1. Follow the Data

Publishers have been trained to plan desktop first for site design, layout, and monetization, leaving mobile as an afterthought. But if you look at your site's statistics and Google Analytics, chances are that the majority of your audience engages almost entirely via mobile. Whether you're going all-in on programmatic, selling native ads, or promoting subscriptions, understanding your data should be the first step prior to making any decisions about your monetization strategy.

2. Find Your Distributed Audience

As you dig deeper with data, you'll likely also discover that a good chunk of your content discovery is happening off-site — via social, search, and email newsletters. And guess what? Platform leaders have been busy creating native content formats like Facebook Instant Articles and Google AMP to optimize the experience for content consumers. These formats are not only designed to enhance the user experience, but publishers can now incorporate ads that, in most cases we've seen, perform better than your on-site ads.

3. A/B Test and Optimize Your Ad Experience

Incorporating different ad partners and formats into your pages will be a given. However, you want to be flexible, test placements, and optimize without switching your entire site setup every time. Being able to easily create and A/B test different articles, sections, and home page layouts with the ad experience saves time and allows you to be smart about expanding your monetization approach.

4. Don't Go Overboard

You may be tempted to pepper ads everywhere on your site because more ads means more money, right? But more ads can actually hurt your bottom line by:

1. Weighing down your pages
2. Decreasing how fast your content loads
3. Creating banner blindness for less ad effectiveness, and/or
4. Simply annoying users to the point where they prematurely leave your site

Strategically use rule-based ad serving and lazy-loading controls to manage when and where ads load, ensuring ads are well aligned with the editorial experience.