For example, if you have 100,000 pageviews in the news section, and you want to hit an eCPM of $10, you’d sell 10 ad slots rotating at $100 each.

The benefits of this technique:

• Advertisers are more likely to see their ads online.
• Advertisers benefit from increased page views over time.

The downsides to this technique:

• You do not benefit from flash traffic or big news.
• More difficult to grow if your page views increase.

Selling ads on a CPM basis allows you to better monetize any flash traffic or pageview growth that your site experiences. This is where your advertiser will buy 10,000 ad impressions at $10 CPM, and when that limit is reached their ad (more or less) comes down automatically.

In BLOX Ad Manager, there are several different ways that you can sell ads with limitations like this:

Impression limit + as fast as possible

This setting runs the ad as quickly as possible, with no attempt to spread the ad impressions over any period of time (regardless of the end date of the ad). It does take into consideration other ads in rotation, and will rotate between all ads in that spot, and will consider weights of all ads in that position. Every 30 minutes the limit is checked to see if it has been reached, so it is possible that an ad may go over its limit during that half hour before it is taken down.

Recommended for ads with very high impression caps, or have to compete with lots of ads in rotation. Also recommended for national or programmatic ads where the length of time doesn’t matter as much as the impressions served.

Not recommended for a low cap local advertiser who may be checking the site to see if he or she can find their ad online.

Impression limit + balance automatically

This will check daily for ad performance, and attempt to ration ad impressions so that the ad has some daily impressions for its entire lifetime (from start date to end date).

Depending on the lifetime of the ad, and the amount of impressions allowed, this daily limit can be very low and will be reached quickly each day.

For example, if you sold 10,000 impressions over 30 days, the system would try to ration the ad to only 333 (or so) impressions per day. These impressions would be served as quickly as possible each day, and then the ad would go offline for the rest of that day, until its ad ration was refreshed the next day. So it is possible, on a site with lots of impressions or not enough ads in rotation, that the ad will go offline early in the morning.

Each day the calculation is refreshed to try to make up for any under serving or over serving that may have occurred. So, even though the ad had 333 impressions originally, due to its performance that calculation may change throughout the life of the ad.

This type of ad serving is good for local advertisers who may be checking throughout the month for his or her ad to show on the site.

Impression limit + balance Automatically with Traffic Smoothing

Traffic Smoothing is an experimental option that is being tested by TownNews. It may be implemented as the default behavior of “Balance Automatically” in the future.

Traffic Smoothing attempts to look at the traffic history of the site, and takes that into consideration for its calculations. Each day, Traffic Smoothing will use the traffic history to predict impressions per hour.

In theory, this method will spread ad impressions most evenly throughout the lifetime of an ad.

Backfill ads

With any of these ad serving options where the ad has limitations (everything but Share of Voice), it is necessary to have some kind of backfill ad in rotation. With any of these limited options, there are points in the day, or even points within in hour, where the ad may be frozen in order to ensure its impression limits aren’t over-delivered substantially.

With BLOX Ad Manager, it is easy to add a backfill position! Just include a programmatic remnant ad in all rotations at 1% weight. This weight won’t have much of an impact when all ads are in active rotation, but when the rest of the ads hit their limits (either at the end of their total impressions, at the end of their daily ration, or at the end of their hourly ration), the backfill position will become all that remains and you’ll still have ads serving even though all other ads have met their limits.

This backfill ad will also come into play if there is flash traffic (due to big breaking news) and all of your impression-capped ads suddenly hit their limits. This will help you monetize these flash traffic situations.

The TownNews iQ program can help supply optimized programmatic ads!