The ending coronavirus pandemic in Europe has impacted every part of our lives, from the priorities we have, to the way we spend our time, the places we can go to, and the way we spend our money.
Of course, this had a massive impact on advertising sales and inevitably on publishers’ advertising revenues. Luckily, in Europe, we’ve started seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. If not for the crisis, at least for the virus.
To help publishers keep updated and allow them to benchmark their performance next to the market trends, we’ve conducted a short study on the impact of “End of lockdown” on publishers’ ad revenues.
As “end of quarantine” dates were different from a country to another, we limited our survey to only one country (France), going from this you can easily envision what could after-quarantine look like in your country.
For this study, we focused on Prebid revenues for the period of 13th-26th April 2020 compared to the period of 13th-26th May 2020, for French traffic only.
Overall, there was an average increase of 16% in revenue during the period immediately following the end of quarantine, despite a sharp drop in user traffic (30%) and subsequently in display opportunities. The sharp drop in traffic can be explained by the fact that people were allowed to go out and engage in other activities.
This decrease in traffic was compensated by the reactivation of ad campaign budgets leading to higher bids, which immediately led to:
==> The ultimate result is a massive increase of 65% in RPM (revenue per thousand auctions).
To sum up, “end of lockdown” had a very marked impact on revenues, despite reduced traffic, which bodes well (we hope) for a return to normal.
As we’ve just seen, social events have a certain impact on publisher ad revenue. We’ve done another article titled "Exceeding targets on Black Friday for Publishers" to explore how seasonality can have the same effects on monetisation.
However, that extra traffic on your inventory won’t be any good if you don’t know how to properly retain value from your visitors. To learn how to do so, read our article on "Price Granularity Unraveled: How to Retain Maximum Value".
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