8 Reasons to Embrace Safety Rankings in Ad Campaigns

1.9 billion websites are competing daily for attention, and there are an estimated 4.95 billion internet users in the world today. With the average global internet user spending almost 7 hours online each day, that translates to more than 1.4 billion years of combined human existence online in 2022 alone.

In other words, the competition is high, but the odds are good for those who play the game right. So, how can publishers ensure that their website achieves the best monetization performance?

If you are aiming for long term, compounded gains, monetization depends to a large extent on brand power. For that, brand safety should be your main priority. To reach top monetization performance, both publishers and advertisers need to maintain consumer trust and provide a high-quality user experience.

Safety Rankings help you figure out risks

In 2022, MGID extended the support offered to its partners by introducing campaign safety rankings. These rankings signal which items in your campaigns are acceptable and which are questionable across publisher networks. Lower quality items signal two potential issues.

• They can be rejected by certain networks because of their own quality filters. Failing to qualify for a high-quality network affects your reach and monetization power.
• They can affect user experience. While accepted by some publisher networks, questionable practices jeopardize the advertiser’s and publisher’s brand image, campaign effectiveness and brand perception.

MGID’s rankings are in no way enforced. Safety rankings merely serve to flag low-quality campaigns; after which, publishers decide for themselves what ad quality they are willing to accept.

What exactly are Safety Rankings?

Campaign safety rankings is akin to having a network of researchers doing background checks for you. MGID’s rankings thus help you understand which items and campaigns are acceptable across publisher networks. There are two safety rankings:

• Medium: Medium Safety Rankings contain more controversial subject matter with strange, odd, or peculiar imagery, along with sensational, shocking, or outrageous topics. The campaign is likely to have a limited reach on a subset of publishers who accept Medium-type campaigns.
• High: High Safety Rankings are clean and innocuous advertising both in ad design and promoted content. The campaign meets the standards of the majority of our publishers and, therefore, is more likely to scale across the network.

If a campaign is rated favorably, it should mean its content is safe to run, from the point of view of legality, content and technical features. The higher the safety ranking, the higher the scalability of the ad campaign across the network — and the higher your monetization power.

Why it works for publishers

1. 100% control over potential ad controversy. Inappropriate, aggressive or shocking ads receive lower rankings. Publishers can eliminate them completely by raising their requirements.
2. Winning users’ loyalty. Questionable ads trigger user complaints or simply cause users to disengage. Positive ad experience equals positive user experience and reflects in increased loyalty and engagement.
3. Refining the web ecosystem. The more time spent in the internet ecosystem, the savvier users become, and the more sophisticated the clickbait. Publishers need to stay one step ahead of users in terms of detecting clickbait and misleading advertising. If users detect it before you, you have already lost them.
4. Positively impacting CPM. Once users learn to trust the ads from the point of view of relevancy as well as technical and quality optimization, they will click on them more often. Brand-safe, high-quality content supports web monetization in the long run.

Why it really matters for advertisers

1. Assuring traffic quality. If an ad campaign receives a high ranking, more websites with premium traffic will accept it for competing in an auction. Low ad quality will generally correlate with low traffic quality.
2. Reaching high impact traffic and paying users. A corollary to the above is that once the ad campaign is considered safe and high-quality, it generally qualifies for premium websites. These websites tend to have more lucrative — i.e., better-paying — audiences.
3. Relevance scores big. Advertisers can hit their target audience with more direct, clear messaging. When users see clear ads on premium, high-quality websites, they are more inclined to check out advertisers’ landing pages. There’s no need to spark clickbaity interest to make them click.
4. Increasing ad visibility and content PPV. As in the case of traffic quality, a high campaign ranking is a signal that the ad content can lead to more brand visibility on high-quality websites. Visibility directly correlates to monetization, which, after all, is the end goal.

Final thoughts

Risky content, clickbait, and low quality campaigns are not sustainable monetization strategies. What does pay off over the long run is quality. True, publishers and advertisers cannot always know (or have time to evaluate) what may or may not qualify as a best practice — especially when working with multiple territories or gray-area markets.

Ad campaigns often strike out because they fail to achieve visibility and engagement. To preempt misspent resources and support ad revenue growth, MGID’s Safety Rankings can serve as a quick, reliable tool to assess if an ad may receive placement in a high-value, top-monetization context.