Ep 171: Increase Your Blogs Ad Revenue By 300% with Colm Dolan

Jaryd Krause: (00:00)

How would you like a 300% ad revenue increase on your content website? Hi, this is Jaryd Krause host of the Buying Online Businesses podcast, and in this episode, I'm speaking with Colm Dolan, who is an ex-Google employee, who is now the CEO and co-founder of PubLift, which helps bloggers, content site owners, and publishers simplify their ad tech helps their clients to see an average of 55% uplift in ad revenue.

In this podcast episode, Colm and I speak about what stops content site owners from making more money from their ads. What are some of the myths and the mindsets, things that they need to get passed? We also talk about how to track user experience on your sites and ad load and how to increase your ad load, decrease your ad load based on user experience, and the data points that you need to be looking at to allow you to increase your ad revenue but also keep your viewers happy.

Colm and I also talk about what are some of the best ad placements that make a good income for your blog, where they can be, how often you use them, and all that sort of stuff. We also talk about how his company Publift works, how they partner with bloggers, what they do, how they make money, and how they can help content site owners make a lot more money from their ads as well? Colm is a great guy.

He is just down the road for me in Australia, and just is fully down to earth and has great service and a great product to offer with www.publift.com where we discuss a lot about that in the podcast but there's if you own a content site or you're going to own a content site or want to own a content website, this is such a valuable episode that you don't want to miss enjoying.

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Colm hello, and welcome. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Colm Dolan: (02:29)

Thank you for having me, Jaryd.

Jaryd Krause: (02:31)

I'm looking forward to this one. We got connected about a year ago now, and congratulations on everything that's been going on in your life now you've been busy family-wise. So looking forward to digging in now. I wanted to like straight up, what is PubLift for people that don't know what PubLift is?

Colm Dolan: (02:49)

Yeah, sure. So it's an ad monetization business that helps publishers increase their ad revenue. So my background was Google, I used to work in Google started in Dublin, and then moved over to the states and started out working AdWord and then worked AdSense which is basically how publishers make money on the internet.

When I was at Google, I was advising publishers and how to increase their revenue and giving them optimizations to do but it was pretty frustrating because publishers couldn't implement those optimizations that they suggested that I could see would make them more money. And the reason they couldn't do it was because of a lack of ad expertise or lack of developer expertise or maybe the confidence to do it.

So started published basically with a mandate to try and increase revenue for publishers from an agnostic standpoint. So not really from Google's standpoint but wherever they could make money. And we approached it really with a consulting kind of head as well and tried to be very hands on and tried to do the work for them. And that has evolved really into being technically a lot easier for publishers to do that.

So what we'll do is give publishers a line of code and they can implement that on their website. And from there we can do lots of different stuff like AB test, add different locations, add different networks, add different demand partners, and basically take care of the revenue side of a content website and everything that has to do with that because it is a very complex ecosystem we're always trying to push, to try and make money more money for publishers. So that's a long winded approach to what we do.

Jaryd Krause: (04:47)

Awesome, a lot of people here listening, looking to buy content sites, and already have them and want to scale them so they're definitely across AdSense and there are different sorts of ways that you can have ad optimizations and different ad networks and stuff like that.

So is Publift not so much an ad network but helps you help publishers link up with ad networks and what do you guys advise on placements and stuff like that? Or how does that work?

Colm Dolan: (05:16)

I suppose definitely not an ad network, the evolution of ad networks has gone to SSPs. So some SSPs like problematic magnetite index exchange, that kind of stuff. And where we differentiated from these guys is how we compare ourselves. We're a shopping comparison site I would say.

So for people in Australia, we're finder.com and we'll try and get the best SSPs and best ad networks available and put them all together and try to get the best price for a publisher. So that's kind of where we differentiate networks. Jaryd, what was the other part of that question?

Jaryd Krause: (06:04)

I forget what the other part was but I want to dive in a bit more about what you said is finder.com that I use like my deal or something like that. So are you saying that work with these brands to find ads that can link in well with different types of publishers, depending on what niche to help them get premium advertising on their site?

Colm Dolan: (06:30)

So if you're a publisher and you work a hundred percent with Google or a hundred percent with Rubicon or vice versa, you're just two partners in general, you're limiting yourself to more networks. For example, the triple lift has been an SSP that we've worked on really closely over the last two years. And they came from nowhere to being our biggest SSP apart from Google. So these are things that we'll just try out in the background and AB test and see do they have CPMs that will help our publishers.

And sometimes it can help different publishers and depend on regions, depending on internet speed, anything like that. And also it's navigating the header bidding landscape, so years ago we just had a header bidding wrapper, and that was superior intelligence than Google at the time. But everything has evolved now, and everyone really has header bidding wrappers but what we have done on the tech side of things is got more involved in terms of multi-varied testing and testing different the speed of our tag in different regions, how maybe a sticky, a unit compares to a static guide unit, an AB test having three ad units compared to five units, what the impact viewability has on that.

So our side of things has got sophisticated. And I think that's where you're seeing globally more of a massive increase in publishers going from AdSense to working with a partner. And I think the evolution also is that SSPs just do not have the resources to be as hands on as businesses like us. We're very hands on because each publisher is different.

Each publisher has different demographics. Each publisher has a different site, low speed. They've got a lot of publishers now using SPAs which can run into difficulty with CoreEd vitals as well. So it needs a lot of handhold and a lot of tender loving care from each publisher. And that's something we've pioneered. And one thing that we're always maybe a bit different to competitors is that we really care and we're just relentless to try and increase the revenue.

And no hard and fast rule says, oh this is how you increase your revenue. It's a lot of testing, a lot of iterating, and a lot of figuring out what works for one publisher and what does not work for one publisher would work for the next. I think that's probably the key difference would ad networks SSPs compared to us, we're really hands on.

Jaryd Krause: (09:18)

That's the custom bespoke approach that can allow people to get that extra level of revenue from the ads rather than the generic version. So just for people listening to that don't know SSP, what does that stand for and SPA, what does that stand for? There are so many abbreviations.

Colm Dolan: (09:42)

SSP is a supply-side platform and SPA is a single-page application. A single-page application is a custom version of a website rather than made through one WordPress or something like that.

Jaryd Krause: (10:02)

So we know that each niche and each demographic will respond differently to different ad placements and different types of ads but I wanted to bring up and talk about, what have you found that are some of the most lucrative ad placements or types of ads on the saws depend?

Colm Dolan: (10:28)

I think depending on user preference but a web interstitial has worked wonders for lots of publishers. So that's an ad unit that you will appear that will take over the whole screen. The CPMs and that are high, other things are sticky footers. So sticky footers generate a lot of revenue and that can be on mobile or desktop.

So that's just a unit that sticks to the bottom of the webpage, and as you scroll up or down, it just stays there. So the viewability is very incredibly high, and I think the user experience is pretty decent as well. So I'd say it's the sticky footer is probably the best ad I would say.

Jaryd Krause: (11:10)

And how do you guys go about the user experience versus going for more ad load on the site, and just ramping up revenue because there's a lot of studies and data that's been shown around the better the user experience, the more people, I mean the longer people are going to stay on your site, the more pages they're going to view, which means the more ads they're going to see, you can have fewer ads but have higher revenue from those ads by having good user experience? What are some of the things that you look at in terms of balancing good user experience on the site versus ad revenue or maxing ad load, I think I've asked.

Colm Dolan: (11:55)

If that makes sense, I think it's very much individual yet again, and it depends on what publishers really want and it's just monitoring the data, just testing. Like there are a lot of publishers that we refer to sometimes as ad jamming, you know just jamming as many ads in there and just seeing how it works out. Does it impact users or not?

If publishers have user feedback forms if they have analytics on their website to see how engagement deteriorates or does it deteriorate from making one change or two changes like that? I think it's very much testing because no hard and fast rule says that I can just say to you, oh well, if you put like a lot more ads on your webpage, it is going to slow down, it probably will slow down.

Does that affect users potentially I've seen where it does and I've seen where it doesn't? So it depends on what type of user you're looking at? Is it some online gaming site? Is it content people going like for big brands, you've got lots of big brands like the daily mail and the mirror and all these kind of stuff. And they're taking jamming to a whole new level, and especially I think the American publishers as well are probably weaved all, always as a business, being very keen on having a good user experience for our users.

Just trying to like we have a mission previously to make the internet a better user experience and have highly targeted ads and make good for a user. But I think we realized that it's wrong of us to go well publishers, I think you should do this because this is for the good of the internet.

I think lately we've said, okay well I think you can make this much money by having this many ads or have this ad density up to you if you want that you will make more money but it could be the detriment of your site. In the longer term, it's just giving people options.

And again, with doing AB testing we just tested on 1% of traffic and see if that works, and it's always good to work with publishers that are pretty savvy as well that can look at that 1% and figure out that did it have a detrimental effect on a user experience and then make decisions in there? I just think it's all about testing.

Jaryd Krause: (14:28)

It's all about the data. The data is going to help us make better decisions. So digging into some of the data before we do, I'm all about long term, better user experience. I know that it's going to compound over time. It's going to make more ad revenue with a lower ad density if you focus on user experience but obviously, there is that happy medium there.

So how do you measure, what are some of the things you look at? Like if you're going to increase a density or the ad load, whatever you want to call it on a content site, how do you measure how the user experience is performing? Are you looking at the bounce rate the time on the page, and are you watching that and seeing if that's degrading and if so, by how much, and are there some rules that kind of things you track and rules that you use?

Colm Dolan: (15:16)

I think there are no hard and fast rules there. I think the bounce rates page used per session is also another good one to just see what it is like but it depends on what type of content sites. I suppose it is a lot of sites we work with are kind of gaming sites or calculator sites or something like that it's people just go on and get what they're looking for and then go off again.

So the bounce rates are pretty high anyway like it is different strategies for like our strategy has always been trying to make the most money possible for publishers but if you have publishers sometimes that are they might make 90% of their revenue, true display at revenue or 10% of their revenue display at revenue 90% from selling.

Affiliate or selling native ads directly or sponsorships or different stuff like that, that has to be taken into account of what their strategy is, and for that then it's fewer display ads because it's probably going to slow down the side. It's probably going to lessen user experience but again, I think there's no hard and fast rule here.

This is when the publisher knows the business the best like we can offer advice, and tell them what work our mandate really is to give publishers the ammunition to be able to make that incremental ad revenue. Whenever they want, we can. It's a consultative partnership. And it's like this, when we onboard a new client, we ask them up front.

Do you want, how aggressive do you want your ad layout to be? And it's very consultative and you work with a range of different characters that would like that to be high or very low user experiences. So important to us, and in that case, we will have very low density and we will work very closely with our developers and often go on calls with them to figure out how we can like reduce the speed of our tag, all these custom integrations to make sure that it's really good too they're hitting their goals.

It's very much customized again to what the publisher wants and we can tailor our service and our technology to help them in any way possible.

Jaryd Krause: (17:49)

That's great, and so there are so many questions I have for you but what when somebody says we want a decrease we don't want to have a high ad load. What do you do then you go and try and find ads that are going to produce the same amount of revenue as what a higher ad load site would, so you can still get the results because I'm sure you have to find the happy medium between your suggestions and they're what they value to ensure that you can get the result as a client?

Colm Dolan: (18:24)

A hundred percent there are always ways and means. So it is kind of a question like if you have a website that wants maybe three ad units on their site. Well, we can work with that. We said to make sure those ad units are in high viewability locations preferably over 90%, that's not put any unit below the fold that is not sticky.

Let's make sure it's sticky and has those high viewability rates that will make agencies and advertisers want to buy more of that demographic that audience, and then work at a strategy to say if you're a content publisher that there's a few ways you can approach it. Like if you are hard and fast, just trying to get more users and your bounce rates are high.

Well then identity can be pretty high but if you want to create, as you said before, that loyal audience that wants to stick with you for a long while. Well, I often have discussions and say well, what's the overall strategy of the business. Display ads are one area but what else do you do? Do you want to build up sponsorships with people? Is this a specific kind, highly lucrative men's targeted fashion brand or something like that?

And if it is right, how can we work? You have, you want to, you're making content to maybe get Rolex interested in buying ads on your site. Maybe Rolex wants to have video engagement, maybe Rolex wants to have a cool custom native ad that your site becomes more and more lucrative. So then you're focusing more on a specific audience, which is great, a specific that maybe men's wear audience is a great audience or any other type of audience, small business people kind of audience, whatever it is, you stick to your niche and try and really focus on that.

How can you make this maybe a premium service? Maybe there's a side of this, and we've had publishers that like a man of many in Australia who really successful or publisher worked with us and they've created their retail brand this kind of things that are exciting for the publisher but I'd always be trying to get the publisher to think outside the box and not just yeah.

Display revenue if that is where they're going because you see a lot of publishers like the publishing business has struggled content publishers over the last 10 years, and you've seen www.mick.com the US buzz, feed all of these guys having to deviate and make other businesses, they've made it drive or drive made a car reseller kind of comparison side or something like that.

You always have to be thinking outside the box. Retail is a big thing with content publishers, if they can make a brand and I encourage it who knows what's going to happen to display advertising over the years? I think it's good to diversify.

Jaryd Krause: (21:28)

You run some risk. I talk a lot about risk when buying businesses, and you can run a risk of having single source dependency, and then you could run a risk, and I just add revenue. Then you could run a risk of having single source dependency on maybe one ad partner who for example is Rolex and they're 70 to 80% of your advertising income, and they decide we aren't going to continue running ads on the site.

There is that risk there as well. What if that is a thing that publishers find hard to get around in terms of diversification in income and revenue stream within ads, what are some of the other things that hold them back from getting more ad revenue or better ad revenue for their sites

Colm Dolan: (22:18)

In terms of what we just talked about diversification.

Jaryd Krause: (22:24)

Just in terms of general in their site, what are some of the common myths that publishers may have that are like holding them back from being able to increase their ad revenue? Is there a thing like oh I want maximum ad load a density or two is not enough, add density, or wanting to only work with a certain type of brand that may do okay but there may be another brand that is better for them? Is there any myth that could be holding them back from getting the best out of there, the demographic?

Colm Dolan: (22:56)

I think it's like what we just discussed, so publishers could be looking at an article in ad exchanger. They could sign up for Digiday or something like that, and say Digiday has an article saying, oh display advertising is dead. You shouldn't put any ad units below forward. You should offer a premium level of $3 price floor and any ads above the fold.

So publishers might have been thinking, oh that's what I should do for my brand but the person writing that column on dig day could be working for a high-class content publisher and the publisher's business may not be that high-class publisher. So again it goes back, to there being no hard and fast rule for everyone in this environment. Like it's so complex, it is that I am always just open to anything and try not to judge everything too much.

I do think that it's become a more and more apparent parent now that publishers are working with partners rather than just absence. And I do think there is a clear benefit of the partners as we just discussed, and I think, I'll be perfectly honest with you. I don't think there is much difference in the technology that we're doing compared to lots of other competitors because we've been tested numerous times and there are three or 4% here and there every time, and it just goes back to service really.

Most of the technology out there is open source anyway. And there is been no groundbreaking advancements but it always comes down to analyzing the data and seeing what works well and seeing what doesn't work well and service to make those decisions because it's still a quite manual service like Google with all their engineers have every publisher I talk to hates auto ads, the AdSense auto ads feature that obviously regenerates your site.

So with the resources they have and they haven't built good enough AI for that yet I don't think there is much hope for the smaller guys in the market like us to make something that is not the case that may not happen in another few years but the feedback we all get from publishers is that, oh we've tried out a couple of other ad companies and you guys are the best because of service.

It comes down to that level of service and testing, and just being able to be nimble to get our CTO on a call with a client. And it's an advantage being small sometimes as well, that there is not the, it's a very flat organization that we run. So there's no bureaucracy there as well. So if a publisher needs help where put all resources to it at that specific time and that's good to be able to do it from that angle.

Jaryd Krause: (26:02)

I think when you can't compete on product development, then service is if you've got the best service you're going to win for sure. Coming back to like, just for people that are thinking like all cool. If I work with an ad partner, how does it work? Like how do they get, say somebody comes to public and like all right cool. I want to work with the public, how do you get paid? Do you have a percentage fee, like how does it work for most?

Colm Dolan: (26:35)

We take a revenue share. So we take a revenue share flatline revenue share, and we have no locking contracts. It's just month to month. We onboard you and we're pretty relentless to training, make sure that we're increasing revenue from what you've done before, whatever the goals the publisher is, and that's kind of how we operate no locking contracts and depending on size potential what resources we throw at publishers, and just try and test everything to make sure we're making more money.

Jaryd Krause: (27:16)

And is there a minimum traffic requirement that the site should have before they sort of go, I'm going to work with a partner like yourself?

Colm Dolan: (27:25)

It's probably a couple of million pages per month. I think the minimum is about $10,000 in terms of ad revenue but again that is as we go further down the phone that's probably, and we get more advanced in our onboarding and technological capabilities to do something in the self-service arena. And that's probably going to go down but there's no like we get a lot of leads inbound leads per month now.

And at the moment we do have to turn away quite a few leads but we're hoping that we can build a platform to service them further down the line. So if any publishers out there want to run something they are more than happy to answer any questions or see if you'd be a fit.

Jaryd Krause: (28:12)

You just open yourself up to a world of emails and leads we have some strong action takers listening to this podcast. So you definitely will get some people emailing you. I want to ask, we talked about one of your results with the calculator site. What go run us through, like, what were some of the things like maybe two or three things that you did that helped you get a great result with that site, and what were the results?

Colm Dolan: (28:41)

It's an Australian site pickcalculator.com so we started working with them I think about two years ago or something like that, and this is just a side job for the publisher. He had the main job as a developer and the story I like about that is that he give up his day job and is now fully on pay calculator.com.

So it's a bit of a romantic love story that I send, a shiver up my spine every time I think about it, and that's why I love working with small publishers as well because most publishers have a passion and they give up their day job and work on their passion and then they make a living out of that and have ultimate freedom which I love working with people like that and love hearing their story.

I'm happy to talk to many different publishers. I always loved in that but I think basically Rob is a developer and you just didn't have the know-how working with AdSense. Like you work with AdSense and I worked at Google. You just don't have the resources to talk to these publishers daily or talk to these publishers even once a year, like a lot of publishers give out and say that they've never heard from Google, and I work there it's not that you, the resources aren't just put there it's that self-service kind of capability unless you're making like a lot of money per year as a publisher, you're not going to get looked upon.

So when we reach out to them and just do a custom layout optimization, like adding, like looking at their website, that people go on and check how much tax they're going to pay for a year, and they stay on the site for a long time. So an ad refresh worked well there. So just adding an ad unit refresh, increasing the viewability of the ad units by making some sticky, and it's been, it constantly evolves partnership with pay calculator.

Maybe we brought them on two years ago and increased their revenue by, I think it was over 300%. It was something really big but again, it's been every six months or thereabout, when we have new products, we roll them out on this site and we constantly gain a bit more on that, 300%. So I would say that the biggest thing there was, was probably the age refresh and looking at the amount of time a user spends on their site.

Jaryd Krause: (31:10)

It's great to see that just by having the right eyes such as you guys publish and then the right steps, actionable steps with the availability of resources you can have in reaching out to those advertisers to be able to it seems like so simple for a publisher to do themselves but having the strategy and having the resources is not always something that they have that can get them to that 300% increase in ad revenue, right. That's where most people are lacking.

Colm Dolan: (31:46)

I think it's very hard for publishers as well because they get contacted every week by lots of different businesses like us saying, we can increase your revenue, we can increase your revenue, just do this, and just do that. And the biggest thing is, is just trust because we've come across so many publishers in the past that have got screwed over by businesses like us.

We've got probably a bad reputation because people haven't paid on time. People haven't said that increased revenue, hasn't increased revenue. And then you don't hear from them like you hear really bad stories, and I can understand why a publisher would not want to work with some partners or any partner in general. And when you have, you know, a big brand like Google, you're going to get paid every 30 days.

Like your revenue wouldn't be as good as working with a partner but Google is not going to go bust. So that's a big thing for us and something that we've had to overcome especially when we're talking to most of our new sales come from the US and Europe. And we're building out a team in Europe and we've got someone there the last year or so but again this business from Australia and it's gone quite global over the last two years.

And one of the things that we always do is ensure that we never miss a payment, we have payment terms and we normally get, like a couple of days beforehand just to ensure that they feel safe and secure. And that's one of the mandates, that's one of the five things we try and give to publishers. One is increasing revenue but two is making them feel safe and secure because it's a lonely world as a publisher, very lonely work.

A lot of publishers we work with are probably one or two-man bands, and they don't know who to trust. It's kind of similar to starting your own business. It can be a lonely enough place when you're running your own business and then you'd have a bit of success. And then people kind of piggyback on you and say, oh you should do this and should do that. And you're like, oh, I don't know what to do, and then it's the same for publishers.

They're kind of like, oh well talking to this person and they seem genuine and trustworthy and then they get messed around, and we've had situations where stuff hasn't worked out for publishers in the past with us before but one thing we always do is, if they've lost money for one reason or another, we'll pay them back and we'll speak with them, and hold our hand. I've had a few situations where publishers have left us where they go well., Well, thank you very much, it's never been a sour kind of, oh, well, public screwed us over.

That's not the way we operate because it's just, I think fundamentally the most important thing in business is just being morally good people, and being open and transparent. And yes, of course, we've made mistakes lots of times, and we continue to make mistakes but if we do, we'll give money back to the publisher or whatever the mistake is made.

We'll tell them front, and there's plenty of situations where we didn't have to do that but it's always inbuilt into me from, my background, my parents, And it's the same thing with everyone in the business. It's just fundamental to building that trust with the publisher.

Jaryd Krause: (35:08)

I agree and reputation is far more important than money. And also, just being a good person is far more important than money and doing the right thing. I resonate with you around when you first start getting some success as a publisher or when you start first, start your own business, not knowing what to do, not knowing who to trust, that's where we fit in as well with our business is helping people buy businesses.

And don't just try and do it yourself, lean on the right people for support, without people don't get results. If they have unanswered questions really, and don't know what to do because they get stuck and they do nothing. So I think you guys do that well. I think we've lent into that a lot with our business too but I want to ask where can people go away and find out more about the public,and if they want to have a chat with you guys or ask questions, where should they go?

Colm Dolan: (36:04)

Our website is probably the best resource www.publift.com and we've got a lot of resources there in terms of the technology that we've built out recently. I think in the last six months I've really met a lot of advancements in our tech. So publishers can see what we do there. You can also see like a lot of publishers that sign will look everywhere on the website to find out what type of business we are. I think it's important to look into different sections about us, and how the journey started.

I've got a couple of other podcasts on there where I talk about life and philosophy and get to know myself. And I think that's important for any publisher just to get to know what kind of people we are because we haven't strong culture published, and it's from my myself and my co-founder as well. And it's not hard, it's just being sound and a good person, and just resonating that down business is not hard.

To me, it's just like just being a solid dude, so that's reiterated right through the business and we have fun and don't take ourselves too seriously. And that's why I think publishers like working with us.

Jaryd Krause: (37:13)

So many things that I resonate with there, thank you so many guys, check that out. There'll be links in the show notes. Thank you for coming on, we could probably dive in more and maybe we have another podcast coming up in the future. So thanks for coming on. Sure.

Colm Dolan: (37:29)

Thanks for your time.

Jaryd Krause: (37:33)

Everybody is listening. Thank you for listening as well. If you own a content site, make sure you took notes. If not listen to this again, if you know somebody that wants to buy a content site or owns a content site, this is a hugely valuable podcast to send. So please feel free to share this with anybody that is in that bracket. Thanks for listening, speak to you guys soon.