10 Tips To Minimize Unfilled Ad Impressions

In this post, I’ll show you some tips and strategies on how to prevent or minimize unfilled ad impressions. The unfilled impression is a major problem of Google Ad Manager users. Unfilled impressions cause of low revenue. Here are some tips to reduce unfilled impressions.

#1 Audit Your Header And Body Tags

If you are using Google Ad Manager tags, the div ID for the header should match with a corresponding body tag. In case of a mismatch, you’re going to see intermittent ad serving and sometimes blank ads, which means you’re leaving money on the table.

#2 Audit Your Ad Units By Monitoring CTR & Viewability

Run a historical report and check the CTR and viewability. These are two of the most important key performance indicators for advertisers to keep bidding on your traffic. If they see any of your inventory not performing well based on these two KPIs, they can stop bidding or blacklist the domain eventually. 

#3 Ensure Your ads.txt is Complete And is Crawlable

Any lines missing for any of the demand partners will prevent them from bidding on your traffic.

#4 Not All Ad Sizes Are Created Equal

Some ad sizes will most likely get more demand than others. Go for high-performing ad sizes as much as possible. Here are some examples for mobile and for desktop. When choosing ad sizes to run, it has to be appropriate for where the ad is going to serve. For example, for the sidebar, you can run vertical ad units like 300×600 and 160×600, while in the middle of the page, you can go for square ads or horizontal ads.

#5 Revisit Price Floors or Target CPMs

Double-check your unified pricing rules or CPM floors, not just on ad exchange but also on third-party ad networks if applicable. Remember, when you set your floor too high, you are also trimming down the number of bidders eligible to bid on your inventory.

#6 Audit And Update Protection Rules or Ad Block Rules

If you blocked a certain advertiser because of a campaign you ran previously, and if that campaign is now finished, revisit your rules and allow that advertiser to bid again. Keep this updated, revisiting from time to time and updating in case of any changes.

#7 Double-check Your Ad Units To Make Sure They’re All Targeted

You can do so by running a report and breaking it down by ad unit, order, and line item type. If you miss targeting any of your ad units, most likely, you’re going to get unfilled ad impressions.

#8 Troubleshoot Your Site 

Troubleshoot your site for anything that can cause slow page load or page performance issues. This could hurt your user experience, leading to unfilled ad impressions. You can use a lot of tools out there, but the best ones we recommend are PubGuru Ad Inspector, which you can download from the Chrome Web Store, and Publisher Ads Audits for Lighthouse and Web Vitals. Follow the recommendations from these tools and address any issues.

#9 Create House Line Items Targeting Your Entire Inventory

Having the lowest priority in the ad stack, it becomes your safety net or your catch-all line item. If nobody else can serve the impression, then the house comes in. It’s important to remember that you can no longer use Google tags as a house; it’s now considered invalid and can get your account banned or blacklisted. You can probably use a third-party tag or an image creative, then set another section of your site or a product that you sell as your landing page.

#10 Use Proprietary Technology, AdSense Re-render

When you work with a publisher partner, you can run our proprietary technology called AdSense Re-render without violating any Google policies. We will serve AdSense as a fallback to minimize unfilled ad impressions. There are several reasons why an impression could come back as unfilled, and our technology will make sure that you’re still monetizing every single ad request that comes in. Built with highly sophisticated machine learning technology, you can rest assured that none of your ad requests will go to waste.