3 tips to optimize UX, SEO and ad monetization

User experience is the key to boosting your conversion rate and optimizing your search rankings.

Google pays particularly close attention to this topic: since 2021, the web giant has analyzed a website’s UX through the Core Web Vitals and penalizes those that fail to deliver good navigation to users.

In this article, Opti Digital, an AdTech company that develops advertising monetization solutions for media publishers, shares its UX tips to optimize your revenue through an ideal user experience and to limit the impact of advertising on your CWV scores.

Finding the optimal setup for a good user experience and strong ad performance

Optimizing a website’s advertising profitability doesn’t mean flooding it with ads of all kinds.

Today, a few solutions do exist to maximize advertising profitability while maintaining a good user experience, including automatic ad insertion.

Automatic ad insertion

This feature makes it possible to monetize a publisher’s content in an innovative way.

An algorithm analyzes a media site’s advertising potential in order to automatically display ads where they are likely to perform best.

The ad placements are therefore distributed harmoniously and close to attention zones, within the heart of the content and alongside it.

Example of in-content insertion, at Numerama.com

As offered by Opti Digital, this solution is fully customizable: you can define a number of rules and adjust the advertising pressure to respect the publisher’s strategy.

When it comes to results, this technique has proven itself! Across its clients, Opti Digital records on average a 15% increase in publisher revenue for an equivalent number of visits thanks to this feature.

Adopting the right strategy: “test and learn”

A/B testing is a method that consists of testing two configurations simultaneously in order to identify the most suitable one for your strategy.

In terms of monetization, the goal is generally to generate more advertising revenue while affecting UX as little as possible.

An A/B test is run over a certain period of time in order to produce results and analyze them, the aim being to run tests with agility and make the right decisions.

By pairing the automatic ad insertion feature with A/B testing, you can strike a good balance between a good user experience and optimal monetization.

A/B tests can help you:

• Add or remove a size within an ad block;
• Find the right advertising pressure by adjusting the distance in pixels between ads;
• Add an ad placement and analyze the impact on revenue per page;
• Conversely, remove an ad placement that degrades your user experience and/or slows down navigation;
• Speed up automatic ad refreshes and observe the impact on loading times.

Optimizing your website therefore relies above all on regularly monitoring your various metrics.

Today there are several tools to help you in this process and spot potential errors, such as PageSpeed Insights, Google Search Console, Chrome UX Report, and more. The AdTech company Opti Digital offers publishers a comprehensive Analytics Platform that lets you test, analyze and optimize your results.

Source: Excerpt from the A/B Test Results page of the Publisher Dashboard for one of our clients.

Core Web Vitals: understanding and optimizing your LCP, FID and CLS scores

Since 2021, the Core Web Vitals have been among the metrics Google takes into account for organic search rankings, alongside mobile-friendliness and secure browsing.

As a result, all of the elements that make up your web pages, and that can affect your site’s overall performance, are analyzed by Google’s algorithm: text, video, image, code, advertising, and more.

The Core Web Vitals are made up of the following 3 metrics:

The LCP score

The LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) metric aims to analyze a site’s loading time. Google recommends an LCP below 2.5 seconds. In fact, if a page’s loading time goes from 1 second to 3 seconds, the bounce rate increases by 32%.

A poor LCP is generally caused by several factors:

• A long server response time;
• JavaScript and CSS code that blocks rendering;
• Resources that take time to load (images, videos, text blocks, etc.);
• Client-side rendering (the execution of JavaScript code in the client browser).

To optimize your LCP score, Opti Digital recommends:

• Integrating a CMP (Consent Management Platform) and making sure it displays fully and quickly. This banner lets you collect your users’ consent for the processing of their personal data;
• Making external scripts conditional on the consent signal. The CMP must block all scripts that use cookies (ads, social media widgets, Analytics, etc.). By blocking these scripts, their loading time will not be counted in the Page Speed calculation;
• And checking the performance of your servers / CDN / caches.

The FID score

The FID (First Input Delay) metric measures the time it takes for a page to become interactive, that is, the time between the moment a user first interacts with a page and the browser’s response time.

An ideal FID score should not exceed 100 ms.

The main cause of a poor FID score is heavy JavaScript execution. In fact, just as with the LCP score, large amounts of CSS and JavaScript can block rendering. Likewise, the size of scripts can also slow down the server response time.

Publishers are therefore advised to set up lazy loading for ads and for components at the bottom of the page, but also for non-critical CSS.

Lazy Loading is a technical process that consists of displaying an element only when the user navigates near its location.

When this feature is not implemented, all of a page’s elements load at the same time, which harms your site’s loading speed and therefore your SEO.

This feature also helps boost the viewability rate of your ads and thus your eCPMs (or revenue per thousand impressions).

The CLS score

The CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) score takes into account a page’s visual stability, and in particular how often users experience unexpected layout shifts.

For a good user experience, the ideal measurement should be below 0.1.

Among the elements that can affect the CLS score are notably:

• images without dimensions;
• ads, embedded elements and iframes without dimensions;
• dynamic content.

Image without and with defined space

To optimize the CLS score, Opti Digital notably offers its publishers a UX optimization feature that reserves space for ads.

Indeed, ad placements often put ads of various sizes into competition, along with automated refreshes, which can cause unexpected content jumps.

To avoid this, when you monetize your site, it is important to reserve a minimum height for each ad placement, based on the sizes included in each ad block.

Beyond advertising, it is also essential to reserve space for all widgets (embeds) and dynamic content, as well as to make sure that all images have dimensions.

To learn more about Opti Digital’s solutions, feel free to contact them.