It is no secret that there are a lot of different variables that you need to measure to ensure that your ad revenue is on track and optimized to drive your business forward. In our opinion, too many of these variables are hidden in the dreaded “black box” — which is how we came up with the idea for Freestar Analytics in the first place. In the end, it all comes down to transparency, so we want to show you exactly how you can use Freestar Analytics to your advantage so you can make evidence-based decisions for your business.
To kick things off, we’re going to start by going into the basics of Freestar Analytics, then showing off the real power of our analytics platform.
The basics of Freestar Analytics
First, we’re going to get our initial look at the Freestar Analytics dashboard. Here is where you can see the high-level metrics that are most important for your business. The best part about our dashboard is that it is completely customizable to your needs. As you can see, you have full control over the widgets that you wish to display on your homepage.
Freestar Analytics gives you the power to create and generate reports with your data. Learn what is working and uncover opportunities to improve and grow your revenue. Complete with data visualizations and new dimensions, you get the tools to do deeper analysis than ever before.
Some of our dimensions and features include:
- Timezone options in a date range
- Report level filters
- Metric level filters
- New data dimensions (Buyer Relationship, Connection Type)
- Hourly reports
- Bar and donut charts
- Visualize up to 25 data points
- Save reports
When you work with Freestar, you get access to our Publisher Success team who will recommend reports to be run regularly. They’ll also help you customize your dashboard so the most important widgets for you are available as soon as you log in.
As you can see — from this ad revenue report, the options for metrics to track are virtually limitless, as are the number of permutations you can make for evaluating one metric against another.
For those who are focused on data, the Freestar Analytics platform will be your best friend! It was built around the idea of transparency — so we’ve gone out of our way to make it clear how you’re making your money, and how your ad units are performing. Your data is just that, yours. Better yet, you don’t need to rely on anyone other than yourself to get the answers to questions that mean the most for your bottom line.
Top reports to pull in Freestar Analytics
Speaking of your bottom line — let’s take a look at what Freestar Analytics has to offer that other platforms don’t.
Here’s a perfect example of something that you can get out of the Freestar Analytics platform that is hard, if not impossible, to get out of Google Ad Manager. To our knowledge, we are the only Ad Ops management solution in the industry that gives you all-encompasing access to your data.
The following images you’ll see throughout this webinar are example reports.
Header Bidding report
As you can see, this report provides data on the partner level — and it allows you to evaluate multiple metrics at the exact same time. You can evaluate your partner based on win rate and participation rate to determine whether or not they’re a good fit. Let’s look at an example.
Win Rate vs. Participation Rate
In this visualization of your data, you can see that this partner doesn’t have a very high participation rate, which might lead you to think that they’re not a great fit for your business. But when you evaluate that next to their win rate — which is particularly good — it allows you to see that they may not participate often, but when they do, they win. This means they’re paying top advertising dollar for your ad slots, and that’s more money in your pocket.
This is a prime example of how you can use your own data, in real-time, to make evidence-based decisions in the best interest of your business. You may be able to speak to a partner to see what they would need to increase their participation rate, or see if there’s a way to optimize your site to maximize their involvement, and therefore your revenue.
Next, we’re going to dive into some other reports to really make the best use of your own information!
Ad Quality
Here’s a quick look at one of the ad quality reports that you can run with Freestar Analytics. It allows you to understand what we here at Freestar are doing for you on the ad quality side of things.
As many of you probably know, ad quality is a top priority for us here at Freestar. It’s why we’ve partnered with several ad quality solutions to block malicious ad content — like redirects, bad links, etc. This report allows you to validate that our ad quality solution is working for you and your business, as well as evaluate how much traffic is being blocked from specific sources.
Need an example? For those of you who may be purchasing traffic, wouldn’t you like to know how much of that traffic is being blocked due to bad ads? You can see that by analyzing your blocked impressions. It’s a great way to truly evaluate your return on investment and re-target your audience.
Ad Revenue (Top 100 URL)
Some of you might be wondering why this report is particularly useful. If you’re planning on accepting guest content on your site or creating and evaluating a new content strategy, knowing which pages are performing particularly well can help you identify guest blog posts that were effective. It can also help you tell if your content strategy is panning out as you had expected when it comes to generating ad revenue.
An added bonus of knowing which content is performing really well in terms of ad revenue is it can inform your backlinking strategy. You’ll want to backlink to that content regularly and often to make sure traffic is being driven to those pages — it’ll help drive that ad revenue!
UTM Code
This is a high-level report that shows you where to drill down on your data to get more specific. Partnered with this report is our data on UTM Parameters, so we’re going to look at that next – this is one way to get more granular with your data.
UTM codes are what help you track campaign-level data — like what exactly your revenue sources are? I’m not just talking about geographically (though that information can be important too), I’m talking about whether that social media strategy you’ve been implementing on Quora is really paying dividends.
Like any marketing guru, you want to be able to properly evaluate the ROI of your hard work and effort. If most of your ad revenue is coming from traffic from your Facebook page, then you know that your social strategy is working. On the other hand, if you’re receiving next to nothing from the hours you’re spending creating well-crafted answers on Quora, maybe it’s time to re-evaluate that part of your strategy.
The best part about the way Freestar Analytics works with this information is that it’s auto-digested, meaning any UTM codes that have been assigned, either by yourself or the platform the traffic is coming from, will be tracked automatically by Freestar Analytics and can be visible in a report.
CPM by Key Value Pairing
For those of you who might have some direct deals of your own, you might be interested to know that not only is Freestar able to flight those deals for you, we can also help you identify opportunities for additional deals.
Now keep in mind, we’re not a dating service — so we can’t help you negotiate and manage your direct deals. We’re more like a relationship coach — we can show you your best possibilities so that you can go out and find the right person to make the magic happen all by yourself.
As you can see here, this publisher gets a lot of interest in their Brand A ads, even though they don’t have a ton of Brand A content on their website. Not only does this point to the fact that they could adjust their content strategy to include more Brand A content, but it highlights that Brand A may have a vested interest in giving them a good deal for advertising slots.
That’s some solid evidence-based, decision-making data that should make approaching Brand A with a relevant sales pitch, a breeze. Next, we’re going to look at some ad unit-level data.
Revenue by Ad Unit
This report shows you the breakdown of how each of your ad units are performing on a unit by unit basis. It’ll also show you viewability by unit.
For those of you who are particularly user experience focused, this data can be really useful when trying to optimize your site for UI and UX, as well as helping you understand the effectiveness of your ad layout. You might have space that you’ve dedicated to an ad slot that could be better used elsewhere if it’s not performing well!
That’s just a sneak peek at just some of the computing power and data analysis that you’re capable of with the Freestar Analytics platform. As we said in the beginning, the number of reports you can run is almost endless, so we’ve narrowed it down to the ones our experts feel are the most useful.
The best part about working with an Ad Ops partner, like Freestar, is that you get access to the experts behind the scenes that can help you determine which data is the most important for your business, and help you set up your custom dashboard.
Get more out of your Analytics
Now, last but not least, let’s take a look at who has access to Freestar Analytics when you work with Freestar.
The answer to this question is fairly simple — every Freestar publisher!
Like we’ve said from the beginning, transparency is the name of the game here at Freestar, and a big part of our mission here is to empower publishers so you can focus on what you do best and continue growing your business, and ensure the Internet stays a diverse and interesting place to be.
One of the ways that we feel we’re best able to accomplish that mission is to provide every publisher, regardless of how big or small they are, with access to the kind of information they need to monetize their traffic and make a living off of the kind of content they love to create.
As always, feel free to ask any questions that you might have and we’ll do our best to answer each and every one of them. For those of you who’d like your own walkthrough of the Freestar Analytics platform and want to learn more about how to become a publisher with Freestar, feel free to email us at pubops@freestar.com.
Note: All data provided is demo data to be used for product demonstration.
