How to improve your ad monetization strategy

It’s the million (maybe billion) dollar question: How can I scale and grow my ad sales business?

Whether you’re a retailer who’s realized you can build a retail media network that offers ad placements right at the point of purchase, or a publisher who’s looking to extend their first-party data and media audience offsite, a lot stands between you and an effective ad monetization strategy.

There are all the ad formats and layouts to decide between, for one. Then there’s the many different demand sources to orchestrate and pull spend from in an increasingly complex advertising ecosystem. It all makes planning, executing, and reporting on ad sales frustratingly time-consuming and perilously error-prone.

Signs your ad monetization strategy needs a reboot

Ad sales teams experience telltale signs of an inefficient ad monetization strategy every day:

• Not knowing why margins are consistently smaller at the end of the quarter. Projected margins can gradually get eaten into throughout a campaign, leaving you with end-of-the-quarter questions from Finance about where the deficit came from.

• Calculating revenue-at-risk only once a week because it takes too long. This translates into a week of at-risk spend, jeopardizing a quarter of an advertiser’s budget for a monthly campaign.

• Sales teams struggling to track the costs of all their individual ad products and the relevant fees – whether it’s ad-serving fees from demand sources, or data fees from data partners. Lacking clarity around the margin of their different ad products, sales teams can inadvertently focus on lower-margin products, limiting revenue.

With one simple solution, you can overcome these inefficiencies hampering your ad sales operation.

An operating system for ad sales can turn your ad monetization strategy around

Here’s the exciting part of the story. By consolidating the entire ad sales lifecycle, it’s straightforward to not just fill an order, but to fill it as effectively as possible for your commercial goals.

First, an operating system for ad sales like AdSalesOS integrates cost-of-goods-sold (COGS), so teams always know how to rank different ad products and can prioritize higher-margin inventory. The solution also provides visibility over margin tracking, so you can always see your exact margin, ad-serving fees, and creative costs for each product. Teams can forecast accurately, meet margin kickers and sales bonuses, and never face any unwelcome end-of-quarter surprises.

Faster forecasting is one of many ways that a centralized ad sales solution boosts teams’ productivity. Just as importantly, by consolidating spend from all your different advertising platforms, you no longer have the painstaking task of marrying sales data with what actually happened in your ad servers. And when you use an ad sales solution with built-in intelligence, you can simply ask AI agents to draft a campaign for an advertiser, tailored to a specific budget, accelerating your time to value.

It’s particularly valuable to receive recommendations of higher-margin products when you’re managing a large ad inventory. Teams can even dictate the amount of high-margin products for the solution to bundle into a campaign deal, seamlessly steering your products toward business goals. And all through a natural-language copilot that means you don’t have to remember fiddly click paths.

A consolidated solution for ad sales helps you continuously monitor and optimize your ad monetization strategy. The laborious process of manually calculating revenue at risk becomes a thing of the past. Daily pacing functionality and an on-schedule indicator do this for you, so you can maximize spend of the advertiser’s budget and minimize money left on the table.

When your solution receives data back every hour (like AdSalesOS), you can significantly close the window of wasted spend and enable timely campaign optimization. Ad ops teams can identify underperforming line items much earlier to shift budget accordingly and maintain campaign burndown. This ensures your ad sales business remains as profitable as possible, while meeting advertisers’ campaign expectations.

Make ad monetization excellence a compelling selling point

Retailers and publishers can turn all these capabilities into a compelling selling point for advertisers. An ad sales operating system becomes a powerful differentiator when you can openly and clearly share how best-in-class technology helps you build campaigns that spend advertisers’ budgets more effectively and deliver them better outcomes.

Embedding the right technology at the heart of your ad monetization strategy doesn’t just re-engineer the performance of your inventory. It re-engineers the efficiency and revenue of your entire quote-to-cash lifecycle. 

Get in touch with the Placements.io team to find out more about how AdSalesOS makes it easier to run a more profitable and effective ad-selling operation.

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