Stacked ads are ineffective and lower your eCPM

Prior to on-boarding a new Publisher with Gourmet Ads, our Publisher Team and ad-serving partner’s fraud teams check each site for what we call “stacked ads”.

What are stacked ads?

They are either:

  • Literally copying the same ad tag multiple times on the page (which is considered fraudulent)
    OR
  • Creating a high number of ad units with different tags on a page to fill up space and rack up impressions

Over the years we’ve seen Publishers stack ads in the most unusual ways, most of which we regard as fraudulent or ineffective.

Gourmet Ads recommends that you have a maximum of 3 display ads per page.

New technology identifies stacked ads on publisher websites

While this kind of Publisher behavior in the past might have been a way to earn more revenue, it’s now a guaranteed way to ensure you don’t earn more revenue. Both Gourmet Ads and our advertisers have technology that identifies individual pages that include more than 3 ads. The same technology also allows us to choose the maximum number of ads per page in real time when trafficking campaigns.

So, advertisers looking for brand separation or high performance will ask us to traffic the campaign only on pages where the maximum number of ads displayed doesn’t exceed 2 ads. We are seeing more of these trends from advertisers recently, hence our push to ensure that all publishers have a maximum of 3 ads per page. Anything more and we fear you’ll be losing revenue.

Have questions about how to place your tags effectively? Read more.