Have you noticed your earnings declining in 2022, or not growing as fast as you want them to? Or is everything going as planned, but you still want more — more profit, more traffic, more… everything.
Well, monetization is no easy task. In order to continue making a profit, you will always need to innovate and introduce new tricks.
The digital marketing world changes every minute, and new trends crop up so rapidly that it is near impossible to keep up with them all. Although every single trend and new development in the industry is another chance to one-up your competitors, sometimes it can be inefficient to try and keep up with all of them.
We have asked our friends at Adsterra to share the top monetization trends they think everyone should follow based on their experience of working with over 10,000 publishers. Here they are!
Adapt your platform to voice search
Although voice search is not that popular yet, it has been getting a lot of traction recently as seemingly every tech giant strove to create its own voice assistant. Optimizing your platform for voice search is a sure way to drive more traffic – just be mindful of what country it is from. Voice search optimization will perform particularly well in America or the UK. After all, voice search and voice assistants have already become somewhat of a staple in many people’s lives.
Optimizing your content for voice search is as easy as ABC. Use keywords — or, rather, keyphrases — that are longer than usual and sound more conversational. You can include traditional keywords within them.
Explore new niches
Any investor can tell you that diversification is the key to massive profits — and aren’t web platforms also an asset? There are many ways to diversify your content. You can always create a new website, add a new branch to your blog, a new category to your e-commerce service, and so on.
At the moment, it seems like all the trends we saw in 2021 are still going to be on top in 2022. Here are some of the trending website niches that you can consider adding to your existing platform or creating a new service for.
Sports
There will be lots of high-profile sports events this year, so the popularity of betting campaigns and live streaming events is sure to be at an all-time high!
Games and virtual reality
As NFTs and the Metaverse continue to gain popularity, games/virtual reality app developers are likely to flood the advertising market.
Local TikTok and Amazon lookalikes
Advertising markets in developing countries (India, Malaysia, South Africa, etc.) are currently being flooded with apps that mimic the most popular services on the market. As their formula has already proven to be a success, these advertisers are ready to pay a lot.
Entertainment
News portals, streaming services of all kinds and flavors, video hosting platforms — all of them will continue to be popular in 2022. Although the lockdown is over in most countries, many users are still more than happy to consume content online. We have also noticed a particularly noticeable spike in the popularity of anime.
As you can see, most of these are niches that have always been popular. However, there’s also one niche that has always pulled in good numbers but has never been particularly popular among publishers: downloads. It will still be just as relevant in 2022, so check it out if you’re looking for something new!
Mobile continues to be king
Despite it being popular for almost a decade now, mobile traffic is still something many publishers neglect. And to their own detriment: it is currently king in driving CPM.
Although mobile ads still pay less on average than desktop ones, that difference is more than made up by the sheer numbers mobile can pull these days. Additionally, advertisers are now starting to pay more for mobile users.
But that’s not the most interesting part. Unexpectedly, 2022 became the year when Android traffic finally started catching up to iOS. It is often forgotten as many publishers decide to focus on its more “glamorous” cousin iOS, but if you want to expand your reach and increase your earnings, we definitely recommend looking into Android-specific strategies.
Don’t neglect Facebook
Although at this point pretty much everyone knows how profitable social media is in terms of digital monetization, not that many people realize just how lucrative Facebook is.
Social media platforms are perfect for boosting your profit: they require very little setup, and are pretty cheap to develop on. However, some of the most popular social media platforms are pretty hard to monetize in a traditional way.
You can’t really put links in your video descriptions or even comments, and people are less likely to click on a random link in your Twitter or TikTok bio than they are to click on a website in a search engine. As a result, the landing page that you link should be incredibly high-converting, yet at the same time user-friendly enough so as not to drive people away.
That’s where Facebook comes in: it doesn’t really have the same issues. Creating and linking landing pages on Facebook is a lot easier. And, from what we have seen after working with social media traffic for over 5 years now, it is often more profitable than monetizing content in “trendier” apps like Tik Tok.
❗️ Remember to never place any code that contains actual ads on your Facebook page. It is not worth the risk.
The landing page you create can be anything you want: a classic huge pop-under, something a little more interactive like a quiz or a chat window, or… It’s finally time to talk about ad formats, isn’t it?
What ad formats will be trending in 2022?
The formats that will bring you the most profit in 2022 will have to be:
1. Mobile-friendly
We’ve already talked about this at length above, so there’s not much more we can say about it. Consider using interstitials — full-screen ads that open as the website loads and cover the whole screen. Despite being just as intrusive as regular pop-ups, users, especially on mobile, seem to like them more than even banner ads. That’s because for all their faults, interstitials are super easy to get rid of completely.
2. Fast, with minimal layout shifts
Google has been paying a lot of attention to CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) lately. It is a metric that shows how stable your website is — the more times your web page has to update itself to load up your content, the less “happy” this metric will be. It basically promotes using smaller images, fast-loading ads, and other UX-friendly ad formats. Popunders are the best ad format for this, as they load in a separate tab (and are still just as profitable as they were years ago!).
3. Interactive
One of the biggest monetization trends as of late has been the focus on prolonging eye contact. And the best way to make users look at your ads more is to make them interesting and interactive. Quizzes, games, chats, and more have all proven to be very effective — and very profitable. Adsterra’s Social Bar is one of the formats that can offer you all these features.
Although these trends have existed for a few years now, we can see that publishers who follow them get a lot more profit on average than those who don’t. If you want to reap maximum profits from your platform, you can try combining different ad formats— just don’t add them all at the same time. Additionally, don’t forget to perform tests for every change you make.
🧘♀️ When combining several ad types, it’s important to remember that simplicity is key. A few well-placed, diverse ads can and will perform better than one hundred banners.
All of these ad formats are available on Adsterra! If you want to receive some personalized advice, you can contact one of Adsterra’s managers. You can also check out Adsterra’s blog to see more tips and tricks for publishers looking to increase their profits!
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