2. Advertising standards
(AAF) Ad annoyance factor: OK, I made that acronym up, but what I'm referring to here is a very real problem. Consider a publisher that allows its site to propagate advertising that continually disrupts its users (think interstitials, host-initiated page takeovers, and excessive pop-ups). Bad for users? Yes. Bad for the site long-term? Yes, because it may lose audience to less annoying alternatives. Bad for advertisers? Yes! Even if the ads you serve are mindful of the user experience, positioning your brand on a site adjacent to annoying, intrusive advertising will not only distract a user from your message, but it could make you part of the user's negative experience.
Advertising to content ratio: Sites that are littered with ad messaging to the point where more than half of the page content is made up of advertising not only dilute the value of their content, but they dilute the impact value of their impressions. Some publishers do this in an attempt to garner the maximum revenue from each impression they serve (why collect revenue from only two advertisers, when you can collect revenue from six or more?), but in doing so they are also diluting the value of each impression they deliver to advertisers because consumer attention is being shared across not just two or three advertisers, but sometimes six or more! This site attribute embodies one of the simplest realities of advertising: Environments that put your message front and center and that limit competition among the voices of other advertisers are more likely to get noticed by consumers and perform better -- and therefore should be (and are) worth more.
Ad quality: Ads are part of a site's content too. Does the site allow low-grade, questionable advertising content to appear on its pages? Advertisers sometimes forget that advertising content is part of a user's overall website experience, and that their brands are going to show up next to that content. Think annoying flashy, blinking ads, questionable "get rich quick" promotions, and "miracle" belly fat reduction ads. Just as any reputable advertiser has standards about the type of site content they do and do not wish to be associated with, they should factor in the impact that placement alongside distasteful ads could have on the perception of their brand.
Ad positioning: How valuable is an ad that never gets seen? Ad placements that appear below the website fold stand a very real chance of never being seen by their intended audience, at least some of the time. This dilutes the overall value of those impressions to you as an advertiser since you are billed for those impressions whether your ads are seen or not. Consider how the ads are placed on a property and how that affects their visibility. Certainly ads that are positioned within a site's core content (i.e., rectangles embedded within articles) are more valuable than those that appear randomly, well below the fold, or, believe it or not, even those that appear too high above the fold. Sites that are designed with long headers force users to scroll downward to get to the real content they're looking for. Users come to the site for content, not ads, so after users take one tiny scroll with their mouse to get to the content they seek, an ad served at the top of the page is suddenly nowhere to be seen.
3. Design and layout
Article parsing: In the case of what I'm referring to here as "article parsing," the publisher takes a full-length article and divides it into several smaller snippets (sometimes as little as a paragraph in length) and places each snippet on a separate page. Users are required to continually click "next" to get through the article in its entirety. This is a tactic designed to stretch the ad revenue potential of any one article, spreading it across a series of pages (and impressions) instead of just one. While this may serve up short-term revenue spikes, the long-term effects on user experience and advertisers' campaign performance can be detrimental. For users, being required to continually click to take in the full length of an article can be annoying enough to turn them off a site (or limit visitation to that site) over the long term. But the takeaway for advertisers is that impression value in these placement scenarios is greatly lowered because the user is so focused on clicking next and getting through the article that they pay little, if any, attention to the surrounding ads.
Auto-refresh: Some websites auto-refresh because the links on their pages regularly change throughout the day. The time between refreshes can vary, but it's not uncommon to see them occur as frequently as every minute. Consider the following example: A user is consuming content/advertising on a page that is configured to auto-refresh every minute. The user gets up to pour a cup of coffee, stops to chat with a colleague, and returns to his or her desk 15 minutes later. In that time, the publisher would have just delivered 15 advertisements to no one! Obviously, this is an isolated example, but on a large site, should a similar situation apply to even a small fraction of its visitors, that would add up to a lot of impressions per format each day that get seen by absolutely nobody. Where's the advertising value in that?
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