Happy midway point of Q1; from here on out things should be hitting a nice stride for the rest of the year. I wanted to cover a few things in this February newsletter, specficially cumulative layout shift (CLS), customer referrals, and the new “interstitial” placement (brought to us by Google). Q1 is also a great time to optimize your ad layout, so don’t hesitate to reach out after you’ve read through the new features.

Cumulative Layout Shift

Since the start of the year, Google has been heavily focused on working with both ad and publisher teams on decreasing the amount of CLS that occurs on a webpage. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, here’s some reference documentation.

For ads, the biggest way to decrease the amount of CLS on a page is by reserving space for those ad units. There are a number of ways to accomplish it. Some examples include setting a min-height on the div or doing something more involved like designing a container for the potential ad units with an advertisement label. This should not only increase your Core Web Vitals/Lighthouse score (which impacts SEO), but it should also cut down on things like misclicks and click spam.

If you have any questions about this, please don’t hesitate to ask.

Referrals

This last year we made some upgrades to our referral system to help make folks more money when they give us an introduction and referral. If you make an intro and that client stays on the network for 60 days, we will pay you an amount equal to a percentage of that referral’s gross revenue.

While I can’t share exact percentages (for the sake of privacy of your referral), I want to note that this is one of the most generous referral programs in the industry. You will not be disappointed if you make a referral of any size going forward.

Interstitials by Google

Finally, we have implemented a new interstitial format that has been made available by Google. Unlike interstitials of the past, this unit is relatively low impact (it only appears when a user is navigating away from your site), and it has been endorsed and tested by the Google team. We’ve seen some good initial results from folks implementing the unit, especially if you’re running a mobile-heavy traffic base.

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That’s it for our Q1 updates and news. Again, if you are interested in any of the new placements, want to explore other options like video or are interested in a site optimization pass, let us know at [email protected] or [email protected].

Thanks!