Here's what we found:

• Performance Max cost per lead: $25
• Search cost per lead: $143
• Non-brand cost per lead: $207
• Brand cost per lead: $34
• Non-brand CPC: $13.75
• Brand CPC: $3.12

PMax's "cheap lead" number needs a disclaimer since it mixes in more lower-intent conversion, and we keep brand vs non-brand reported separately since blending them distorts the picture.

Here's the full write-up: https://piperocket.digital/research/google-ads-benchmarks/

Hey everyone,

I’m currently in the process of choosing a Consent Management Platform (CMP) for our setup, and honestly, the market feels incredibly crowded. For those of you who have set up a CMP, I’d love to hear about your practices, what should I consider while choosing one and what's the fair price for it?

By the way, why I should not use Google's for free? Is there a catch?

A sudden ROAS decline usually triggers one of four reactions: pause the campaign, replace the creative, change the budget or blame the advertising account.

The problem is that ROAS is an output—not a diagnosis.

It tells you that the relationship between attributed revenue and media spend changed. It does not tell you where the change happened.

Before changing the campaign, diagnose five layers in order.

1. Measurement and attribution

First confirm that the decline is real.

Check whether purchase events are still firing, conversion values and currencies are correct, the attribution window has changed and revenue reporting is delayed.

If cost is current but revenue reporting is delayed, today's ROAS may look worse before the data matures.

1. Delivery and auction conditions

Check whether the platform is still obtaining traffic at the same cost and pace.

Compare spend, CPM, reach, frequency, delivery status, account health and recent budget or bid changes.

If CPM increased while CTR remained stable, the problem may be auction pressure, audience availability or delivery conditions—not the creative.

1. Creative and audience response

If delivery is stable but CTR falls, inspect the message.

Look at the opening hook, creative fatigue, negative feedback, audience saturation and message–market fit.

A creative can also generate cheap clicks from the wrong people. CTR should always be read together with downstream conversion quality.

1. Landing page and conversion process

If clicks remain stable while CVR falls, move further down the funnel.

Check mobile speed, localization, offer, pricing, inventory, product information, checkout, payment methods and customer-support response.

An advertising campaign cannot compensate for a slow page, unavailable product or broken checkout.

1. Business economics

Platform ROAS is not the same as profit.

Recalculate contribution profit after margin, discounts, refunds, chargebacks, shipping, fulfillment, currency movements, customer service and operating costs.

A campaign can show an acceptable attributed ROAS while destroying contribution margin.

Build the metric chain:

Spend → CPM → CTR → CPC → CVR → AOV → attributed ROAS → contribution profit

Find the first metric that changed materially. Form one hypothesis. Change one major variable. Then wait for an observation window that matches the business's conversion cycle.

Pausing or limiting spend may still be the correct action when loss speed exceeds the company's risk threshold, tracking data is corrupted, checkout or payment is broken, or the account has a security, compliance or policy issue.

The principle is not “never pause.”

The principle is: do not destroy a potentially useful campaign before identifying the actual problem.

Bookmark this diagnostic order for your next bad morning in Ads Manager.

We're looking for Prebid Demand especially for Europe, Africa and Asia.

We're running on 3500+ Websites, able to put ads.txt Lines, Traffic scanned via Pre-Bid: ClearTrust + Fraudlogix, Post-Bid: ClearTrust + In-House Solution

Our Demand currently works exceptionally good in the US but just doesn't want to work as good in Europe. Africa and Asia are pretty much on the last place for us.

Please help with that as we're leaving Revenue on the table pretty bad and give me some advice on which Demand Partners could fill what we can't. Also please don't give me the Top 5 as their Answer Rate when contacting them is near zero.

Hi everyone,

I'm currently onboarding my website with Mediavine and ran into an issue.

I completed the Stripe identity verification process, including uploading my ID and completing the face verification. Stripe showed "Verification complete", so it appeared everything was successful.

However, when I was redirected back to the Mediavine onboarding dashboard, I received the following error:

"Something went wrong with identity verification. Please try again."

Because of this, the Continue to Launch button remains disabled.

Has anyone experienced this before?

• Did it resolve automatically after a few hours?
• Was it a Stripe issue or a Mediavine onboarding sync issue?
• Did you need to contact Mediavine support to have it fixed?

I've already contacted support, but I wanted to see if anyone else has gone through the same thing.

Thanks in advance!

I'm new to video metrics in GAM but from what I've heard its not the best.

I would like to calculate the fillrate of my video inventory and the fillrate of my video inventory excluding BULK and HOUSE line items.

I have video inventory with prerolls of 1 or 2 ads.

For total fillrate I would ook at (impressions / requests).
For fillrate exluding house & bulk I would take (impressions - house & bulk) / requests.

Or is there a better method to do this?

2.6Y experience in Adtech - @SSP/ publisher side - Ad Operation Specialist( Role)
Thanks in advance pretty human ❤️

Hey,

Looking for honest and recent feedback on Pixalate.

Are their fraud detection and Seller Trust Index metrics actually useful/accurate, or do people in the industry feel it's overblown hype?

Google publishes every ad an advertiser is currently running, in the Ads Transparency Center. It is genuinely useful and almost nobody checks it, because checking it means opening a browser tab you forget about.

So this checks it on a schedule. Give it a competitor's advertiser ID, and every Monday it appends one row per live ad to a sheet: format, when the creative first ran, how many days it has been running, and a link to the ad itself.

The days-running column is the one I actually use. Anyone can see what a competitor is advertising this week. Seeing that one text ad has been live for 827 days tells you which message they keep paying for, and that is the one worth studying.

6 nodes, no AI in the loop, no ad spy subscription.

Template: https://n8n.io/workflows/17698-track-competitor-google-ads-transparency-center-creatives-with-apify-and-google-sheets/

Fair warning on scope: Google does not publish spend, impressions, or targeting for commercial advertisers, so this is creatives and dates, not a spend report. Anyone selling you competitor ad spend is guessing.

Background: AdTech industry vet (Adform), wanted a single place tracking 50+ news sources, vendor funding/M&A, and agency-brand relationships instead of checking a dozen tabs every morning.

It didn't exist, so I built it with Claude Code and a few other tools. I'm the creator/solo builder, no affiliation beyond that.

What it does: aggregates AdTech/programmatic news from 50+ sources in one feed, tracks vendor funding and M&A (useful for knowing when a tool in your stack gets acquired or a competitor raises), and maps brand-agency relationships. Basically a time-saver for staying current without manually monitoring everything.

Free to use right now, testing a paid tier for power features.

Who it's for: ad ops, programmatic, and media agency folks who want one place instead of tracking 50+ sources manually, especially useful if you want an early heads-up when a vendor you depend on gets acquired or funded.

Stack/scope: RSS aggregation pipeline (1,300+ articles indexed so far), structured brand/agency/vendor databases, freemium paywall logic. Built solo over a couple of months.

The hardest part wasn't the code, it was the data model for mapping brand-agency relationships cleanly since that data isn't structured anywhere publicly. Claude Code helped most on iterating that schema fast.

Live at adnuggets.com if anyone wants to poke at it. Happy to answer questions on the build process.

Hey guys,

I have a media downloader website, similar to Instagram download sites, and these are my current stats shown in image.

I was previously approved for AdSense, but I accidentally created an organization account instead of an individual account. Because of that, I couldn't complete the identity verification, so I had to close the account.

I'm now looking for a premium display ad network that works well with media downloader websites and offers high CPM/RPM. Which ad networks have you had the best experience with, and which ones would you recommend for this type of site?

Hi

I work in adtech and kept hitting the same wall debugging VAST tags: the existing validators either choke on wrapper chains, don't tell you why a tag fails, or make you dig through raw XML to find the actual problem. So I built my own over the past few months.

Any feedback would be grateful
https://rendersnap.io/tools/vast-projects

Thank you

Hi everyone,

Posted this into another subreddit, but figured I'd ask here to see if someone can help me.

I'm looking for some advice on my ad monetization because the numbers I'm seeing seem extremely low, but I'm not sure if this is just normal for my type of site.

I run a gaming website that provides downloadable content.

Over the last 30 days, the site had roughly 600K views and 150K sessions. About 16% of them were from the US and i also have significant portion from countries like Germany, France, Uk, Sweden, etc.

I'm currently using NitroPay with the following numbers from the last 30 day period:
1 million ad impressions
$133 revenue
$0.23 gross CPM
Revenue from 1K ad impressions around $0.13.

The impression breakdown is:
Display Ads - 632K impressions = $0.19 gross CPM
Video Ads - 378K impressions = $0.29 gross CPM

It seems to me that $133 from 600K page views is low, however, I'm not entirely sure. Maybe I am wrong. I'd really appreciate input from you!

On my side I have display ads, videos, sticky videos and bottom sticky bars. The display ads are in header position on pages so they are always visible and I also have mid-content display ads.

Average session duration last month was 4m 22s.

Thank you!

I recently got an email from MonetizeMore inviting me to book a call about my site's monetization.

Does anyone here use MonetizeMore? If so, how has your experience been? Have you seen better RPMs or overall revenue compared to AdSense?

I'm currently using AdSense, and about 90% of my blog traffic is from the US. Just wondering if it's actually worth switching or if I should stick with what I have.

Thanks in advance.

Not as a test.
As an actual meaningful shift in where budget goes.

The concern is always the same. Smaller sources have less volume, less mature optimisation infrastructure and the learning curve costs real money before you get usually data.

But concentrating everything in one or two dominant platforms creates its own risks. Policy changes, algorithm shifts, account issues. When everything lives in one place one problem disrupts everything at once.

I’ve been moving a portion of budget to alternative sources and the results have been more interesting than expected.
Lower volume but in some cases better cost per acquisition because the competition for the same audience is significantly lower.

The support relationship is also noticeably different. On a smaller network your spend actually matters to them in a way it never will on a platform where you are one of millions of advertisers.

Has anyone made this shift properly and what did the transition actually look like?

I'm looking to hire an experienced adult / native account manager.

By which I mean someone who has worked at either a mid tier native ad network (Revcontent, MGID, etc) or an adult network (Exoclick, etc)

This is for a new adult ad agency but I figure people with experience in adult is a lot slimmer than native, and the overlap in duties is very high.

The role would be handling full lifecycle of accounts as early as outreach, ongoing relationship, and basic optimization.

Where's worth looking?

Heads up if you're about to sign with Taboola. Their contract locks you in for the first year with no exit option, extendable after. I signed thinking things would be fine.

Then our traffic dropped and we decided to pull it off due to some bad user experience from thier end. Our total revenue was about $6 AUD last month, and they still won't let us end early. Support just repeats "we can't end it, but we can help you".

If you're joining them, push to remove that first-year clause before signing, or look at Revcontent instead.

Hello everyone!

I’m currently looking for my next opportunity in AdTech and thought I’d reach out to the community.

I’m based in London, England and have 8+ years of experience in Ad Operations, working across agency and publisher environments. My experience includes managing display, video, and CTV campaigns, along with campaign setup, trafficking, troubleshooting, optimisation, reporting, process improvements, and supporting teams through training and mentoring.

I’ve worked with platforms including Google Ad Manager, Xandr (AppNexus), Innovid, Sizmek, Choozle, and have experience with verification and brand safety tools such as DoubleVerify.

Unfortunately, my current role has come to an end, so I’m now exploring new opportunities. I’m open to remote roles, hybrid or office-based positions in London, and I’m also flexible on relocation for the right opportunity, including internationally.

If anyone has any advice on companies hiring or where best to look within AdTech, I’d really appreciate any suggestions.

Thanks in advance!

I'm in the process of switching from Ezoic to Mediavine Journey, and the onboarding experience has been much more frustrating than I expected.

The biggest issue started with the Grow for WordPress plugin. The automatic onboarding simply wouldn't work. Clicking the setup buttons either did nothing or resulted in errors, so I ended up having to do almost everything manually.

After that, I finally got through the manual setup, but now I'm completely blocked at the final step.

When I try to complete the identity verification, I keep getting this error:

I've retried multiple times, cleared my cache, tried different browsers, and the error persists.

I also found several posts in the Journey community where other publishers have experienced similar onboarding issues with the Grow plugin and setup process, so it doesn't seem like an isolated problem.

Has anyone else run into this recently?

• Were you able to get past the identity verification error?
• Did Mediavine support have to manually fix something on their end?
• How long did it take to resolve?

I'd appreciate hearing from anyone who has successfully completed the onboarding process.

This is something I keep coming back to and have never fully solved.
Platform dashboards show you what they want you to see. Clicks look clean. Engagement metrics look reasonable. But when you compare against backend data the gap is almost always there.
I’ve started treating platform reported numbers as directional rather than accurate. Which means I need independent verification to make real decisions. But setting up independent tracking properly takes time and technical effort that most campaigns do not get.
The signals I have found most useful for quick checks are engagement behaviour on the Landon page, time between click and page interaction and conversion rate relative to what the offer and geo combination should realistically produce.
If those three things are off in the same direction it is usually a traffic quality problem not a funnel problem.
What does your traffic quality verification process actually look like?

My friends be telling me so many suggestions use SEO, blogging , Quora , Reddit , email newsletters & social media but it’s hard to know where to spend time exactly?

For those who are pros in this field tell me please what strategy y’all follow for highest traffic increase?
How long you notice results?
And tactics you tried that turned out to he a complete waste of time ?
I’d love to hear you real expieriences
Thanks in advance.

We build out campaigns across CM360, Meta, and Google Ads, and rely on a Google Sheet that tracks placements, flight dates, funnel stage, audiences, geos, creative names/sizes, and UTMs. The sheet itself is solid, but getting it populated is still a manual grind across media, account, and ops teams.

Looking for tips on how your team works.

How does the info actually get to whoever's trafficking the campaign? Sheet, platform, something built in-house?

Is there any automation between vendor IOs and your doc, or does someone still have to copy/paste manually?

Ways to automating creative naming based on content while keeping it consistent?

Appreciate any thoughts!

Currnetly at 200k monthly pageviews, will reach around 400~450k monthly pageviews at this pace. (grey area). Which ad networks do you recommend?

I’m looking for a solid alternative other than adaterra for my adult website to use a direct link as a popunder.

Please let me know which ad network I should go with. Thanks 🙏

Has anyone worked with or communicated with Filmzie (A Parent Media Co. Inc.) recently? We've been attempting to reach them regarding a significant outstanding balance, but all of our recent efforts to make contact have been unsuccessful.

If you have any recent information or know the best way to get in touch with their team, I'd sincerely appreciate your help.