• by February 7, 2019

Google parent Alphabet this week said its ad sales rose 20% to $39.3 billion in the fourth quarter from a year earlier, again demonstrating the search giant’s seemingly limitless ability to print money.

Google also has a key role in boosting revenue for publishers. All websites that tripled their display ad revenue in the past year got most of their traffic from Google Search, according to a study by website optimization platform Ezoic.

The firm found several common characteristics among 20 publishers that tripled their programmatic ad revenue. Those included boosting website traffic, increasing the number of keywords they ranked for in search engines and prolonging visitor engagement time.

The publishers that tripled revenue last year added an average of 4,369 new ranked keywords in search engines to help them get discovered, the study found.

Publishers can create six broad categories of content to help boost metrics, Ezoic’s head of marketing, Tyler Bishop, said in a blog post:

• Tool/Game – Provide a free tool or game to visitors
• Evergreen content – Specialize in content that is referential or static
• News – Publish news or topical, real-time information
• Informational websites – Specialize in information on an evolving or specific topic, such as university scholarships
• Niche content – Specialize in niche topics, such as self-help or recipes
• Directory – Provide a directory of data or information

Publishers need to consider their content and marketing strategies as the digital ad market shows signs of maturing. The growth in worldwide ad spending will slow from 18% last year to 8.6% in 2022. By that year, the digital ad market of $427.3 billion will make up 54% of total media spending, according to a forecast by researcher eMarketer.

That deceleration will cap Google and Facebook’s ability to achieve the double-digit growth they’ve seen over the past 15 to 20 years, especially as Amazon emerges as a growing threat to their core business.

Unfortunately, corporate earnings are falling apart, especially in the technology industry. A long overdue recession could lead to dramatic cuts in ad spending as businesses retrench and seek to restore profitability. These broader challenges will push publishers to hone their strategies for boosting ad revenue.