Managing third party ad networks

Should I have a cull

[surfgatinho]

I only recently started using third party ad networks (after I got hit with "brand safety" and was trying anything!). My CPC is pretty good at the moment, and around 90% of ads served are Google so I figured it was time to play around with some settings again.

Does anyone have any recommendations on how to select / deselect ad networks? I could just go on RPM, but wondered if there was a better way.
Or should I just leave as it is all optimised already?!

[Travis]

I tried a bit of everything :

- no third-party ad networks
- only doubleclick related ad networks
- only criteo ad networks
- doubleclick + criteo
- all ad networks

No noticeable improvement (or downgrading), so I guess that the system is well optimized by itself (all ad networks). With third-part ad networks you can grab few cents or dollars (depending of your volume of traffic) from CPM.

Now, some network have odd names, like "0" (zero) , "(do not use)", "test"; "old" ... so I removed these (more than 100 !), ...

Some third part ad networks "might" help a little bit for countries which are not widely covered by Adsense itself.

[NickMNS]

I use the all or nothing strategy. In most cases it is all strategy. When I was impacted by "Brand Safety" I had switched of third parties completely due to the high volume of low quality ads it was generating, I preferred to show my own backup-ads. With the "All" strategy there is one refinement, when reviewing ads in the Ad-Review if i find a specific network that Is feeding a lot of spam impressions then I will block the network. I have only run into that situation once before.

A note about brand safety, if you are impacted by "Brand Safety" I recommend that you switch off 3rd party networks and in place sign up to a specific network like Media.net or any other network, then implement the third party ads as backup ads. I believe that RPM will be improved.

Using RPM can be misleading because most of the third party networks generate very few impressions so the RPM reported may not be representative of the true long run RPM. 1 click out 100 impressions can cause a significant bias.

[surfgatinho]

Thanks for the suggestions. Will keep an eye on Ad-Review and networks with dodgy sounding names.