Header Bidding, Native Video and Viewability Optimization for Radiopaedia.org

Radiopaedia is the largest online collaborative radiology resource. Radiopaedia’s mission is to create the best radiology reference the world has ever seen and to make it available for free, forever, for all.

Increasing traffic for Radiopaedia has meant increasing development and operational costs that are primarily met through advertising. The Radiopaedia team is extremely conscious of avoiding excessive advertising and strives to keep advertising as separate as possible from the content. Radiopaedia users can opt-out of advertising altogether by becoming supporters.

Goals

When partnering with a new website, Snigel is always led by the publisher’s goals. Radiopaedia asked Snigel to:

Decrease page load speed
Improve the user experience by minimizing the impact of ads
Promote Radiopaedia’s video content with a native video player
Improve ad unit performance

Page load speed – fewer requests, faster page load

Radiopaedia aims to support low and middle income regions by providing free content and a lightweight website that loads quickly.

Snigel optimized AdEngine (our header bidding stack) to minimize page load speed and bandwidth usage. AdEngine lets Snigel customize every header bidding auction based on the user’s IP location. When the page loads and ads are requested, Snigel only sends requests to advertising demand partners that perform well in the user’s location. This means Snigel is able to decrease the amount bid requests sent out.

The result was a rapid increase in page load speed.

Viewability – fewer ads, more revenue

Snigel’s ad ops team conducted a full audit of Radiopaedia’s ad units. This allowed us to identify and recommend low-performing ad units for removal. Snigel also identified and recommended several high-viewability positions for ad units.

The result was fewer ad units on the website but an overall increase in ad revenue. Viewability results for Radiopaedia:

Overall increase from 25% in Dec 2019 and to 61% in Nov 2020
The highest viewability score for one unit was 88%.

radiopaedia results_Viewability – fewer ads, more revenue-

Native video – content sharing and monetization

Radiopaedia has a library of educational video content. The Radiopaedia team wanted to share this relevant content with their audience and cover the cost of creating it.

Snigel has developed a native video player that allows websites to share and monetize video content. We installed the Snigel native video player in Radiopaedia’s sidebar and customized it to not show up for users from countries with limited bandwidth.

As a result, Radiopaedia’s time-on-site increased as users stayed longer to watch the video content while Snigel’s monetization covered the costs.

Bidding partners – find the right bidders for the right publisher

Snigel always aims to connect publishers with the right header bidding partners for their sector. By creating this match, we’re able to ensure users get served relevant, high-quality content and publishers are able to maximize their ad inventory.

Radiopaedia’s audience is mainly made up of healthcare workers. By analyzing our database of ad exchanges and SSPs, Snigel’s ad ops team was able to connect Radiopaedia to several specialist healthcare header bidding partners.

The result was more relevant ads, an increase in ad quality, and optimum performance from Radiopaedia’s ad inventory.

PMPs – source bespoke deals

Private marketplace or PMP deals, are bespoke deals with a fixed, high-value CPM. Snigel’s PMP team is constantly arranging bespoke deals for our partner websites. We have a network of connections across all major advertising agencies which allows us to source PMP deals at premium rates.

Snigel has been sourcing and implementing PMP deals for Radiopaedia since our partnership started.

As a result, Radiopaedia has received bespoke deals with premium rates from top healthcare brands. This has helped improve ad quality and maximize Radiopaedia’s ad inventory.

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