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Very Low RPM

Amelia Sandy
Edited

Hi,

I'm now past the 30 day ‘ramp up’ period, and though my RPM/CPM climbed quite quickly at first, it hasn't changed in the last few weeks, and is significantly lower than what i was expecting! Previous ad providers offered a higher RPM from day one.

I implemented a sidebar a few weeks ago based on other advice I've seen here to see if that would increase my earnings, but I haven't seen any significant change.

My site has had around 36k pageviews over the last 30 days of being with Journey, and the earnings are really not anywhere near what I had hoped for. I was really excited when I got started based on what I've heard from other creators, but at this point I'm starting to feel like I need to explore other options. 

If you could provide any sort of advice or guidance on what I can do to improve CPMs on my site, I would really appreciate it, as I've had a great experience here and would prefer to improve things and continue with Journey.

Thanks,

Amelia

 

 

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Comments

5 comments

Date Votes
  • Support
    • Journey Support Team

    Hey Amelia, 

    I can jump in here and I hope your fellow publishers do as well with what works for them! 

    Outside of seasonality and market conditions, CPM is primarily influenced by your audience. Browsers, countries, referral sources, and devices all play a huge role. (You can read more about CPM here.) Audience/Reader behavior, and traffic sources (country, social, organic, etc) can all play into how your RPM shakes out after the fact. (More about RPM here.)  

    It looks like you're running Google Analytics so I'd suggest digging into your traffic (where it's coming from, where it's going, how long they're on the page) and seeing if there's been any changes to that recently. 

    One thing I did notice is that your homepage and category pages get a lot of traffic. This isn't necessarily a bad thing because it means readers are making their way to your site but they don't typically monetize very well. Readers are going there, finding what they want, and jumping off to other content. 

    Advertisers bid more competitively to be where your readers are found - this can mean higher CPMs and an overall higher earning potential. This is why we recommend trying to drive traffic to well-optimized posts and away from your homepage whenever possible. 

    Oh! One other thing was when I was looking at your site on my phone I noticed there is a super attention-grabbing Jump to Recipe button. Having that within the first screen view can prematurely lead readers to skip past all your content! I'd maybe lower it a bit or make it less prominent. Seeing as you already have an open Table of Contents they can use to skip around, they have other ways to skim if they need to. 

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  • Support
    • Journey Support Team

    Okay, last thing! I also saw you have a newsletter marked as coming soon in your contact page. I'd recommend collecting emails now with any of Grow's Subscribe options or utilizing Link Share in your recipe card. Grow also tends to be good for CPMs! 

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  • Anita Coombe

    Hi Mary, I am piggy backing onto this post, not sure if that is correct or not. But, I have now been on Journey for over 2 months and my RPM's are still very low. Last 30 days, is average $7.13 RMP.

    Could you please look into this - I thought maybe it was because I was new to Journey, but after 2 months, the RPM should be higher than what it is.

    My site: https://cocktailsandappetizers.com/

    Thanks!

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  • Support
    • Journey Support Team
    Edited

    Anita Coombe RPM is incredibly specific to the site and its audience so I always recommend avoiding comparing! Each site’s RPM is impacted by a ton of different factors like audience makeup, CPM, formatting, reader behavior, which devices or browsers most of their visitors are coming from, etc. Two identical sites can have vastly different RPMs based on how their audience behaves alone.

    We do find that drink recipes tend to have lower CPMs, the spending from advertisers, as well as fewer impressions since readers usually quickly scroll through the ingredients and then hop off the page. All of which affect RPMs. 

    Content that encourages longer and slower scrolling, like recipes, tends to have high CPMs and will generate more impressions. There isn't anything wrong with drink recipes but they will monetize differently.

    One thing I would suggest is to bump your font up a bit. It's pretty small on both desktop and mobile. I'd suggest anywhere between 18px and 20px. 

    I'd also maybe drop the social share buttons from the side of your pages on mobile since they take up a good bit of real estate on mobile and you have them elsewhere in the post. 

    Aside from that - when I look at your site I see ads serve as expected so the next best thing to do is to make sure there aren't any conflicts with your Journey script and that your posts are as optimized as possible

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  • Anita Coombe

    Mary, thanks for getting back to me and the feedback. I will look into these suggestions, appreciate it.

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Journey is Self Supported

Our support staff is monitoring this forum everyday for bugs related to ad delivery, the display and functionality of the Journey dashboard, and any bugs related to the onboarding process. We are typically unable to assist with non-bug related issues like RPM performance expectations, issues setting up the ads.txt file, and questions already answered by our existing help docs. Read here for a more detailed breakdown of how Journey is self-supported and our recommendations for how to find answers to common issues.

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