Floor Cpm Question For Users Options

[Lamont]

I'm trying to judge what my floor CPM should be. Anyone want to post what they are using as floor CPM's that is actually getting advertisers to bid? Maybe post what the highest floor you have set up and an advertiser paid more for?

[Mentor]

Hi Lamont,

Welcome to the OpenX community forums!

This is a good question. I'm going to pin this topic for a while to have it more visible for other users.

[Adserverhelp]

The issue is that not all inventory is equal. So what one 'travel' publisher generates does not equate to what another publisher with similar content will.

There are so many ways to buy inventory that sometimes we will never know why some achieves a higher cpm than other simliar inventory.

My advice would be to try many approaches to it, with a whole range of floor prices. The most important thing is to ensure that your floor price is higher than you are achieving already!

I actually add on 25% to what i am currently achieving. The reason for this is that there is a risk that if i just use what i am achieving from another adnetwork this may fall over time.

For example: (Numbers imaginary!)

I achieve $0.75 from Adsense, if i set my floor to $0.75 there is a risk that my adsense eCPM may fall as by participating in the OpenX market i am allowing other networks to cherry pick the best inventory. If they take the best inventory at $0.76 then maybe, just maybe, my eCPM from Google will drop as they are now having to work with inventory rejected by the OpenX market. Over time my eCPM from adsense could drop to $0.60 and i am selling the rest at $0.76. This could result in a net drop in yield.

There is no scientific proof behind this but whilst i am learning more about what sells and what doesn't i am being slightly conservative!

I would recommend testing testing testing!

[Lamont]

Thanks for the advice. I've just started setting it up so it can display Google adsense first if the floor is not met. I hope OpenMarket takes off with Advertisers. Its a great idea.

[ColonelForbin74]

I'm starting to play a somewhat more interesting game in the sense that apparently,
I myself and others aren't "worth" serving an ad to...however others are.

I find this market behavior a bit odd, but am definitely going to see exactly how much
I can charge for these impressions simply by increasing the floor CPM over time.

After doing some research on the Internet, apparently website owners were charging
roughly $25 per 1,000 impressions a LONG time ago...so I'm trying that.

As the first person requested, I'll keep posting since nobody else is much as I wonder...
how much money can I make simply serving highly targeted impressions?

There's only one way to find out!

Cheers,

[James S]

I'd be happy to try a 25% hike, but the issue for me is that I don't see a way to set the floor for a website.

I can only see a way to set the floor per campaign, which is on the advertiser level... Not the website level.

So if, for instance, I set my adsense campaign (which is all my websites' ads from AdSense) to $0.50, then my low-cpm websites will never get a market ad while my high $ websites will be wasting their $1/click displays with lower cpms from the market.

Why can't they just put a floor switch on each website, or better yet, every targeting channel individually?

-James

[ColonelForbin74]

I'd be happy to try a 25% hike, but the issue for me is that I don't see a way to set the floor for a website.

I can only see a way to set the floor per campaign, which is on the advertiser level... Not the website level.

So if, for instance, I set my adsense campaign (which is all my websites' ads from AdSense) to $0.50, then my low-cpm websites will never get a market ad while my high $ websites will be wasting their $1/click displays with lower cpms from the market.

Why can't they just put a floor switch on each website, or better yet, every targeting channel individually?

-James

All I can say is just give it time, and use the resources available at your fingertips. Over time they'll change I'm sure.

For instance, I myself have in some sense opted out of the OpenX Market(for now?) by setting everything to
$25 CPM and am now leveraging OpenX Hosted to serve ads for affiliate networks...which while it is more difficult
to actually make money have much more attractive rates -and- stronger brands.

*sigh* Unfortunately, it is VERY early yet in the Internet marketing world(i.e. I used to make a decent amount
of money at various dot-com style companies...Google keeps showing me e-Harmony ads! *rofl* A complete
and total mismatch...I'm more of a onlinebootycall.com kind of guy) but seeing as more and more people use it
I think it's only a matter of time until more and more marketing companies "get the clue".

Until then, I'm happily serving away GoDaddy, Buy.com and Sony ads. Not bad for a little website that Google
can't even seem to index properly...much less people can find. :-)

Regards,

[James S]

For anyone else having the same problem I was, namely needing to set a floor per website, it is achieved by making a channel PER website.

I used to think it was good enough to have a channel for adsense, and a channel for AdBrite... Total: 2 Channels.

Now, for my 5 websites, I have 2 channels per site, so a total of 10 channels. Now I can set floors for the websites through it's individual campaign.

Oh yeah, I set mine at 25% above that sites' CPC earnings, per advertiser. We'll see how many market ads I get from this.

Hope that helps some other newbies out there.

Cheers,
James

[hans]

A good topic for a question I also had - I just changed from Adsense to Openx source yesterday and was wondering how to set reasonable floor prices per channels/language-sections or as mentioned above per site.

some 3 years ago G eCPM was excellent on my high traffic/multilingual/multi topic site with steady average around 12,5$ - after the economy crisis started some 2 and half years ago the eCPM went way down to some 5,50$ average (and G profit went way up) on weekends 1-2$ more and Xmas almost double.

Since in many openx admin forms there often is a set default below 1$ CPM that was confusing.

May be some more experience sharing helps to find a reasonable CPM across several categories to start with.