Getting My Own ADX Account with Ad.Plus

Ad.plus is technology solution for digital publishers looking to earn more revenue from Display ads

I wrote an honest ad.plus review like two years ago in which I discussed everything you should know about using this Google MCM Partner.

I stopped using Ad.plus after five months or so.

Since then Ad.plus became a Google Certified Publishing Partner so this places it in the same category as other publishing partners such as Mediavine, Ezoic, Raptive and so many others.

The other day, I felt like giving it a try and replied to one of the few emails I got from an Ad.plus sales manager.

I indicated that I had used Ad.plus for four to six months in the past two years or so and that I really was curious about getting my own ADX account and getting my payment directly from Google.

The sales manager replied promptly and said that they could get me my own ADX account, so I provided:

• The email address linked to my Adsense Account, account which is also linked to Google Ad Manager.
• A screenshot showing that Ad.plus still remained approved as a parent publisher on my Google Ad Manager Account

After that I got an email from Google AdManager in which Ad.Plus requested network delegation and I got an email with instructions from the sales manager to enable ADX on Google Ad Manager

Then the Ad.plus sales representative provided me with a line to add to my site’s ads.txt file.

Then I got an email that said that everything was working and from that point on, I could replace the Adsense ad units with ADX ad units

I will test the performance for a few months and see if getting your own ADX account is what content creators like me really need.

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Why Get your Own ADX Account?

These are my reasons why I like having my own ADX account.

• More advertisers can bid on my sites so it is reasonable to think that most advertisers bidding means betters RPM’s
• I get paid via Adsense so I don’t have to think about extra steps to get my money or be charged twice for additional transactions by my bank.
• I don’t have to rely on third parties data. I can go to Google Ad Manager and run reports, similar to what I do with Adsense.
• I have more control over what’s going behind the scenes, I can create ad units, choose the best sizes and best ad placements.
• I like learning about ways to increase what I make from Display ads, so I don’t really see the time spent figuring all this out as a waste of time.

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Is it Easy to Manage your own ADX Account?

Ad.Plus provides little information about how to manage your ADX Account.

They set up the basics, they provide you with some ad codes and you have to figure out things yourself.

If you want to figure out things by reading tutorials and watching videos, you will find that there is not much information out there.

I recommend not messing with anything related to monetization inside Google Ad Manager if you are not 100% what you are doing.

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Create Reports to Measure ADX Performance

One thing you could do is to create reports to know how much your sites are earning per day, the fill rate, ad viewabilty, ECPM per unit and other important data that you think that you should know.

If you don’t create your own reports within ADX, you will never be able to know whether having your own ADX is paying off or not.

If you have never measured those important metrics in Adsense, you will have no data to compare it to.

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Creating ADX Ad Units

If you use their default system, you will be given two codes, if you don’t want to use their defaults ADX code, you can add your GAM script to the head of your site

<script async="async" src="https://www.googletagservices.com/tag/js/gpt.js" ></script>

and then add the ad unit code where you want the ad to be displayed as you typically do with Ad Inserter

This is an unminified version of the ADX Ad Unit Code

<div align="center">
    <script>
        var gptadslots = [];
        var googletag = googletag || { cmd: [] };
    </script>
    <script>
        googletag.cmd.push(function () {
            var responsiveads = googletag
                .sizeMapping()
                .addSize(
                    [0, 0],
                    [
                        [300, 100],
                        [300, 50],
                        [250, 250],
                        [300, 250],
                    ]
                )
                .addSize(
                    [350, 200],
                    [
                        [320, 100],
                        [320, 50],
                        [300, 100],
                        [300, 50],
                        [250, 250],
                        [300, 600],
                        [300, 250],
                        [336, 280],
                    ]
                )
                .addSize(
                    [750, 200],
                    [
                        [728, 90],
                        [468, 60],
                        [300, 250],
                        [300, 600],
                        [336, 280],
                    ]
                )
                .build();
            gptadslots.push(
                googletag
                    .defineSlot("/123456789/after_paragraph_01", [[336, 280]], "after_paragraph_01")
                    .defineSizeMapping(responsiveads)
                    .addService(googletag.pubads())
            );
            googletag.pubads().setTargeting("site", ["yoursite.com"]);
            googletag.enableServices();
        });
    </script>
    <center>
        <div id="after_paragraph_01">
            <script>
                googletag.cmd.push(function () {
                    googletag.display("after_paragraph_01");
                });
            </script>
        </div>
    </center>
</div>

I used the free version of Ad Inserter to add both codes to my site.

I think that the Ad Units created by ADX are far more powerful than the ones by Adsense since you can specify many sizes to consider.

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Do Earnings Improve Right Away?

An increase in earnings is why people leave Adsense behind and search for alternatives such as Ad.Plus, Ezoic, Mediavine, Raptive etc.

I think I have written somewhere in this blog that if you were making the most out of Adsense account, you probably won’t see a huge increase in earnings when you start using one of its Alternatives.

Let me give you an example from my first three days of using ADX.

I have two Adsense ad units after paragraphs #4 and #8 on Desktop and Smartphones and this is what I got

Placement	RPM on Desktop	RPM on Smartphones
After Paragraph #4	0.43	0.20
After Paragraph #8	0.31	0.17

I placed an ADX ad unit after the Table of Content, an Ad Unit usually placed between the Paragraph #4 and Paragraph #8

These were the results:

Placement	ECPM on Desktop	ECPM on Smartphones
After TOC	0.30	0.16

So the earnings per 1000 impressions were pretty similar to my second Adsense ad unit or probably lower than that if you take into account that Ad.Plus will take 20% of my earnings.

I think I won’t have this reaction just because I got ADX enabled.

You would get such reaction if your previous placements were trash or if you are lucky enough to join a premium network.

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Did Fill Rate Fall?

One of my main concerns when replacing my Adsense ad units with other Google Partner’s ad units is that the fill rate will be lower.

I know that the fill rate will be lower because I am using a different service for the first time and my main site doesn’t target an English speaking audience.

This is some data related to the number of impression I got with Adsense:

Placement	Desktop	Smartphones
After Paragraph #4	2,218	3,712
After Paragraph #8	1,949	3,552

This is the data about the number of impressions from an ADX ad unit placed after the Table of Content.

Placement	Desktop	Smartphones
After TOC	1688	2963

Numbers don’t lie, Adsense has more coverage than ADX, at least during the first few days.

I think this could change as days pass but this proves my point that Adsense is not a good-for-nothing service, if you have a good idea about what you are doing.

Keep in mind that some countries are linked to low ad fill rate and that page views from smartphones tend to get a lower ad fill rate than page views from desktop computers.

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Did I Add Bidding Partners?

I never followed the recommendation of adding partners such as Index Exchange, Pubmatic, OpenX, Facebook because my site got hit after the core updates that Google started on March.

Adding partners was not simply toggling a button, publishers need to follow the process and expect for the partners to check and approve your site so I didn’t want to do that for sites with low amount of page views per month or in decline by the Google Core updates.

How much more was I going to earn by adding bidding partners?

These are extracts from emails received by AD.Plus team:

You can also add all the Open Bidding partners directly to your own AdX as you wish resulting in additional 30% revenue increase (Index Exchange, Pubmatic, OpenX, Facebook, etc). 

Three emails later, a different revenue increase was promised:

You can also add all the Open Bidding partners directly to your own AdX as you wish resulting in additional 15% revenue increase (Index Exchange, Pubmatic, OpenX, Facebook, etc). 

By the way, I was after a month or two , I was never encouraged to start the process of adding bidding partners probably cause my site was not what it used to be in terms of page views so they rather spend time helping bigger publishers.

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Full Month Using my Own ADX Account [June, 2024]

Things have changed a bit, the site where I was primarily testing ADX ad units have seen a decline in traffic after May.

This is a report from June 2024, a month in which ad placement didn’t suffer any change.

These are the RPM’s and ECPM from Desktop and Smartphones

Ad Unit	Desktop	Smartphones
Adsense 01	$0.56	$0.22
Adsense 02	$0.41	$0.18
Adsense 03	$0.35	$0.16
Adsense 04	$0.31	$0.15
Adsense 05	$0.24	$0.14
ADX 01	$0.22	$0.12
ADX 02	$0.18	$0.09
ADX 03	$0.17	$0.08
ADX 04	$0.16	$0.08

Take into account that Ad.Plus will take 20% of the earnings generated by ADX ad Units:

ADX 01	$0.17	$0.09
ADX 02	$0.14	$0.07
ADX 03	$0.13	$0.06
ADX 04	$0.12	$0.06

So I think I might be losing money instead of making any more money.

If I saw the ad units below the fold outperforming the ones above the fold, that would be a compelling argument to remove all Adsense ad units and let ADX ad units take over.

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Did I Get Paid?

Regardless of the method I have used to work with Ad.Plus , I have been paid on time.

When I used Ad.Plus without ADX I always got paid via PayPal.

The couple of months I have used ADX thanks to Ad.Plus, I got paid via bank transfer since that’s the way I get paid by Adsense.

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Ad.Plus with ADX or Without it?

Based on my anecdote, I conclude that having ADX by itself won’t make any difference in terms of earnings.

If you are not willing to start the process of adding bidding partners, you would probably make less o the same that you were already earning with Adsense or Ad.Plus without ADX

If you want to take the offer of having your own ADX account, you probably need to know what you are getting into, you need to have a plan.

If you don’t have a plan, it is better if you use their service without ADX since they already have partners.

This is the data Ad.Plus asked you to add to your site’s ads.txt file:

#Ad.Plus
ad.plus, 352349, DIRECT #Video #Display
google.com, pub-4573231550355221, RESELLER, f08c47fec0942fa0
pubmatic.com, 160907, DIRECT, 5d62403b186f2ace
indexexchange.com, 194273, DIRECT, 50b1c356f2c5c8fc
rubiconproject.com, 24442, RESELLER, 0bfd66d529a55807
media.net, 8CU5DERG1, DIRECT
rhythmone.com, 895733750, DIRECT, a670c89d4a324e47
video.unrulymedia.com, 895733750, DIRECT
sovrn.com, 357833, DIRECT, fafdf38b16bf6b2b
lijit.com, 357833, DIRECT, fafdf38b16bf6b2b
lijit.com, 357833-eb, DIRECT, fafdf38b16bf6b2b

You can also give their team some of your Adsense Codes so your Adsense compete with their inventory.

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