BARCELONA—Online ad company ExoClick has announced that it has broken another internal record, and is now responsible for more than 8.5 billion daily ad impressions across its global ad network of publisher sites.
ExoClick’s Business Intelligence department compared network data from Q1 to Q2 and impressions increased by 13.87 percent, with 72.5 percent of that number on mobile, 22.7 percent on desktop, 4.1 percent on tablet and 0.7 percent on SmartTV/consoles. That’s up from 68.3 percent on mobile in Q1. Members area traffic saw a bigger increase when compared to Q1 at 24 percent, device distribution was more or less the same with Q2 showing 63.5 percent on desktop, 31.9 percent on mobile, and on tablet 4.6 percent. In addition to serving 8.5 billion daily ad impressions, the company is also now averaging 14 billion programmatic queries per day, 8.5 billion for advertisers, and 5.5 billion for publishers.
ExoClick’s sales and ad operations director Evan Zirdelis stated, “This year we added exclusive new traffic sources including two of the biggest sites in adult: XVideos.com and XNXX.com, plus several additional exclusive members area publishers. We also saw initial increases in traffic when lockdowns began in March this year, and we have continued to maintain our high impressions after the lockdowns began to end.
“One of the main reasons for this growth in impressions is that we constantly strive to help our global network of 65,000 publishers optimize their websites and ad zones," he added. "We have introduced several platform features and tools this year to help publishers create additional inventory opportunities and increase their revenues. We then educated our publishers on how to use these features with tutorials and business advice through blog posts and our recent Ultimate Guides. More inventory gives more volumes for advertisers to target with their offers, which in turn creates more demand for our quality traffic sources.”
Publisher optimization features and business tips that ExoClick has introduced this year include:
• Increased impressions to engaged users: ExoClick’s frequency capping settings of the In-Stream video ad format can be used to increase impressions shown to engaged users while still providing a great user experience as shown in these two publisher case studies.
• Monetizing ad block traffic: Publishers can use ExoClick’s in-line code which forces pop-unders to show even if the end user is using an adblocker as demonstrated in these three publisher case studies.
• Push Notifications: Publishers have the option to allow two push notification image sizes: 192x192px and the new larger 720×480px. Both sizes now feature Carrier and IP Range targeting. Additionally, Firefox 72 blocked publisher website’s notification opt-in prompts to end users, Google is also testing this in beta. Firefox demands that a user has spent time on a website and clicked on some of its content before being shown the push notifications opt-in prompt. ExoClick’s admin panel allows publishers to toggle on the ‘soft-ask option’ in the ad zone configuration and to set a timed delay before it is shown to the end user, in compliance with Firefox, which has helped publishers to grow their push notification subscriptions.
• New full-page interstitial ad formats: Available for mobile and desktop, these full page ad formats are an alternative to pop-unders and are fully Google compliant because they feature a close button on the top right hand corner of the ad. Because Chrome blocks some pop-unders, publishers can use various combinations of pop-unders and full-page interstitials across different browsers to ensure that high CPM, large format ads are not blocked from being seen by end users. The full-page interstitial and pop-under formats also include several different triggering options to monitizing a user at different stages of his browsing to further increase a publisher's inventory. A full tutorial can be read here.
• Lighter ads: Chrome has started protecting end users from heavy ads on websites. Back in February, ExoClick began to accept only maximum ad weights in line with the IAB and Google with static banners and video banners at 150KB, full-page interstitial at 300KB and MP4 videos at 50MB. This ensured that Chrome would not block any ads served by ExoClick while helping publishers with SEO and a higher Google ranking with faster website load speeds while ensuring a great user experience.
