News Publisher Case Study: Boosting Ad Revenue & Fill Rate
Challenge:
A large regional news website struggled with sub-optimal fill rates across its ad inventory and needed better yield from its SSPs.
Solution:
- SSP & Ad Server Optimization
Reconfigured line-items in Google Ad Manager and implemented header bidding across three SSPs (PubMatic, Magnite, OpenX). - Creative QA & Troubleshooting
Introduced rigorous QA playbooks to eliminate creative errors that were costing impressions. - Unified Yield Dashboard Developed a custom dashboard consolidating fill, eCPM, and revenue metrics from all SSPs—enabling daily trend analysis.
Results:
| Metric | Before | After | Improvement |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fill Rate | 72% | 77% | +5 Per |
| Monthly Ad Revenue | $85,000 | $95,200 | 0.12 |
| Error-related Downtime | 8 hours/m | 1 hour/m | –88% |
By improving fill rate by 5 percentage points and reducing technical downtime, we delivered a 12% lift in monthly ad revenue for this news publisher.