Maximize your revenue with Opportunities and Experiments

Every publisher wants to take advantage of each revenue maximizing opportunity that comes along. But as the digital advertising landscape changes so quickly, uncovering and implementing new revenue opportunities can be a real challenge. Google Ad Manager puts machine learning to work to help you scale strategic optimizations and maximize your revenue with Opportunities and Experiments. This self-service feature helps publishers discover and experiment with actionable, tailored opportunities for improving yield.

Continue reading below to find out how you can use Opportunities and Experiments to optimize your revenue.

Within Ad Manager, Google’s machine learning algorithms are constantly working to optimize revenue across every impression, regardless of sales channel, ad format, or device. When you view the Opportunities and Experiments section within your Ad Manager dashboard, you’ll see suggested optimization opportunities tailored to your business and the projected revenue impact they will drive. From there you can choose to put those optimizations to work or set up an experiment to test them with a few clicks. Alternatively you can decide not to implement the recommendation if you prefer.

Opportunities and Experiments help you understand how a change to an Ad Manager rule or setting could impact your current or future revenue. They then allow you to apply, test, or decline implementing that change.

How do opportunities work?

• Opportunities are suggestions created weekly by Ad Manager’s machine learning that show you how you could earn more revenue, such as changing a pricing rule or unblocking a general ad exchange category.
• You can view the projected revenue impact and decide whether to implement the suggested change. Ad Manager calculates opportunities based on historical data from your network, and provides fresh suggestions for your network every Sunday evening (PST).
• If you don't see any opportunities, we haven't detected any meaningful optimizations for you that week. You can also subscribe to email updates to stay updated on new opportunities.

How to launch an experiment 

• Experiments let you use live network traffic to test how applying an opportunity suggestion will impact revenue.
• You can set a fixed percentage of impression traffic to see how the proposed opportunity performs compared with the rest of your traffic before deciding to implement the opportunity across all of your inventory.

When the system has found an optimization opportunity for your account, opportunities will appear on the home dashboard of Ad Manager, and they may also appear on the Insights card. The suggestions are specific to you (under “Your opportunities”), and each one displays metrics to help you evaluate the benefits.

There may be multiple suggestions for the same opportunity, and each has projected metrics. From there you can decide to apply them. You’re also able to apply them as an experiment based on a fixed percentage of impression traffic. If you don’t want to see an opportunity, simply dismiss it.