand and agency buyers.

You can read about this release in Jetpack here.

The WordAds platform is not dependent on a single buyer, and other buyers have started taking up the slack already. So the model is working but we wanted to be up front that some sites, especially smaller ones, may see lower earnings until the inventory fully rebalances.

Some general guidelines to help improve earnings:

As always, you can maximize your earnings by continuing to focus on writing high quality content, posting regularly, and engaging and cultivating your audience.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is another important tactic to potentially increase traffic to your site and enhance your earnings. If you are hosted on WordPress.com, we recommend reviewing these SEO tools, and if you are self-hosted and running Jetpack, you can take advantage of Jetpack SEO tools.

In addition to advertising, our Simple Payments tool might be worth considering for your site. Simple Payments lets you create and embed credit and debit card payment buttons on your WordPress.com or Jetpack-enabled site. If you have goods or services to sell to your audience, you can easily add Simple Payments by following these instructions.

Some potential traps to avoid:

As we have noted in the past, it will hurt your earnings if you pay for potentially fraudulent traffic or if you post content or images that are not family friendly.

We appreciate your continued partnership and are working hard to refresh momentum on your earnings. To follow product updates that might help inform potential site improvements, please subscribe to the WordPress.com blog or, if you are a self-hosted site and running Jetpack, the Jetpack blog.

Starting today, all WordAds users can access daily stats on their ads performance from the Stats dashboard on WordPress.com.

This has been the #1 feature request we’ve received from users, and we’re excited to roll this out for everyone during the peak season for advertising. Now, site owners will be able to view daily snapshots of ads served (impressions), average CPM (revenue per 1,000 ad impressions), and revenue. Even better, you can roll these stats up into the weekly, monthly, or yearly view to spot larger trends as you tune your monetization strategy.

How does this benefit WordAds publishers? If you run a brand safe WordAds site advertisers trust us that your site is indeed brand safe as our system has approved it.

WordAds is for family friendly sites as our advertising buyers are not interested in mature sites or content that is not suitable for all ages.

If you are interested in learning more about brand safety and our system for addressing it, Adexchanger has an article about it here.

Ads in email subscriptions contributes to WordAds’ mission to make advertising management simple for users. Email advertising is surprisingly complicated as users must setup an email ad server and strike deals with ad buyers.

You can be assured that the email advertising program is in compliance with privacy norms and regulations.

Email Ad Example:

How does GDPR impact earnings?
The first question to ask is do you have a meaningful percentage of your site visits from the European Union (EU)? If you don’t, you shouldn’t see a significant negative impact on earnings.

If you do have EU traffic, you could potentially see a steep slide in your earnings. But you can take action to protect your earnings.

In general, WordAds tries to show personalized ads to your visitors because those ads pay at much higher rates. Prior to GDPR, WordAds displayed personalized ads to your EU visitors without having to first consent to ads related tracking. Going forward we will only show personalized ads to EU users who have given us their consent.

How do I get consent from users?

To get consent from your EU visitors to show personalized ads, you will need to install our Cookies & Consent widget on your site. This will display a consent banner that allows your site’s users to opt into ads related tracking.

When your visitors consent to ads related tracking, advertisers will bid at far higher levels. The consent gives advertisers access to information indicating whether or not a visitor is likely to be interested in their product.

Important Notice
Please note that it is your responsibility to ensure that you comply with the relevant applicable laws in your jurisdiction. This widget is designed to help you take steps towards this, but is not offered as a guaranteed or complete solution for compliance with the GDPR or other laws applicable to you.

WordPress.com and Jetpack Ads users have site-level access to toggle where ads are displayed below posts and at the top of each page. You can also obtain more granular control of your ad placements using widgets.

In some cases, we’ve found users seeking additional control to specify whether ads display on specific pages or sections, so we’ve added a few hooks to Jetpack Ads to make that possible.

Currently, there are 4 filter hooks that will allow you to disable ads based on your choosing. These can also be nested within conditional statements – for example, if you wanted to disable body content ads in a certain category only.

Each of the code examples below can be safely pasted into your theme’s functions.php file, or you can use the examples as a guide to implement the hooks in your own custom plugin or other setup.

Disabling ads in the_content

Hook: wordads_content_disable
Filters enabling ads in `the_content` filter

Example:
add_filter( 'wordads_content_disable', '__return_true' );


Disabling ads in the_excerpt

Hook: wordads_excerpt_disable
Filters enabling ads in `the_excerpt` filter

Example:
add_filter( 'wordads_excerpt_disable', '__return_true' );


Disabling ads placed within posts

Hook: wordads_inpost_disable
Allow third-party tools to disable the display of in post ads.

Example:
add_filter( 'wordads_inpost_disable', '__return_true' );


Disabling header ads

Hook: wordads_header_disable
Allow third-party tools to disable the display of header ads.

Example:
add_filter( 'wordads_header_disable', '__return_true' );


As your advertising partners, we want to see you succeed and grow your WordAds earnings over time. So we decided to answer these frequently asked questions around the perils of buying site visits.

What is non-human traffic? Advertisers pay to display their ads in front of real humans. However, fraudsters have developed various means — including bots — to manipulate advertisers into believing that their ads were viewed even when they were not. This includes malware that infects peoples’ computers and directs them to visit a list of sites to simulate authentic ad views.

Why do sites buy non-human traffic? Because non-human traffic is cheap, some site owners feel they can profit by earning more from their ads earnings than what they spend on paid site visits. As you probably figured out by now, this is short-term thinking. Advertisers will invariably catch the site owner, which will lead to the black-listing (or complete blocking) of their site.

Which companies should I avoid so that I don’t buy non-human traffic? To be on the safe side, it’s best not to buy traffic from any source. There are many companies that will sell you traffic, but they generally don’t acknowledge their use of non-human traffic sources.

What will happen if I do buy non-human traffic? Advertisers have a keen interest in showing their ads to real people, and have methods to identify non-human traffic without difficulty. For example, they often use third-party companies that screen sites for non-human traffic. Once they flag a site for non-human traffic it’s unlikely they will revert their decision. So if your site is blocked by one ad partner and you then seek a new ad partner, you might find that advertisers will still not bid on your site due to previous concerns about traffic patterns on your site.

To build your website for long-term success, we always recommend you focus on your site content and engage with your (human) visitors — that’s the most tried-and-true way to grow your traffic and your ad earnings. Besides, it’s not only the safest way. It’s also the most satisfying one.