Skip to main content

Disappointing RPM for travel niche

Patrick Hughes

I am concerned.  I have decent Tier 1 traffic, am well optimised for ads and am 2 months into using Journey. 

My RPMs are much lower than hoped, not quite reaching $7 on the best day.  I’m very active in the travel blog community and my rates are perhaps ¼ of some of my colleagues (and honestly some are getting 5x or more from Journey). 

Of course I’m impatient to do better but right now I was making more on Adsense. 

As there’s no direct support with Journey, can a Journey colleague check that everything is functioning as it should on my site, please: thisisplanetpatrick.com - I appreciate any insights to get RPMs to a reasonable level. 

0

Comments

1 comment

Date Votes
  • Support
    • Journey Support Team

    Hey Patrick, 

    From a technical perspective, everything looks good. I'm seeing ads when I visit your site and there isn't anything optimizing the script from what I can see. 

    We use a programmatic approach to ads, which means our advertisers purchase based on a unique site's audience makeup. Two sites with similar content/niches can earn very differently, based on the layout, engagement, etc. 

    In general, RPM is incredibly site-specific and impacted by not only geography but reader behavior, how they're engaging - and even what browsers and devices they're using.  You can read more about that here.

    It looks like you have things optimized pretty well. My only two suggestions would be for the mobile view of your site. 

    Break up long paragraphs. Since most readers skim content and use mobile devices to browse sites, shorter sentences, and paragraphs keep them more consistently engaged. It also lets our script wrapper work a little better. 

    Bump up the mobile font size. From what I can tell it's set to 17px and it looks to be a bit smaller on my phone. Normally we recommend a font size of at least 18px. I think you'd be safe to go anywhere between 18px-19px. Font size is an easy change to apply, and it gives your entire site a bump in length, and most importantly, SEO. 

    0

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.

Please sign in to leave a comment.

Powered by Zendesk