I’ve been working with DMX publishers for as long as there’s been a DMX. I have helped publishers from dozens of countries, with very different backgrounds, and with very different sites, and I’ve learned one thing: they’re not that different after all. There are some behaviors that are shared by many of our most successful publishers, so I’d like to present you with some of their best practices, so you can use them and maybe even make lots of money:

1. DMX is very different from a traditional network. The most successful (read: highest-earning) publishers on DMX don’t just traffic DMX tags into an outside platform to pick up their defaults, they use it as it was intended—as a platform to help them manage their advertising deals. With all of your deals trafficked into DMX, you can leverage all of its power to manage as much of your advertising as possible, forcing both your linked networks and your external deals to compete with one another, earning you as much as possible.
2. More competition is always better. Always. Link to as many networks as you can, while still meeting minimums and receiving checks as often as necessary. Ad campaigns are in constant flux and having a standing relationship with a network ensures that you have access when those rockstar campaigns come through! Use the Analyze tab to narrow down the areas where you have the lowest CPMs and fill, and work to find new partners to improve performance in those areas.
3. Pricing in Manage: update often. While some of your placements may be deals that you sold yourself at set CPMs, odds are that some of them are networks that aren’t a part of DMX. The CPMs those networks are paying fluctuate just as much as the CPMs from DMX networks, so updating placements on a weekly basis to make sure that the price in DMX reflects what you’re really earning is a very simple way to maximize your revenue. Even a one cent difference between the price you have set and the price they’re paying can really add up! Think about it—if Network X wins a bunch of your inventory at $0.75, then only pays $0.65, you could be losing out on revenue if the linked networks would’ve paid between $0.66 and $0.74. Similarly, if you have a placement at $0.75, but it’s really paying $1, the linked networks could be winning auctions for as low as $0.76.
4. Watch the placement of ads on your pages. Use your common sense here. Putting excessive ads on a page could lead your site’s visitors to ignore them, reducing interaction with ads and, in turn, reducing your CPMs. Also, too many ads on a page may annoy visitors and cause them to seek out other pages with more content and fewer ads. Some of our most successful publishers only have one or two ads on most of their pages—the combination of more traffic and higher CPMs works out quite nicely for them.
5. Frequency caps rule. When I think about the most important tools in DMX, frequency caps come to mind. Frequency is at the top of the list of metrics advertisers use to measure the value of impressions. The concept of “ad blindness”–the more ads someone sees, the more that person ignores ads—is as old as advertising itself. Effective use of frequency caps is key to getting the most you can out of each of your advertisers and networks. When in doubt of where to set a frequency cap, ask the forums or a contact at DMX about suggested caps for specific networks.
6. Be creative! We built DMX to help you manage your ad deals, but that doesn’t mean you need to use each tool in the exact way that it’s presented. DMX may be a simple product, but it’s built on a very robust platform, so I encourage you to stretch the functionalities. Here are some ideas:
o Get Fancy with Placements: Instead of setting up multiple placements for an advertiser based on geographical areas, you might also consider trying to analyze the network’s performance and break your inventory into tiers. If you have a network that pays better than anyone out there for fresh eyes, and they’re so-so on the higher frequency impressions, you could set up a placement with a cap of one and a high CPM, then set up a second placement with a lower CPM and a higher cap on the “second tier” impressions.
o Compare Placements: If you have a few ads on each page and want to see how they perform individually, you can just set up different “sites” (e.g. url.com/left and url.com/bottom). After placing tags in the appropriate positions, you’ll be able to see reports on the sections individually.
o If you’re using your own servers and you want to keep your ads G-rated during the day, but PG-13’s ok at night, you could set up different “sites” for the different times of day, associate different Media Guard profiles with those sites, pull two sets of DMX tags, one for the day, one for the night, then use your own servers to serve up the appropriate tags.
o Make everyone play nice: As mentioned in #2, you should be working with as many networks as possible. With all of the advertisers, networks, platforms and other ad management products out there, compatibility can get difficult. The good news is that there’s almost always someone that had to make it work before you, so the DMX staff is pretty versed at the different obstacles to compatibility presented by your external deals and we’ll be able to help you out. There’s no reason to split inventory between multiple servers or platforms, creating a management nightmare, when you can make them all work together in one, efficient auction.
7. Ask us for help! Seriously. Everyone that works at DMX is happy (and paid) to help you out—take advantage of that. Don’t think of us as just a support system or someone to call when things go wrong, think of us as consultants to help you grow your business.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 at 2:02 pm and is filed under About Right Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.