Political Ads During Election Season
While the dollars are flowing from political campaigns, is the revenue worth it for your site? How can you block them for your visitors? We’ve got the answers!
In the United States, 2020 is an election year and November is right around the corner! In an effort for politicians to spread their platforms to voters, an increase in political ads has been widespread and will only increase through the third quarter. For some of our publishers, these campaigns are unwanted; which is why we keep strict political blocks in place year-round.
Opportunity Cost
Before we describe blocking political ads, the first thing you should know is that 2020 was projected to be the highest spending political year ever. If you choose to fully exclude all political ads you can estimate that you’ll be missing out on between 7%-10% of ad revenue during the 3rd and 4th quarters of
2020.
Understanding Blocks
With all blocks, no filter that can be set up in ad-tech will be perfect. Filters are only as effective as the campaign-criteria an advertiser sets it up with and the sophistication of the exchange that the ad was sold in.
In some cases, advertisers sneak campaigns by labeling them based on criteria that are not actually contained. If an advertiser mistakenly or purposely mislabels an ad, it can take time for industry filters to catch the bad actors.
For example, photographs from a campaign speech in a rural area might be used in an ad that is then labeled under “agriculture” instead of “politics,” as an effort to circumvent filters. Prior to this hypothetical ad being displayed, neither our filters nor our team would have known about the mislabeling.
We rely on our 5-step defense (outlined below) as much as is feasible, which allows us to individually address these occasional outliers. Because we do not want to put large-scale blocks in place for a neutral category like “agriculture” (the result would be filtering out hundreds of clean campaigns that are earning money for your site), we take the time to review these cases individually.
Some ad exchanges do not support domain-specific blocks, making it almost impossible to fully block every single ad from this category without blocking it for all of our thousands of publisher’s sites. The only option at this point is to remove certain advertisers from buying on your site, which can result in some potential revenue lost.
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A few more things to keep in mind regarding category blocks. The first is that while we have strict family-friendly blocks in place, specifics blocks in approved categories such as a political party or an individual candidate must be blocked on a site-by-site, exchange-by-exchange basis. Furthermore, not all your readers will even see political ads! If the user visiting your site does not have any virtual affiliation with a political party, advertisers likely don’t know this user and may not be willing to target them in their campaign.
Catching Unwanted Ads
If you do see an unwanted political ad sneak through our protections, there are two particularly helpful things you can proactively do. The first is to take a screenshot of the ad; the second is to copy the URL the advertisement sends you to. After you send us this information, we can then add the specific URL to our server’s block list, let our ad-quality partners know, and then attempt to manually pinpoint other possible sources. Because advertisers may seek new URLs to push campaigns through, it is always a good idea to notify us of any additional unwanted ads.
Monumetric takes extreme measures in advertisement quality. This is absolutely one of our highest priorities and since 2016, we have had exceptional success in mitigating reported or unwanted ads using our 5 Barriers of Defense. We know how irritating these ads can be (both for readers and for publishers) which is why we execute this 5-step defense to prevent, protect, and respond to bad ads on your site.
Here are the first 5 steps of our defense prevent bad ads from reaching your site:
Step 1: We block unwanted ads on all three levels of the ad lifecycle. In the first step, we employ strict filters on the ad server.
Step 2: We have special code in our ad tags which scan every single ad creative for malvertising, and prevents the ad from displaying if flagged.
Step 3: We block unwanted ads from filling through our unique algorithm built to beat the worst of the malvertising offenders.
Step 4: If an unwanted ad does slip through, we utilize our proprietary technology to track the ad so that we can report it, with details, to our advertisers to prevent it from happening again.
Step 5: If the unwanted ad continues to persist, we use this 5th step to replicate the ad across web servers around the globe, trace it back to its origin, and then notify our advertising partners to block it completely.
Network Success
While no system or company has proven to block 100% of unwanted ads, we have been able to reduce the number of blocked ads across the Monumetric ecosystem by 96%. We continue to test new solutions and block new workarounds to keep your site and your audience safe.
As we continue working together, please understand that having political ads almost always increases a site’s revenue. Political parties are spending their campaign advertising budgets for the election year to market on your site and they pay competitive CPMs to get their time-sensitive message across. The more advertisers you block from buying ads on your site, the more it will affect your earning potential.
Of course, this can be well worth it to publishers who want to keep control of the messages shared on their site, which is why our team is here to assist no matter what your ad strategy might be!
