1. Authentic Content Experiences: Pivoting Based on Data

Generic, cookie-cutter content no longer cuts through the noise, especially during high-demand periods like Q4. To connect with your audience, it’s crucial to create authentic content that aligns with their needs, preferences, and behaviors.

How can publishers achieve this? 

Start by looking at your existing data and using it to pivot your content strategies. Analyze metrics such as backlinks, organic search performance, and Page Speed Insights. These are not just metrics to check off but are critical indicators of how your content resonates.

By leveraging this data, publishers can ensure they are not only creating high-quality, relevant content but are also refining it to meet the evolving demands of their audience as Q4 progresses and into the next year as well. 

2. First-Party Data: Your Secret Weapon

With third-party cookies slowly becoming obsolete, first-party data has emerged as a critical asset for publishers. This data—whether it’s demographic information, browsing behavior, or engagement patterns—is unique to your platform and provides deep insights into your audience. More importantly, it allows you to create personalized ad experiences, which is crucial for creating an engaging experience for your audience on the website.

Using first-party data strategically enables you to:

• Segment audiences more effectively: By creating targeted audience segments based on first-party data, you can deliver highly relevant content and ads. This is especially useful during the holiday season when user behavior is more intent-driven.
• Optimize ad placements: With first-party data, you can better understand which pages, formats, or times of day perform best, helping you optimize your ad placements to ensure maximum engagement and revenue.
• Create custom audience packages: If you’re working with advertisers directly, offering packages based on first-party data can lead to premium CPMs and stronger partnerships.

Tapping into this data also allows you to demonstrate the value of your audience to advertisers, especially those looking for niche, high-quality traffic.

3. Partner with the Right Demand Sources for Diverse Ad Placements

Q4 is not just about maximizing pageviews—it’s about maximizing the value of those pageviews. As we have seen with our current publishers, video ads, in particular, are in high demand in Q4, with advertisers often willing to pay a premium for these placements. 

• Private Marketplace (PMP) deals: These can be a powerful tool in Q4, as many advertisers are looking for exclusive, premium inventory. Establishing PMP deals with advertisers can lead to higher eCPMs, especially when offering access to targeted, niche audiences backed by first-party data.

Freestar’s technology, for instance, provides access to a wide range of demand sources while also ensuring that the most lucrative opportunities are maximized across all ad formats. Reach out to us to learn more about this. 

4. Review and Adjust Block Lists

Every publisher’s block list evolves over time. However, as Q4 approaches, it’s essential to review your block lists to ensure you’re not inadvertently blocking valuable demand sources.

• Revisit ad categories: Certain ad categories (e.g., political, retail, e-commerce) experience a surge in demand during Q4. Ensure that your block lists are not excluding these valuable categories, unless absolutely necessary.

5. Constant Optimization of Ad Units

Ad placements and formats that worked well in Q1 may not be as effective in Q4. Therefore, it’s crucial to continuously optimize your ad units throughout the holiday season.

• A/B testing: Conduct A/B tests on different ad placements, sizes, and formats to understand what works best with your audience. Minor changes in ad layouts or sizes can significantly impact engagement and revenue.

How Freestar Can Help You Monetize These Strategies

Freestar’s comprehensive approach to ad monetization makes it easier for publishers to execute these strategies effectively. With Freestar, publishers can tap into advanced optimized ad placements in real-time to maximize revenue. 

As the Q4 season heats up, publishers who combine authentic content experiences with smart ad monetization strategies will have the upper hand. By leveraging first-party data, optimizing ad units, and working with the right partners, you can unlock the full revenue potential of the holiday season. And with Freestar as your ad monetization partner, you’ll be well-positioned to turn those strategies into real results.

WATCH THE WEBINAR ON-DEMAND

The post Top 5 Key Takeaways from our Webinar: Maximizing Q4 Ad Revenue first appeared on Freestar.

1. Updating High-Traffic Content

Refresh Last Year’s Top Performers
Your top-performing content from last year should be a priority for updates. Pages that previously attracted high engagement, like gift guides, product reviews, and seasonal travel recommendations, are likely to perform well again. Refreshing these pieces with updated trends, new links, or current recommendations can help boost their relevance and ranking in search results.

Leverage Seasonal and Event-Based ContentHoliday-themed content is incredibly valuable in Q4, but don’t forget about other key spending events that can drive traffic. In years with political elections, there’s an uptick in ad spend around political campaigns. Similarly, major sports seasons like the NFL and NBA bring advertisers looking to target engaged audiences during key sporting events. Make sure to align your DIY guides, travel tips, and holiday shopping lists with these pivotal moments to capture relevant ad revenue.

2. Analyzing Data for Strategic Insights

Dive Into Your Data
Looking at past and current traffic data can reveal critical insights for where your focus should be. Understanding what content is driving the most engagement and ad performance will help you replicate those successes. Use this data to optimize ad placements, refresh top-performing pages, and make informed decisions about future content.

Traffic Trends and Recovery
While some publishers are experiencing recovery in their traffic, especially quality publishers producing reliable and valuable content, others are facing challenges. Understanding the broader traffic trends in your industry can help you anticipate changes and prepare for fluctuations. Freestar can assist with analyzing these trends and suggesting actionable steps to optimize for recovery.

3. Optimizing for SEO

Focus on SEO Best Practices
Quality content goes hand in hand with strong SEO. Update meta descriptions, alt texts, and ensure your content is optimized for mobile users. Q4 is competitive, so making sure your site is search engine-friendly will help capture more organic traffic. Don’t forget to focus on keyword optimization around trending holiday search terms!

Boost Performance with Direct PMPs
Private Marketplace Deals (PMPs) are a powerful tool to secure high-value, targeted ad placements. By offering premium ad inventory to select advertisers, you can ensure higher CPMs and better fill rates. It’s crucial to position your site as a valuable, high-quality partner to direct advertisers, especially during this busy season when demand is high.

4. Capitalizing on Traffic Trends

Scale Issues and Efficiency
With scaling challenges still impacting many, now is the time to focus on doing more with less. Efficient ad layout, strategic partnerships, and traffic quality will become increasingly important in Q4. Quality over quantity is key – advertisers are looking for reliable, high-engagement audiences, and this can improve your value in direct campaigns and PMP deals.

How Freestar Can Help

Freestar continues to support publishers by analyzing traffic trends, offering strategic insights, and ensuring you make the most of your Q4 opportunities. Our header bidding technology and network of demand partners can help you unlock new revenue streams while ensuring high-quality ads and traffic recovery.

The post Maximizing Q4 Ad Revenue: A Guide, Part 2 first appeared on Freestar.

The post Maximizing Q4 Ad Revenue: A Guide, Part 1 first appeared on Freestar.

Publishers are increasingly reliant on first-party data to drive ad revenue and deliver personalized experiences to their audiences. However, effectively leveraging this first party data can be a complex task. This is where identity solutions (ID) come into play and create efficiency. By providing a unified view of users across different devices and platforms, identity solutions enable publishers to maximize the value of their first-party data.

Rich Audience Segmentation

This allows for more personalized ad targeting and content delivery, leading to improved user engagement and higher click-through rates allowing users to spend more time on the website which in any intent signal tracking and push them to come as returning users to the site. This increases quality traffic on the site which helps in organic ranking across. 

Addressable Inventory Across Browsers

With identity solutions, publishers can track users across different browsers and devices, ensuring that their ad targeting remains consistent and effective. This enables publishers to reach their audiences on a wider range of platforms, increasing their potential ad revenue.

Improved Data Privacy

The lack of consent from IOS users including Safari have hit eCPMs hard, with revenue dropping drastically across the board. Survey data shows that eCPMs on an average, 70% lower than those from publishers’ addressable inventory. These impacts depend heavily on the percentage of traffic coming from non-Chrome browsers, which can make up about 40-50% of total traffic in regions like the USA, UK, and Australia.

Identity solutions can be implemented in a way that respects user privacy by obtaining explicit consent for data collection and usage. This helps publishers comply with data privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA, mitigating the risk of fines and penalties.

Enhanced Contextual Targeting

Identity solutions can be combined with contextual targeting to deliver ads that are highly relevant to the content users are consuming. This improves user experience and leads to higher engagement rates and better ad performance on the site creating an overall positive user experience for visitors.

Increased eCPMs

By delivering more targeted and relevant ads, publishers can command higher eCPMs from advertisers. This translates into increased ad revenue for publishers, ultimately improving their bottom line.

Better Measurement and Data Attribution

Identity solutions provide more accurate tracking of user behavior and ad performance, allowing publishers to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns. Publishers are in need of a secure storage solution for their growing first-party data, and a data lake is often the go-to choice. Unlike traditional databases, data lakes can handle both structured and unstructured data. Publishers can safely store all customer information and easily create custom datasets when required.

Improved User Experience

Identity solutions enable publishers to deliver personalized content and recommendations based on user preferences, improving the overall user experience.

Enhanced Ad Fraud Prevention

Identity solutions can help detect and prevent ad fraud by identifying suspicious patterns and malicious activity. This protects publishers’ ad revenue from fraudulent traffic and ensures that their campaigns are delivering genuine results.

Advertisers and publishers can work together through data clean rooms, enabling them to share data in a privacy-compliant manner. Stand alone  clean rooms, in particular, allow data owners to match similar audience segments and improve user profiles using look-alike modeling, while personal information remains anonymous. 

Greater Ad Inventory Monetization

Identity solutions enable publishers to optimize their ad inventory by matching the right ads with the right users. This maximizes the revenue potential of ad inventory and ensures that publishers are getting the best possible rates for their ad space.

Long term viability

Identity solutions are designed to be adaptable to future industry changes, such as the evolving landscape of data privacy regulations and technological advancements. This ensures that publishers’ ad revenue strategies remain viable and effective in the long run and thus being able to be agile in motion. Through a definite ID framework publishers can collect data in the way they observe it from users’ behaviors and actions on their sites, while advertisers can collect it to help with targeting and campaign measurement which as mentioned above will increase user engagements, eCPMs, inventory management and higher ad revenue. 

What does it mitigate?

This reduces all risks involved in the mapping of audiences and segments between advertisers and publishers, in the programmatic ecosystem where there are many intermediaries and bidders.

At Freestar, we specialize in helping publishers navigate these complexities and optimize their monetization strategies. Don’t let the competition leave you behind—contact us today to learn how we can help you implement an ID Graph solution and unlock your full revenue potential.

The post Top 10 Reasons ID Solutions Help Publishers Leverage First-Party Data for Increased Ad Revenue first appeared on Freestar.

Of course, optimizing for Google features tends to be more complex compared to your average SEO efforts. This is because Google likes to use a variety of different search engine result page (SERP) features to display the most valuable and newsworthy content. Therefore, each feature has its own set of ranking guidelines and reporting capabilities.

In this article, we’re going to talk about the differences among the Google features as well as how to optimize for them to get more web traffic, and a list of what you need to avoid/focus on to get featured. 

Read on to learn more. 

What Are the Different Google Features and How Do I Optimize For Them? 

Optimizing for Google features is easier when you understand how your site performs against each feature’s guidelines. 

Let’s dive in:

Google News

Google News is essentially a news aggregator. It’s available on both mobile and web browsers, and it works by sifting through websites to pull up which are most newsworthy per each user search. 

Publishers used to have to manually submit their sites for approval to get a news feature. Now, all you have to do is produce high-quality content that also complies with the Google News content policies.

Technically speaking, as long as you follow these content policies, it’s possible for any type of content to appear in Google News. However, the primary thing you’ll want to avoid is content that is violent, dangerous, hateful, or deceptive. 

Moreover, when it comes to optimizing your content for Google News, it’s best practice to demonstrate E-A-T: Expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. In addition to E-A-T, Google also looks for content that is both unique and displays diverse viewpoints, which puts a greater emphasis on authority and the overall content quality. 

So, if your goal is to rank for a Google News feature, you’ll want to put out comprehensive content that’s accurate in its reporting of current events and demonstrates subject matter expertise with a fresh standpoint on the subject in question. 

Quick publishing is also a key element in getting a news feature to garner more web traffic. However, this is arguably the hardest feature to compete for.

Google Discover

Google Discover was launched in 2018 as part of the Google Chrome mobile app release. A user opens the Chrome app to search, and just below the search bar, Google will automatically populate with content they believe the user will like. 

Google Discover likes to recommend personalized content to users based on their search history across all Google web products. This means it gathers specific data such as location history, topics that users follow, location settings, and so on. This also makes getting a feature on Google Discover different from getting organic traffic, which is excellent for businesses since it essentially retargets an audience using their own interests.

More good news: Virtually any type of content is eligible to appear in the Google Discover feature without having to use sitemaps or specifically structured data. In terms of optimization, however, Google does require you to use at least one high-quality image that’s considered ‘compelling’ and is at least 1,200 pixels wide. AMP implementation is also known to improve Discover performance. 

The other guidelines for optimization include focusing on content that is ‘timely’ regarding users’ current interests. The content must also tell a story well or provide unique insights to a hot topic. Additionally, it’s important to avoid clickbait at all costs and ensure that you’re including clear dates, bylines, and information about the authors of the content or the publication or network behind the content.

In a nutshell, Google Discover content tends to consist of articles that are able to evoke strong emotions from readers while also being highly entertaining.

Google Top Stories

Google’s Top Stories feature is a goldmine for organic web traffic, especially for news publishers. It also works for both mobile and desktop Google applications. 

Google Top Stories is a carousel of current trending news stories — and we’re talking about anything and everything that’s considered trending. It’s not uncommon to see seasonal evergreen search queries return several options in the Top Stories placement. Up until October of last year, only AMP articles were eligible for the Google Top Stories feature on mobile devices, but that is no longer the case. 

Google Top Stories is arguably the most confusing feature to rank for as it doesn’t have a dedicated reporting panel in the Google Search Console or Google Analytics. Therefore, the best way to optimize for Google Top Stories is to use major keywords in your headlines and ensure that the name of the subject you’re targeting — the person’s name, location, or general thing — is also clearly stated.

Another key ranking factor is to keep your articles brand safe. Avoid using profanity, clickbaity, and anything that would be considered inappropriate for an article headline. Make sure the author’s name, and the publish date appear at the top of the post.

In a sense, it’s best to also stick with the Google News feature policies to rank for the Top Stories feature. Stick with E-A-T in addition to the optimization rules, and make sure you’re putting out content that’s eye-catching, engaging, and insightful. 

What You Need to Avoid

At Freestar, our publishers often receive organic search traffic from Google, but struggle to in Google News, Google Discover or Top Stories? Or we get asked “why did I receive that traffic but don’t any longer?”  More often than not, it’s because publishers aren’t following Google’s guidelines. 

To be eligible for Google News/Discover/Top Stories, publishers must avoid:

• Publishing false information
• Vulgar language & profanity
• Promoting hate speech or violence
• Publishing sexually explicit content
• Including non-News URLs in your News XML Sitemap
• Purely re-publishing the same information that’s already public, attempt to add a POV or new facts
• Having more ads on the page than content, find the balance between monetization and UX
• Concealing sponsored content or affiliate content as pure editorial content – disclose it to the user

What You Should Focus On

Appearing in these placements can be harder than normal organic search placements. We like to tell our publishers while avoiding the list mentioned above, they should really be focusing on:

• Set up your Publisher Center. If you haven’t already, check out the Publisher Center FAQ.
• Create a Google News XML sitemap and submit to Google Search Console.
• Clean up old content if it violates these policies, as Google looks at content site-wide.
• Improve E-A-T – it’s essential that your publication shows expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness and your content brings exceptional value to the reader.
• Increase your transparency, like including post dates, bylines, author profiles, journalist’s bio, credentials, and area of expertise.

Key Takeaways

When you put out content that’s compelling and unique, more people will want to click on your headlines and stories to visit your site. Of course, if you’re putting out news that’s similar to everyone else’s you’ll just end up getting buried in the SERPs. 

So, to rank for one or all of Google’s features to get more web traffic, the best thing you can do is focus on how to make your content better and different compared to others. It also wouldn’t hurt to throw in a Google News Sitemap to your blog or website.

The post How to Get Google Traffic From Sources Other Than Organic Search first appeared on Freestar.

Full-service video production agency, LAI Video recently quoted that “more than 80% of traffic online is video traffic, as the content people want has changed from text to images to videos and now livestreams.”.

For publishers who haven’t already jumped on the video bandwagon, let these three simple benefits be the last three you read before taking the plunge!

Why Publishers Should Invest in Video

#1 Publishers make more ad revenue from video content.

We never recommend going overboard with the number of ads on your website, but we do believe in pushing right up to the point of truly getting our partners the revenue they deserve. And it wouldn’t be very #publisherfirst of us if we didn’t truly advocate for the most profitable of ad products.

Advertisers pushing budgets to video isn’t slowing down either, and why would they when data continues to scale in its favor. Insivia recently reported that viewers retain 95% of a message when they see it in a video, compared to 10% when reading it in text. Enough said.

Because of that, CPMs are typically 3-4x higher than display, and can make up to 20% of a publisher’s overall advertising revenue. Freestar offers several high-quality video ad products, all customized for user experience and speed.

It’s quite common for Freestar publishers who have reservations about the video player, to initially try it as a test without custom content. Once they see the revenue impact, it’s at that point they go down the route of creating custom video to supplement their regular content.

#2 Website engagement indicates a good user experience.

Video production company, Mist Media, revealed case study data to support that having a video on a landing page makes it 53% more likely to show up on page one of Google search results.

I did a similar case study, specific to the food niche by weeding through hundreds of recipe query top performers. Ninety-five percent of positions 1-3 include video on the page. Of that, only 50% of the videos were actually specific to the recipe displayed on the page.

Live search results are a great indicator of what Google is valuing for organic search, and one of the strongest signals in the search algorithm is page engagement. Remember, Google favors the best quality of content, and content isn’t just the text on the page. It’s all the content, including video, text, images, user comments, links, and more.

When Google sees metrics like low bounce rate, high pages per session and high time on page, it indicated a good user experience and this is rewarded in Google search results.

#3 Video content can be more useful than static text and images.

With the right strategy, video content significantly enhances the user experience of a web page. And although we still recommend running video ad products even without custom content, that should be your entry point to video revenue, but not the stopping point.

For certain content topics, including a video helps the user understand. Here are several examples when adding a video would make the most sense.

– DIY crafts and projects

– Household or car repair

– Recipes

– Hair and makeup tutorials

For content like this, having written step by step instructions, with an accompanying video, provides the best experience for the user.

For these three reasons and many more, publishers must have a strategy for video content and monetization. If you have any questions or want to talk to Freestar about this further, contact marketing@freestar.com today!

The post 3 Simple Reasons To Invest in Video Content first appeared on Freestar.

At Freestar, not much work is done without strategy behind it. There are objectives, goals, testing, project planning and despite those things, timelines almost always miss the mark. It’s hard to plan ahead for the year to come, there are many unknowns.

Working with enterprise publishers on traffic growth and SEO, I’ve found it helpful to align initiatives throughout the year by quarters, instead of months, to target historical highs and lows for ad revenue.

Even understanding the very basic seasonal trends for ad revenue, will help you better understand why you see the CPMs and RPMs that you do. Please use this directionally, it may not be 100% your experience, but it is the general movement many publishers and content creators see.

Before we get into the trends, a reminder of the heaviest factors impacting a publisher’s RPM: advertiser budgets, content niche, content quality, traffic source, device type and location of the user. And seasonality, meaning what part of the year, month or quarter it is.

Seasonal Trends, the Basics

1. Mostly tied to brand budgets, January typically sees the lowest revenue of the year, heightened by the drop from Q4 spending.

2. February and March can see uptick from January, but usually remain on the lower end.

3. Q2, particularly June, can be some of the higher months of the year. Many advertiser’s financial year ends in Q2 so they’re wanting to rid those dollars to avoid losing the budget altogether.

4. For any month, a typical trend would be that the end of the month yields higher RPMs than the beginning of the month.

5. Regardless of the hype around Q4, it’s often November that sees the highest return of the quarter.

How Ad Seasonality Impacts Digital Strategy

If it can wait, Q4 is not the time to make any huge structural website changes, like a migration or redesign. In fact, from October through December, take a more conservative approach to content updates or editorial adjustments as well.

I’ve never gone through a migration that hasn’t, at least temporarily, seen a 15-20% traffic drop. October, November and December RPM peaks because of the traditional shopping holidays. High search interest for purchasing terms and high conversion period = advertisers looking to spend big cash for impressions on contextually relevant content.

Now, when is the perfect time for migrations, redesigns, or taxonomy updates? My recommendation is January or February. Lower risk on revenue.

For many content creators, summer months represent a slower traffic and revenue period. Two recommendations when it comes to avoiding the summer slump — number one, make sure you’re offsetting the potentially slower traffic by publishing more content. Capitalize on topics like travel, school breaks and relaxation by creating content, games or tools that target these angles.

Number two, make sure you’re running high impact ad units on your website, specifically video. This can also offset the lower CPMs of July and August. Video outstream units require no original content and can make up 20-25% of a publisher’s overall revenue. If you’re a Freestar publisher, reach out to your account manager today and ask to get video running today!

But for all publishers, users expect to see video ads and guarantee all your competitors are using them. It’s easy to test for several weeks, get an idea of the impact, and remove it if you don’t like what you see.

Q3 is the quarter to focus on your content inventory for quality improvements or topic gaps. Find your top performers in organic search, review and update them for quality enhancements and make sure related content is linked together.

By knowing what to expect for ad revenue seasonality, you can better target when you want to launch products, test new page layouts or implement that navigation consolidation you’ve been planning to align with the lower risk times.

The post How Ad Revenue Seasonality Can Impact Digital Strategy first appeared on Freestar.

Benefits of Push Notifications

1. Increased return visitors to your website

In a world where publishers-turned-influencers shifted their resources from blogs to Instagram, we believe there is more long-term value in continuing to focus on websites. Publishers own websites in a very different way than they do social media accounts and push notes drive people back to the site.

With intention and the right strategy, publishers can drive a large amount of incremental traffic with this audience. Because the user has to take action to subscribe, it tends to be a source of higher quality traffic. The user is genuinely interested in the brand or content type, or they wouldn’t have signed up. This leads to a higher conversions rate, longer time on site and more pages per session.

Invest in UX optimization to ensure that once the user goes from push note to website, they have a smooth experience. If they’re already a casual reader, have signed up for alerts, AND have a seamless experience on the site, you can easily turn them into a brand loyalist.

2. Added connection with your audience

You control when push notifications appear to your users, and they don’t have to be active on your website to receive. This gives you an opportunity to get to them at optimal moments of the customer journey.

The push note audience is similar to email, highly engaged and brand advocates. Scale distribution is immediate and can be automated while also being personalized to some degree.

3. Customizable communication

You can modify what content your readers receive based on both their own preferences as well as historical click behavior. Push note vendors allow users to opt-in and out of receiving certain content.

They can run from content feeds or manually create notifications to drop to the user at any time. And unlike SEO optimization, where the headline must include the search term, you’re free to get creative with your headlines here. You can turn the average headline into a more interesting teaser to increase click-through rate.

4. Increased brand recognition

Push note messaging can also be used to promote marketing strategies. Alert customers to giveaways, promotional material, press releases or your latest product release. There are plenty of ways to get creative with what you include!

– Remind people of your social media accounts
– Announce an updated About Page or new mission statement
– Link to your new podcast episode
– Newsletter subscription form

5. Increased revenue

There are several ways that push notifications can increase your website revenue. The first is from ad revenue received from the additional traffic. This will be key, as many of the best vendors have a cost associated. If this is the only way you plan to drive incremental revenue from these alerts, you’ll want to make sure the total made from ads exceeds the cost of the service. In almost all cases we’ve experienced, it does prove favorable to the publisher.

Another option is to use the push note real estate for ad copy to promote your direct sponsors or campaigns. There is a headline field, and short description — both can be used for advertising messages.

Web push notifications can be an effective strategy for audience development, consider trying it out this year!

The post 5 Benefits of Web Push Notifications first appeared on Freestar.

Fun Fact: WordPress touts 70 million new posts are published each month on their platform alone. Yep, that’s a lot of content for Google to sift through, evaluate and rank. Images also help content stand out, which is another reason why THIS is the year you will create the perfect image strategy.

How Images Improve User Experience

1. When Contextually Relevant

If the goal is to improve the user experience with images, the most important factor is that they’re contextually relevant to the content on the page. It would make no sense to the user to have images of house plants on a DIY shower scrub article. Make sure the images you add to the page help the user accomplish something, whether that is to better understand the process, the product or information.

And even when the images are contextually relevant, it doesn’t help the user if there are too many. Not only could that have page speed implications, the user could tire of scrolling through endless similar pictures. Find the balance of helpful to the user and exactly the right amount.

2. When Responsive

Viewing a non-responsive image from your phone can cause a frustrating experience. Website images should smoothly scale with the size of the site, whether desktop, tablet or mobile. In order to do this, you must use the srcset and sizes attributes to give the browser additional source images, which will allow identical image content to be resizes.

Technical details beyond that should be left to the expertise of a developer, a plugin or this comprehensive guide might help. But do check your site on mobile to make sure there are no heads cut off or awkwardly enlarged visuals.

3. Enhanced Search Results

Images can enhance how your site looks in search results, and that creates a better user experience before the user ever hits your page. With the proper structured data, just on Google alone, images are shown in mobile carousals, recipe packs, regular search results, product results, image results and Google Discover. That’s a lot of opportunity for additional traffic.

4. When They Help Explain a Process

Process Shots can make or break the user experience. For DIY and how-to queries, landing on a text-heavy page without images can be anything but helpful. However, if you include step-by-step instructions, with an accompanying image to show the reader, that goes a long way.

Remember not to overdo it either though. If there are 15 steps listed on the page, 15 images may slow it down considerably. Use images when they show something new or just the more challenging of the instructions.

5. When It’s Information Displayed Visually

Infographics are an excellent way to engage the reader even more than the average image. Because this style image typically includes some sort of data or information, the user tends to stop, scroll and spend time digesting.

They can also be a great way to get backlinks and coverage from other publications.

6. For Products and Recipes

Webpages promoting products or recipes require an even deeper level of image strategy. With products, it’s tough because in many cases, the writer may not have the product to get a unique shot. Product images available from manufacturers or sellers are often the same as hundreds of others. But product images aren’t one you can typically skimp on.

For recipes on the other hand, getting the perfect food photo can become an obsession. Classes and courses are dedicated to food photography tips. When recipes themselves aren’t original, providing the best image can put you ahead of the rest.

7. When They’re Interesting

Last on the list may be the most challenging of all, you need to make them unique, interesting and eye-catching. Back to the 70 million new blog posts published each month, how is it even possible to have that many different images to supply content with?!!

In truth, it really depends the niche. Many demand custom images, like recipe sites, DIY content or travel. For the informational sites, like this one for example, the challenge becomes avoiding the overtly stocky photos (computer man hands, girl smiling at a conference, you know the ones). Using tools like Canva or Unsplash to pull photos that you then modify slightly through filters or treatments, might be the easiest solution to custom-like photos.

The post 7 Ways Website Images Contribute to a Better UX first appeared on Freestar.

Real audience development is a long-game that requires relationship building and a true understanding of why users come to your site, why they stay, and what will make them tell others. For the digital publisher, the primary focus of audience development is driving more pageviews to the website, to then increase revenue via methods like display advertising, product sales or ecommerce.

Why It’s Essential

This year, Freestar is investing in audience development as an added value service to our publishers, acknowledging the important role traffic plays in the overall revenue. From the most basic approach of increasing traffic to increase ad revenue, to the more advanced discovery of how to align production resources to audience sources most valuable, growing users should always be part of the plan.

1. Consider the audience coming from organic search. The user has strong intent, which means they have opened a browser to search for a specific thing. They typically will go from the search engine result page (SERP) to a website, where they are likely to scroll through the post with a genuine interest in the topic and content. This interest leads to higher engagement on the page, more viewable ads, and higher CPMs. SEO is a vital piece of audience development, as the most effective tactic to increase organic search.

2. It’s also important that a publisher’s traffic comes from a variety of places. If it doesn’t, diversifying those sources should always be a goal for audience growth. It’s not uncommon for Google Search to make up 50-60% of a publisher’s traffic, followed by drivers like Pinterest, Facebook, Paid sources, newsletters, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google Discover.

3. Investing resources into audience development provides another avenue for optimization, outside of the ads. Many uncontrollable factors impact a CPM such as advertiser budgets, seasonality and content niche. Ad layout optimizations can only go so far. Audience growth initiatives look at content optimization opportunities, technical website best practices and data to find audience gaps.

How to Identify the Audience

To understand a user’s behavior while on your website, understand two things — your data and your industry. In Google Analytics, the first two areas I would suggest getting familiar with are:

Source/Medium

To identify where your audience already exists, the source/medium report is helpful. In the left navigation rail, go to Acquisition => All Traffic => Source/Medium. As previously mentioned, it’s common to see Google organic as the top source for publishers. Other common publisher traffic sources are Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google Discover, email and News aggregators.

Traffic labeled as direct can also be in the top 3 sources. Direct traffic isn’t something focused on as part of audience development. Although, if too high a percentage of overall traffic, it can be an indicator of IVT or suspicious activity. You want a more temperate percentage of direct traffic because it’s more likely that users are coming to your site from sources like Google. High levels of direct traffic could be attributed to dark social, organic search or certain mobile apps, there’s no real way to tell.

All Pages

To identify what content your audience likes best, I recommend looking under Behavior => Site Content => All Pages. This report shows posts that receive the most traffic. From those URLs, you can see the topics most popular with your users. You can take it one step further by adding a secondary dimension for source/medium. You’ll now see the most popular posts, and where the audience is coming from.

Also valuable from this view is the average time on page and the bounce rate, both engagement metrics. Time on page is exactly that, and bounce rate is the average percentage of people who leave after visiting that single site page. They are both useful metrics to examine the user experience for that content.

How to Get Started

Build an in-house team

I was first introduced to the concept of audience development in 2015. With the rise of digital-only brands like PopSugar, Refinery 29 and Bustle, our own content sites were beginning to feel the heat from shiny, new (and well-staffed) competitors. The solution was to build an in-house audience development team, each team member specializing in a different audience area.

Mine was organic search (SEO) and shortly after, syndication partnerships came my way. I was rounded out by a paid search specialist, an email marketer, and a social media expert. We focused on educating editorial departments and operational leads on best practices and testing various strategies we thought might work. In the first year, traffic to our web properties increased by an incredible 40%.

If you have the resources, an in-house audience development team can be an effective route. In many ways acting as the liaison between operational, editorial, and reporting. Since this team spans across many departments, it works better when internal teams communicate and silos are eliminated.

Audience Development at Freestar

For enterprise publishers interested in ad monetization with Freestar, audience development support is part of our service.

To assume that a publisher is aware of Google’s latest best practice, an algorithm update, or a new traffic source, is to put revenue at risk. If we, as an ad monetization partner, can proactively inform of these things, while optimizing ad strategy at the same time, the objective becomes a healthy, stable business instead of a purely revenue-focused model.

The long-term success of your business is important to ours. To learn more, we’d love to hear from you.

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