How to increase ad revenue: find where your page RPM leaks, then fix it

Viewability: get the impressions you serve seen

Under the Media Rating Council standard, a display ad is viewable when at least 50% of its pixels are on screen, in an active tab, for one continuous second after it renders. Video needs two continuous seconds of play, and units of 242,500 pixels or more, such as a 970x250, may count at 30%. Google's Active View applies the same rules, the 30% one to large ads on desktop.

What moves it, in Google's own guidance:

• Position. Just above the fold beats the very top, and content that holds attention is seen most.
• Lazy loading with margin. Request below-the-fold ads as their slot approaches, early enough to render before the reader arrives; load above-the-fold slots first.
• Speed and measurability. Faster pages and fewer passbacks raise viewability; an ad hidden with CSS on load, or in a cross-domain iframe, can become unmeasurable.

Fill rate: why requests come back empty

In Google Ad Manager, fill rate is impressions divided by ad requests; an unfilled impression is a request that came back with no eligible ad. Check two causes first. Floors above what your audience clears: misconfigured pricing rules can lower fill, Google warns, and a floor that suits your strongest country is often too high for the rest, so segment it. And thin demand: with one buyer, many requests find nobody, which is what header bidding addresses.

A page view whose ad code never loads sends no request, so it sits in neither half of the fraction: a site can lose page views before the auction and still report a healthy fill rate. Late calls show up elsewhere too: bids that miss the timeout are dropped, and an ad server call held too long loses the impression rather than leaving it unfilled.

Header bidding vs waterfall: how your inventory is sold

A waterfall offers each impression to demand sources one after another, in a fixed order, until one accepts. Header bidding asks several at once, before the ad server call; in the usual setup the ad server still picks the winner. Since 2019 Google Ad Manager has run one first-price auction where header bidding line items compete with Google's demand.

Prebid.js is free, open-source software, launched in 2015: it calls bidders in parallel and drops late bids. Its documentation names two failure modes, bids lost to the timeout and impressions lost while the ad server waits, and suggests reading timeouts by bidder and region. It gives no number of partners: add them one at a time and keep those whose wins pay for the wait.

Ad refresh: when it pays and what the policies allow

Ad refresh requests a new ad for a slot already on the page. Whether you may do it depends on the platform.

Sources: AdSense placement policies and Ad Manager's refresh declaration. Google restricts some buyer demand on declared inventory, says longer intervals attract buyers and prefers user-action or event refresh.

In practice, refresh only has room on long sessions. Judge it on revenue per session against a period without it, not on impressions or eCPM.

Layout, ad density and Core Web Vitals

• Density. The Coalition for Better Ads, from research with more than 150,000 consumers, fails mobile pages where ads exceed 30% of the main content's height, sticky units included, and desktop pages above 50%. Google bans its ads on failing screens, and Chrome can filter ads on a failing site after at least 30 days' notice.
• Layout shift. web.dev names ads among the largest sources of layout shift. Reserve each slot's space with a CSS min-height and do not collapse it when no ad fills.
• Core Web Vitals. Targets: LCP within 2.5 seconds, INP of 200 ms or less, CLS of 0.1 or less, at the 75th percentile. Google ties them to Search, not to CPM, so treat speed as a viewability and traffic lever.

Consent and limited ads in Europe

If you have readers in the EEA, the UK or Switzerland, consent is a revenue lever too. Since 16 January 2024 Google requires a certified CMP integrated with the IAB Europe TCF to serve personalised ads in the EEA and the UK, and in Switzerland since 31 July 2024. TC strings generated from 1 March 2026 must be TCF v2.3. Without valid signals a request can fall back to limited ads, with no audience targeting or remarketing, which Google says may affect revenue.

Third-party cookies have not gone away: in April 2025 Google decided to keep them in Chrome, with the choice in the user's settings. Read EEA, UK and Swiss traffic apart in your reports. Whether adblock detection is legal is a separate question.

The page views that never reach the auction

Every lever above works on page views where your ad code loads. Ad blocking removes page views from that set before any ad request is sent. Blockthrough's July 2022 report measured 21% of page views with an ad blocker, across more than 10 billion page views on 9,453 sites (adblock statistics). Your share depends on your audience, so measure it.

This is the part we work on. AntiAdBlock Core detects page views with a blocker and shows a wall that asks the reader to allow ads on your site; the free plan covers 5,000 detections a month, with no payment method. The dashboard estimates recovered revenue at the CPM you set (adblock revenue recovery); confirm it in your AdSense or Ad Manager impressions. More in adblock rate and recovered revenue and adblock recovery methods.

Every lever, ordered by effort and risk

Start at the top, cheap and reversible: one lever at a time, a full week each, compared on the same weekdays.

Frequently asked questions