Content & news sites
Share the main topics, readership geography, languages and recurring content patterns. Identify where an ad appears in the reading experience and whether the site is primarily mobile or desktop.
Publishers & app teams
Build monetization around your audience.
A useful inventory review starts with your content, visitors and placement experience. Prepare the information that helps a partner understand what can be monetized, how it is measured and how it affects your users.
Give the inventory a clear identity
Utility & lifestyle apps
Explain the app’s core task, supported operating systems, active audience and natural breaks in the experience. Distinguish a deliberate user interaction from an ad shown while the user is trying to complete a task.
Video environments
Describe the content, player or viewing environment, session behavior and eligible placements. Agree how requests, starts, completions and billable delivery will be counted.
Keep site visits, page views, app users, ad requests and served impressions separate. These measures answer different questions. The enquiry asks for monthly page views or app impressions; the published eligibility guidance separately refers to unique monthly visitors.
Explain where the audience comes from
- Direct: returning visitors, bookmarks and other direct sessions.
- Organic discovery: unpaid search or other discovery sources, with relevant content and landing pages.
- Referrals: links from other sites, communities and editorial partners.
- Social and email: distinguish organic sharing, subscriptions and paid promotion.
- Paid acquisition: disclose purchased traffic, campaign dates and any incentive mechanism.
A traffic-source mix is most useful when it includes geography, device, seasonality and how the data was measured. Explain sudden changes in volume. Avoid combining purchased traffic with direct or organic audiences in a way that hides its origin.
For programmatic inventory, confirm the authorized selling path and the domain or app identity used in requests. IAB Tech Lab’s ads.txt and app-ads.txt guidance describes publisher authorization records. Request the exact approved seller entry from your partner; do not copy an unrelated account identifier.
Design placements that respect the product
| Area | What to review | What to record |
|---|---|---|
| Layout | Space for the creative and a stable page or app interface. | Placement name, size, device and screenshots. |
| Visibility | Whether the placement is measurable and actually exposed to a user. | The measurement source and eligible impression base. |
| Frequency | How often a user encounters the placement during a session. | Placement and refresh behavior agreed with the partner. |
| Performance | Loading time, errors and the effect on the core user task. | Before-and-after observations for the tested placements. |
| Controls | Content restrictions, consent signals and escalation routes. | Named owner and the approved configuration. |
Begin with a limited, observable placement set. Changing density, formats and refresh behavior simultaneously makes it difficult to identify which change affected revenue or the user experience.
Read yield as a combination of measures
Revenue depends on eligible opportunities, filled requests, rendered impressions, the prices paid and the commercial agreement. A higher headline eCPM can coincide with lower total revenue if fewer opportunities are filled.
Delivery
Compare requests, filled requests and rendered impressions. Investigate a growing gap between a returned creative and an impression that was actually counted.
Revenue
Keep currency, date range, gross versus net revenue and the revenue-share basis consistent. Compare similar geographies, devices and placement types.
Experience
Review page or app behavior alongside revenue. An ad layout that interrupts the main task can make a short-term revenue comparison misleading.
The publisher metric examples explain these denominators. The company’s published guidance lists Net-45 payments and a $100 minimum; eligibility, deductions, final reporting and payout details are confirmed in the account terms.
Prepare a review packet
Inventory profile
Provide the site or store URL, operating entity, content category and the contact responsible for the property.
Audience summary
Provide a recent date range, monthly volume, leading markets, devices and traffic-source breakdown. Explain the measurement source.
Placement and technical review
Identify proposed placements and the existing ad stack. Agree the integration method and testing environment before changing production code.
Commercial and reporting agreement
Confirm currency, revenue-share calculation, validation, reconciliation and payment schedule. Arrange financial or identity documents through the approved onboarding route.
Controlled rollout
Check delivery and user experience on the agreed placements, review the first report and document any adjustment before wider rollout.
The public enquiry accepts a brief, not financial documents or credentials. Use your saved reference when following up with the team.