As Core Web Vitals approaches, we’ll continue to keep you updated on the advances we’re making in our ad products and solutions. Below is a timeline from the Google team, a quick snapshot of where the Freestar Engineering and Product teams are at, and a little bit of our philosophical approach to monetization.

By now, you likely know that the Core Web Vitals update has been postponed to mid-June. Here’s Google’s (revised) timeline as shown on their Google Search Central blog, along with some specific quotes we wanted to share with you.

Here’s why we treat Google timelines with some skepticism:

1. Core Web Vitals Timeline
2. CLS Measurement
3. FloC Trials
4. TCF 2.0 Deadline

So what’s the latest at Freestar?

We’ve been working on our Page Speed Optimization product and it’s currently being rolled out for testing. We will continue to work with a few of our publishers to turn on these optimizations and continue to measure both changes in their CVW status as those impacts on revenue. We know all sites are different, so we are going to be testing on a handful of sites to start and compare results. Given the updated deadline is in mid-June, we expect to have even time to test and make optimizations as we go. We should also add that once that deadline hits, that does not mean those tests and optimizations will end; we anticipate plenty of tweaks and adjustments in the coming weeks and months.

In our experience: rigidity and inflexibility in regards to the product and general strategy pose the greatest risk to publishers. It’s the decisions made out of fear and emotion that are often most regretted. Publishers and technology vendors should continue to iterate and maintain their poise during these changes. As mid-May June approaches, take comfort in knowing that your partners at Freestar are standing beside you to solve any unforeseen variables and looking over your shoulder, monitoring your analytics and audience behavior.

The Last Thought (for now)

Be skeptical of anyone claiming to have all the answers to the upcoming changes in the SEO landscape. With the right attitude, collaboration with your Freestar team, and dedication to quality content, you’ll thrive amidst the disruption. 

We make our decisions based on the assumption that our publishers are still in business with us years from now, and that’s why we operate with transparency, tenacity, and ingenuity. When analyzing data or any problem, it’s easy to get lost in the noise. We choose to tune the noise out and focus on what really matters: the success of our publishers measured both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Between the collective experience, wisdom, and technical acumen at Freestar, we know that Google tends to have some flexible deadlines and guidelines. We will continue to work with our Google team to ensure we are in front of these changes and keep our publishers aware of things to come.

We treat your business as if it were our own, and understand these changes can be challenging. We aren’t here to make false promises, or work on short-term gains. The health of your business is important to the health of our own, as well as the health of our industry at large. Your long-term success is core to what Freestar values and is built on.

The post And Now My Watch Begins…in June? first appeared on Freestar.

As a sneak peak, here’s the before and after of one of the websites we’ve conducted our preliminary tests on:

BEFORE FREESTAR OPTIMIZATIONS:

AFTER IMPLEMENTING FREESTAR’S SOLUTION:

How our publishers can get ahead:

As Freestar nears completion of our first official line of ad products optimized for search, we ask that our publishers focus on the foundation upon which their sites are built. To facilitate this, our Account Managers have tools readily available upon request which will allow you to identify areas for improvement for the core vitals and other metrics weighed in determining rankings.

As we continue to develop new products and solutions to meet our publishers’ needs, we urge our publishers to return their attention to optimizing their foundations.
By conducting these tests and proactively striving for optimal search performance, publishers will have a major advantage when our solution suite is released.

What are major publishers doing about CLS?

It’s no coincidence that many publishers, especially those known as innovators in SEO strategy, have been improving upon their user experience the last few months. 

Their focus has turned to improving page speed by optimizing factors not controlled by Freestar and the results have been promising to say the least. Here are a few examples of publishers showing initial improvements:

Something you can do – if you aren’t already – that is a big component of load time is to investigate working with a Content Delivery Network (CDN’s). You can learn more on the Web Vitals blog to ensure fast page loads across the globe.

Overview of CDN’s:

A content delivery network consists of a network of servers that are optimized for quickly delivering content to users. Although CDNs are arguably best known for serving cached content, CDNs can also improve the delivery of uncacheable content. Generally speaking, the more of your site delivered by your CDN, the better.

At a high-level, the performance benefits of CDNs stem from a handful of principles: CDN servers are located closer to users than origin servers and therefore have a shorter round-trip time (RTT) latency; networking optimizations allow CDNs to deliver content more quickly than if the content was loaded “directly” from the origin server; lastly, CDN caches eliminate the need for a request to travel to the origin server.

The Road Ahead:

Freestar is finalizing our work with our demand partners, our ad products, and our code in general. We expect to finish all initial testing of a CLS-optimized ad stack by the end of April. As mentioned in our article from April 1st, this product will be an opt-in feature for our publishers; we do not yet know the full scope of the revenue impact this will cause. 

Once testing is completed, we will be rolling out to opted-in publishers in waves in May, and reporting back findings throughout our Newsletter and these Blog posts. As with any of these major Google updates, we intend to be flexible and iterate as time goes on.

The post The Latest on Core Web Vitals first appeared on Freestar.

Freestar recently made the switch from Google Ad Manager to Ad Manager 360, and we wanted to highlight some of the key changes and new features that are now accessible with Ad Manager 360. While Google allows access to some Ad Manager 360 features without actually being on Ad Manager 360, we previously had access to Open Bidding for example, it is important to understand the differences between the two in order to make the decision of if and when a publisher should make the switch.

Some of the key changes that will be available when switching to Ad Manager 360 are access to more advertisers and how they buy, the ability to find more places to engage with your audiences, greater protections and controls to protect publisher’s brand safety, added insights and optimizations to make better data driven decisions, and more granular segmentation of access within a publisher’s team to specific items.

All of the added features that come with Ad Manager 360 are certainly advantageous, but some can be viewed as immediate added value to a publisher’s business. As mentioned, Google does allow publishers access to Open Bidding prior to being on Ad Manager 360; but having the ability to run cost per action (CPA) and viewable CPM (vCPM) campaigns can be an attractive pitch to potential advertisers that are interested in reaching users at various stages of the acquisition funnel. Every impression served brings added data and Ad Manager 360 helps make sense of a publisher’s increasing volume of data to earn more from each impression. Ad Manager 360 allows for audience segmentation to ensure publishers are targeting ads to the correct users across their sites, further increasing its value proposition.

Additionally, pulling conversion reporting allows publishers to track their user’s actions and gain more insight into the value of their inventory. Utilizing data transfer reports, publishers are provided with raw, log-level data of every event in Ad Manager 360. The raw data can be integrated into third-party reporting systems for more custom analysis. The raw data also provides access to data that is not available in the Ad Manager Query Tool.

Ad Manager 360 also allows the setup of Teams. Teams allows for restricting user access to specific items like advertisers, agencies, proposals, orders, ad units, and more. The Teams feature is most beneficial for those who manage several companies in their Ad Manager 360 account, as it can help to protect client data and avoid confusion. Freestar is currently exploring how to best utilize the Teams feature to give our publishers access to restricted parts of our Ad Manager 360 network. Of the many possibilities this opens up, allowing Freestar’s publishers to manage their own orders and thus line items, is one way Teams can increase productivity and performance across the board.

While this blog does not cover every change made from Google Ad Manager to Ad Manager 360, we hope that it provides some clear benefits of making the change and how Freestar plans to use these to help our publishers. Email us here if you have any questions regarding Google Ad Manager or Ad Manager 360 or if you want to learn more about how Freestar is always exploring new ways to help our publishers!

The post Important things to know when switching from Google Ad Manager to Ad Manager 360 first appeared on Freestar.

Oliver (known as Oli around here) is a Yield Analyst and his Freestar 3-year work anniversary was on August 7th.  Oli’s “Above and Beyond” approach is one of the many reasons he was selected as our August Employee of the Month.  Oli puts a lot of time and effort into comprehensive quality assurance during onboarding for our publishers.  Oli is extremely detail oriented and finds ways to increase revenue for publishers by catching viewpoint settings, creative sizes, and many other nuances in the publisher onboarding process.  

In addition, Oli lives our “Publisher First” value by  always asking thoughtful questions, making sure that Freestar is taking care of publishers from every angle.  It is difficult to get Oli to take an actual vacation, since he will sign on to respond to questions or issues even when he is taking a day off!  We truly appreciate everything Oli does for Freestar and our publishers.  

Some Fun Facts on Oli:  

Recently binge watched: Ozark

Most used emoji:  Thumbs up

Fast food choice at 1am:  McDonalds

Go-to karaoke tune:  Tequila by The Champs

Favorite dessert:  Ben & Jerry’s Strawberry Cheesecake Ice Cream

Best thing about working at Freestar:  The people!

Congratulations, Oli, on being selected as Freestar’s August Employee of the Month, well deserved!

The post August Employee of the Month first appeared on Freestar.

Google Chrome is getting a major update next month, so we spoke with our Vice President of Engineering, James Jackson to break down the release and appropriate next steps for publishers.

The update will roll out to all users on February 4th, 2020.

What is the Chrome 80 release?

It’s a new version of the Chrome browser with some significant changes aimed at data subject privacy that will ripple across the publisher and advertising ecosystem.

What changes will be made to Chrome after the release?

Chrome has introduced changes that affect the handling of cross-site cookies. Prior to this change, cookies were treated as cross-site by default and the SameSite cookie attribute was opt-in. With this change, the new default will be SameSite=Lax, and cookies that need to work cross-site must be explicitly labeled with a new SameSite=None attribute value. Additionally, this will require HTTPS (not plaintext HTTP) because browsers will ignore the SameSite=None attribute unless it is accompanied by the Secure attribute.

James adds that it is important to keep top of mind that Google is going to eliminate the basic functionality that allows data subject identification over a period of two years. We should be grateful for the timeline but wary that we should start preparing as soon as possible.

The Chrome 80 release is a new version of the Chrome browser with some significant changes aimed at data subject privacy that will ripple across the publisher and advertising ecosystem.

What do the SameSite and Secure attributes mean?

As a user browses the web, the Secure cookie attribute means that these cookies can only be passed from secure pages. SameSite is a way of determining the scope.

What do publishers need to do?

Publishers need to make sure all assets on their pages are served via SSL, otherwise, the browser will not certify the page as Secure and the cookies will not be passed. If you manage cross-site cookies, you will need to apply the SameSite=None; Secure setting to those cookies.

It is important to keep in mind that not all languages and libraries support the None value yet, requiring developers to set the cookie header directly. This Github repository provides instructions for implementing SameSite=None; Secure in a variety of languages, libraries and frameworks.

What does this mean for Freestar?

Freestar cookies are now compliant with the coming requirements of SameSite=None and Secure attributes. Broadly speaking, we’re going to have to do a lot of work to try and maintain the value of our publisher’s content but we will do everything in our power to ensure a smooth transition for our publishers by keeping Freestar in the forefront of industry changes.

In Conclusion

While the digital world has a lot to learn, browsers are finally starting to change their behavior to enforce more privacy-preserving defaults and shifting focus to protecting the user. While publishers should make sure that they are following the necessary steps to remain compliant throughout these changes, they should feel reassured that these stepping stones are placed to make the internet a better and safer place.

The post February 4th: Google Chrome 80 Release Notes first appeared on Freestar.

This month, we would like to introduce an all-star member of our Publisher Operations team, Carrie Landers!

Lightning Landers!

Sr. Publisher Operations Manager

Dayton, OH

Publisher Operations

Krush Media Group and Cox Media Group

12

I’m pretty proud of my family – I’m the youngest of 17 children, was an aunt three times before I was born, became a great-aunt for the first time in my early 20s. We all keep in touch (thank you social media!) and see each other whenever we can. I love my crazy giant fam!

That publishers can generate meaningful revenue with transparency and integrity.

Born and raised in Rochester NY, been living in Dayton, OH for 17 years.

Tabletop gaming, watching terrible reality tv shows, collecting Wonder Woman action figures. I can also do some very convincing bird whistles.

Touring castles in the UK.

I have four cats: Cleo, Newton, Kepler, and Zoe.

“Exercise empathy!”

RuPaul Charles

Responding to publishers emails, trafficking campaigns, generating reports, and trouble-shooting technical issues

I am a massive fan of RuPaul’s Drag Race and the art of drag in general. I’ve traveled over 100 miles away to attend shows starring my favorite queens and would gladly do so again and again.

The post Member Spotlight: Carrie Landers first appeared on Freestar.

Site owners are searching for an innovative solution that keeps both revenue and safety in mind. As the industry struggles to come up with an answer, publishers continue to face several issues.

Consumers will do what’s necessary to protect themselves.

Millions of people turn to ad blockers as a way to protect themselves from malware, which means millions of people that publishers can no longer monetize. With fewer people to monetize, publishers have to get creative. One way they’re doing this is by creating new ad formats that sacrifice user experience in the name of revenue. (Auto-play video ads, for example.) Not surprisingly, this only motivates more people to go the ad-blocking route, because now in addition to protecting themselves, they want to avoid the nuisance of aggressive advertising.

Additionally, some publishers are experimenting with software that enables them to reach consumers even if they’ve installed an ad blocker. Others are asking or forcing visitors to whitelist their site so they can break through the blocker, but so far we haven’t heard any runaway success stories with any of these solutions. User response is mostly categorized as either negative or nonexistent.

The availability of new software may empower publishers to locate and solve issues on their own. We’ve made this a high priority at Freestar and are currently working with several partners to do our part…

Publishers lack the control they need.

As programmatic advertising becomes more popular and promising, the number of parties involved increases. This leaves less control in publishers’ hands and forces them to rely on their ad partners to deal with harmful ads. This is problematic for two reasons: 1) the ad exchanges themselves are still figuring out how to better identify the root of bad ads, and 2) ad exchanges feel less urgency than publishers to do so since they have less of a stake in the game. If consumers encounter a dangerous ad, they hold publishers and advertisers responsible – not ad networks.

Freestar is here to help.

The availability of new software may empower publishers to locate and solve issues on their own. We’ve made this a high priority at Freestar and are currently working with several partners, including Confiant and Blockthrough, to do our part. We’ve seen promising results in their ability to identify and block threats and have entrusted these partners with our publishers in mind.

Not to mention here at Freestar, we have a best-in-class team that understands the frustration of ad quality and we will continue to perfect our scanning, blocking and troubleshooting process to jump on any complaint as soon as it’s been received. We’re hopeful that as publishers across the industry also dedicate expertise and bandwidth to testing, our combined learnings will get us closer to a solution.

The post Malware Has Long Been a Plague For Publishers. As Malvertising Gets More Sophisticated, How Can We Win? first appeared on Freestar.

This month, we would like to introduce one of our newest additions to the family, Christina Fiasconaro.

I hate being called ChristinE or Chrissy!

Sr. Director of Publisher Development

New York

Business Development

Undertone

Director, Publisher Development

The people!

12 years

Helped to open up Undertones presence back in the UK!

Getting that bread.

Emails, Calls, Closes.

That it is always improving and we are always ahead of the trends!

Westchester, New York

Baking! See @cookingfiasco on Instagram

Bora Bora.

Yes! Gracie, a 5 year old Goldendoodle

“Don’t go to the funeral until the day of the funeral”

Wendy Williams because she is the Queen and I would get all the tea.

Potatoes. I’d make gnocchi, mashed potatoes, vodka, french fries, chips, lots of variety!

My kids! Because they are awesome. I guess my husband too in case he ever reads this. :)

I wish I could play the trumpet or violin!

Big Michael Bolton fan. “How can we be lovers” is one of the greatest songs of all time.

The post Member Spotlight: Christina Fiasconaro first appeared on Freestar.

The Solution

Last year, Google joined the Coalition for Better Ads, a group dedicated to creating global standards for online advertising that address consumer expectations and improve user experience. The Coalition for Better Ads vows to improve consumers’ experience with online advertising through a set of guidelines that ads must follow to pass through ad blockers and be shown to the desired user.

Because the Coalition for Better Ads announced that it is expanding its Better Ads Standards beyond North America and Europe to go global, Google will be following in their footsteps.

Google Announced that starting on July 9th, 2019, Chrome’s ad blocker will be rolled out worldwide.

In February, Google Chrome started blocking ads (including their own) that were non-compliant according to these guidelines defined by the coalition. The browser’s ad blocker works when a user lands on a website, the browser’s filter will check if that page belongs to a site that fails the Better Ads Standard. Chrome will remove all ads from sites that have a “failing” status in the Ad Experience Report for more than 30 days. If violations have been identified, Publishers can request a review of their site after you’ve fixed the issues.

What Constitutes a “Bad Ad”?

The Coalition, using research collected from over 60,000 consumers, developed the Better Ads Standard for desktop and mobile web. The research identified the ad experiences that were most likely to fall beneath the threshold of consumer acceptability and, therefore, cause users to adopt ad blockers.

They came up with four types of desktop ads, out of six reviewed, and eight types of mobile ads, out of 12 reviewed, that were deemed unacceptable.

Google’s Strategy

Google will use the Chrome browser to cut off ad revenue from websites who serve ads that are out of line with the Better Ad Standard. Their goal is to ultimately improve user experience and punish sites that restrict that from happening. They note that advertisers are not the enemy and they would prefer if Chrome didn’t need to block ads at all. However, the consumer’s experience will always come first. They hope that the ad blocker could one day reduce the usage of other third-party ad blockers that would completely cut off any ads from running at all.

Chrome’s ad blocking system benefits both the site owner and its users. Google announced that as of January 1, 2019, two-thirds of all publishers who were at one time non-compliant are now in good standing, and less than 1 percent of the millions of sites Google has reviewed have had their ads flagged. With more and more websites following the Better Ad Standard, it means that site owners can generate revenue from the ads on their site while keeping their loyal users coming back for more.

With the rollout right around the corner, be sure to check your site’s compliance by using Google Search Console’s Abusive Experience Report to check if your site contains anything that needs to be corrected or removed. If any are found, you will have 30 days to correct these issues before Chrome starts blocking ads on your site.

The post July 9th: Google Chrome’s Ad Blocker Goes Global first appeared on Freestar.