Rat Race Armaggeddon: SetupAd Review

SetupAd is a header bidding and monetization platform for website owners with high traffic volume.

When SetupAd is implemented in line with recommendations, it guarantees a 30% increase in revenue compared to its competitors. Some users have even seen increases of up to 300%.

Although header bidding is a relatively complicated concept, SetupAd takes the stress out of the process and makes implementation super easy–no source code manipulation is required.

Below, we’ll take a deep dive into how SetupAd can help you monetize your website, what kind of features it has to offer, and what you can expect to pay for its solution.

SetupAd Pros and Cons

Pros

Easy to implement
Always up to date with industry standards
30-300% guaranteed increase in revenue
Supports multiple banner types
Mobile-friendly ads
Native advertising
Reliable customer support and personal account manager
Partnered with 16 industry-leading SSPs

Cons

Not suitable for low or medium traffic sites
Minimum payout of 200 Euro
Lack of notifications relating to ads.txt updates
Account manager must create ad placement code on the user’s behalf

SetupAd Features

Understanding the pros and cons of a solution is a quick way to determine whether or not it could be a great fit for your needs. But to truly understand whether SetupAd is the right solution for you, you’ll need to dive deeper into some of its key features.

Header Bidding Wrapper

Header bidding is also known as advance bidding or pre-bidding. In a nutshell, header bidding allows website owners (publishers) to offer inventory (advertising space) to multiple ad exchanges simultaneously before reverting to their ad servers.

The idea is that you’ll have numerous demand sources bidding for your inventory all at once, thereby increasing the yield and revenue that you make from ads. It sounds complicated, but it doesn’t have to be. Especially when you have SetupAd on your side.

SetupAd’s header bidding wrapping solution is ideal for websites with less than 500,000 monthly visitors. It’s ready to use and incredibly easy to implement. You see, instead of manipulating your source code, SetupAd uses a tag-based solution implemented directly through your ad server.

SetupAd’s heading bidding wrapper will connect you with the top 15 SSPs including Google. And as soon as your tag is launched, it will start monetizing your site by buying inventory immediately.

If you’re worried about ads slowing down your site, you don’t need to be. SetupAd’s heading bidder wrapper runs using a cloud-based ad server in order to connect SSPs that are near data centers. Not only does this mean your ads will be delivered faster, but it also means you’ll fill more inventory and be rewarded with higher revenue.

Furthermore, SetupAd will also help you with understanding the best ad formats and placements for your particular site. You’ll have access to tons of free advanced formats such as sticky leaderboards, mobile anchor ads, and more. Enabling the right ad format is important in generating revenue performance.

Finally, you don’t need to be concerned about filling your site with irrelevant or unwanted ads. SetupAd detects and reports any inappropriate content using a Chrome plugin with an extensive blocklist. Outside of this blocklist, if there are any ads you’d prefer not to see, you can include that too, ensuring it won’t appear again through a different source.

Header Bidding SaaS

Header bidding SaaS is a customized and unique prebid.js-based header bidding software for website owners. In a nutshell, header bidding SaaS allows you to rent a completely developed and optimized solution instead of creating and managing your own prebid.js.

Compared to header bidding wrappers, SetupAd’s header bidding SaaS is a far more advanced solution and is ideal for publishers with more than 50 million monthly visitors.

It’s also much more difficult to implement and requires trafficking your own SSP accounts. But the reward is far greater flexibility and monetization of 100% of your inventory.

SetupAd’s header bidding SaaS software is implemented directly to your website’s source code and operates via your Google AdManager. It takes into account existing revenue streams for direct sales and programmatic connections. Instead of paying a revenue share commission, you’ll pay a flat CPM fee.

Furthermore, SetupAd can offer further demand from additional SSPs and server-side integrations in order to increase the number of bids, thereby increasing revenue even further. It’s important to note that you’ll still pay SetupAd a revenue share on these bids.

One of the downsides of header bidding SaaS is that you’ll be responsible for updating blocklists, instead of SetupAd managing them for you. However, you will be provided with a default blocklist to get started and will have the opportunity to take up the anti-malvertising software for an additional cost.

Advertising Flexibility

A key highlight of SetupAd’s product is that you have a range of options when it comes to deciding which advertising is best for your website.

Advertising flexibility allows you to tailor your ads to meet the needs and preferences of your visitors, encouraging them to spend more time on your site. It’s also important in allowing you to monetize your site in a way that is not disruptive, irritating, or unattractive for your audience.

For example, SetupAd can help you with content recommendation, native advertising, and video content.

Content recommendation encourages users to stay on your website longer by suggesting other, relevant content for visitors to click through to. And the longer the visitors are on your website, the better your analytics and revenue are. SetupAd delivers recommended content via a widget, offering you an opportunity to gain additional revenue from sponsored posts or content ads.

SetupAd also supports native advertising which engages users by presenting ads in a similar style to your website layout. The content is always sponsored and is relevant to the search history of the visitor. The ads are custom-made for each page and provide a non-intrusive, intuitive advertising experience for visitors.

Finally, SetupAd allows you to harness the power of video content. Video content and marketing is more prevalent than ever and one of the best ways to capture your audience’s attention. SetupAd video content can be native or display ads, allowing you flexibility in determining the most attractive type for your visitors.

AdBlock Monetization

Did you know that 10-40% of your website visitors use content-filtering and ad-blocking software like AdBlock? It essentially prevents page elements such as advertisements from being displayed while they visit your site.

When visitors aren’t seeing the advertisements on your site, it has a direct effect on your ad revenue stream.

Thankfully, SetupAd has your back. It respects the privacy of visitors using AdBlock and instead runs non-intrusive advertising. You see, some ad formats make the website more visually appealing and user-friendly, thereby appearing less intrusive to the user. These formats include desktop, native, mobile, sticky, and video.

There are not many other monetization solutions out there that offer this feature, so it’s a clear benefit of using SetupAd.

Mobile-Friendly Ads

How often have you been browsing the internet on your mobile only to be bombarded by poorly placed ads that clearly aren’t optimized for mobile viewing? It’s disruptive and irritating and most likely causes you to immediately leave that site.

We don’t want this to happen on your site. Especially when, in today’s day and age, mobile web traffic surpasses desktop traffic for most site owners. That’s why, it’s extremely important to have quick loading, mobile-optimized ads on your site.

If you’re scratching your head wondering how best to do this, don’t fret. SetupAd will create custom mobile versions of your ads to increase your website ad revenue. It also suggests the best type of ad format for mobile viewing and provides direction on where to position the ads so that they’re not disruptive to the viewer.

Although other monetization platforms do offer mobile-friendly ads, they will simply adjust the size of your ad to fit the mobile site. In comparison, SetupAd will coach you on exactly where to place them and which formats are best for your mobile site. With this in mind, SetupAd is a great option for users with heavy mobile traffic.

SetupAd Pricing and Package Options

One of the best things about SetupAd is that it is completely risk-free. You don’t have to commit to a monthly subscription fee in order to use its services. Instead, SetupAd earns money by keeping 20% of your ad revenue as commission.

However, there are a few requirements that you’ll need to meet to use SetupAd’s services. These requirements include:

Your website will need to be compliant with SetupAd’s quality policy
You’ll need to prove that your website receives over 100K visitors per month
You must agree to paste SetupAd’s ads.txt onto your website and utilize all demand sources, including Google

SetupAd pays in Euros and you will need to earn a minimum of 100 Euros to be paid out. SetupAd’s payment methods are via PayPal or bank transfer. It’s important to note that the first pay period is 60 days. So if you start using SetupAd in January, you won’t see any revenue until March. After that, you’ll be paid monthly so long as you reach the minimum payout threshold.

As far as revenue goes, SetupAd guarantees that you’ll increase your revenue by 30% by using its software over Google Adsense and Google Adx. But if you want to estimate the revenue SetupAd can offer you, you can run a test period to see results before committing to a contract.

One particular downside to SetupAd’s requirements is that the minimum monthly visitor threshold is quite significant. It completely excludes all low and medium traffic websites from accessing SetupAd’s solution.

SetupAd Reputation

SetupAd has a reputation for bringing in great revenue. Most users report seeing extremely satisfying results or having at least doubled their revenue since switching over. In fact, dozens of European publishers report revenue increases of anywhere between 30% and 200%.

Reviews also suggest that SetupAd’s customer support is very helpful and easily accessible via phone or email. Furthermore, once you sign up, you’ll be designated your very own account manager to take care of any issues or trouble you may face.

Another thing that SetupAd is well known for is its easy setup process. SetupAd is easily implemented with a tag-based solution on your ad server–no mucking around with your source code or needing a developer to make changes.

Although users have few negative things to say about SetupAd, multiple users have commented that creating ad placement codes fall into the hands of the account manager, which can be frustrating. SetupAd is also not great at notifying users when it modifies its ads.txt.

Some suggest that the 60 day payment period is quite long compared to other monetization solutions. In saying that, payments are reportedly always on time, and earnings are paid exactly as expected so there are never any issues in that regard.

So if you own a high-traffic website with at least 100,000 monthly visitors and want to increase your current revenue by at least 30%, SetupAd is a great solution for you. It can offer you advertising flexibility, AdBlock monetization, and mobile-friendly ads, allowing you to monetize your site without impacting your visitors’ experience.

If you’re a low or medium traffic site, you won’t be able to use SetupAd, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t monetize your site. Starting off with Google AdSense or the Amazon Associates Program are great ways to get started without minimum visitor thresholds holding you back.