One of the most pressing challenges for publishers and content creators is maximizing revenue through instream video ads.
Unfilled ad spaces, or “unsold inventory,” can lead to missed income opportunities, so improving your ad fill rate is crucial.
Follow this guide as it explains the ad fill rate, how to calculate it, why a low ad fill rate occurs, and how technology like JWP Connatix’s Dynamic Strategy Rules and Recommendations can significantly improve it.
Key Takeaways
- Learn how to calculate your ad fill rate and understand how it impacts your revenue.
- Identify common causes of low ad fill rates, such as insufficient demand, targeting issues, and technical challenges.
- Discover Dynamic Strategy Rules to adapt and fill ad spots automatically.
- Use Recommendations to boost engagement and increase ad opportunities.
- Create competition for ad space with Header Bidding.
What Is the Ad Fill Rate?
Ad fill rate is the percentage of ad inventory successfully filled with ads. It measures how effectively you’re monetizing your available ad space.
Use this formula to calculate the ad fill rate:
Ad Fill Rate = (Number of Ads Served / Number of Ad Requests) × 100
For example, if you receive 100 ad requests and serve 80 ads, your ad fill rate would be 80%. A higher fill rate generally indicates better monetization and more revenue, while a low fill rate suggests that there is a significant amount of unsold ad inventory.
Why a Low Ad Fill Rate Happens
A low ad fill rate happens due to several factors:
- Insufficient demand: A lack of advertiser interest in your content, often due to niche topics or low traffic.
- Geographic and device targeting issues: Advertisers may want to target specific regions or devices. If your audience doesn’t align with those parameters, it can result in unfilled spaces.
- Low-quality traffic: Poor audience targeting, such as bots or low engagement, can reduce the chance of ads being filled, as demand is directly tied to audience quality.
- Technical problems: Issues with the ad player, integrations, or ad servers may cause ads to fail to load, reducing the fill rate.
Ad formats and placement Issues: If the ad formats you offer or the timing of your ads doesn’t align with advertiser preferences, fill rates may suffer.
How to Improve Your Ad Fill Rate
Now that you are aware of the main reasons for a low ad fill rate, here are some strategies to help you effectively address these challenges:
1. Dynamic Strategy Rules for Ad Flexibility
One of the most powerful tools to improve ad fill rates is JWP Connatix’s Dynamic Strategy Rules. Activate alternative strategies to automatically adapt to situations where a pre-roll ad fails to load, or if a certain ad spot remains unfilled:
- Click-to-play teasers: If a pre-roll ad fails to load, the system can replace it with engaging teaser content that entices viewers to click and continue watching.
- Alternative ad formats: Displaying non-video ad formats, such as banner ads, ensures that the ad space is filled even when video ads aren’t available.
- Engaging overlays: The system can display interactive “Keep Watching” overlays with buttons, keeping viewers engaged even if no ad is available.
- Cross-content switching: If an ad consistently goes unfilled, the system can automatically switch to different content, providing a seamless viewing experience and ensuring ad opportunities aren’t missed.
Dynamic Strategy Rules can transform empty ad spaces into potential revenue-generating opportunities while keeping a positive viewer experience.
Learn more about Dynamic Strategy Rules
2. Optimize Video Content with Recommendations
To maximize ad fill rate, it’s crucial to keep viewers engaged across your platform, as engagement is directly correlated with ad opportunities. JWP Connatix’s Recommendations feature is a great solution for boosting engagement.
By offering personalized video recommendations based on user behavior and content traits, this feature significantly increases viewer retention, which, in turn, enhances ad fill rates.
For instance, Apartment Therapy, a leading lifestyle publisher, used Recommendations to more than double their plays in just one month, from 10M to 24M plays. This increase in plays led to a notable rise in ad revenue.
Additionally, Recommendations provides continuous video suggestions tailored to each viewer’s preferences, reducing bounce rates and increasing the chances that viewers will watch more ads.
3. Increase Fill Rate with Video Intelligence and Automated Content Insertion
A lack of video content in certain articles or sections of your site can lead to missed ad opportunities.
Article Matching can help you automatically insert relevant videos from your content library into articles, boosting the chances for ad fill. This automated system uses the article’s metadata to match the best videos from your library, which means every article that goes live will have video content ready to go, increasing the likelihood that ads will be filled.
Moreover, this approach increases the overall number of ad impressions by generating more video plays, ultimately raising the ad fill rate. This strategy also helps with engagement, encouraging viewers to stay on your platform longer and opening up more opportunities to serve ads.
4. Use Header Bidding to Increase Demand
Integrating Header Bidding into your monetization strategy can also help increase your ad fill rate. By allowing multiple demand sources to bid on your inventory in real time, header bidding creates competition for your ad space, leading to higher fill rates and potentially higher CPMs (cost per thousand impressions).
This means you’re more likely to fill all available ad spaces, especially if you’re targeting premium advertisers.
5. Maximize Viewer Engagement Across All Devices
Optimize your content for all devices, including desktop, mobile, and OTT (over-the-top) apps to improve your ad fill rate.
JW Player’s real-time video analytics provide valuable insights into how your content performs across various devices. With these insights, you can adjust your strategy to focus on high-performing devices and platforms, improving both engagement and fill rate.
Final Thoughts
Increasing your ad fill rate is not just about filling empty spaces — it’s about creating a seamless, engaging experience for your audience while maximizing revenue opportunities.
By utilizing tools like Dynamic Strategy Rules, Recommendations, and Header Bidding, you can count on your ad inventory to be filled more efficiently and your viewers stay engaged for longer.
At JWP Connatix, we offer the advanced features and insights you need to drive higher ad fill rates and ultimately increase revenue. If you want to start optimizing your video monetization strategy and boosting your ad fill rate, contact us today to learn how our platform can help.