"We Need More Money": Why Every Department in Your Ad Network Pulls Revenue in a Different Direction

Usually, as the person running the business, I need to grow turnover, and that usually gets translated into "we need more money." But the amount of money is just the result of how well every department in the company worked together. For an ad network specifically, it comes down to how profitably we sold the traffic we paid the publisher for. That difference, minus operating costs, is the network's profit.

With that in mind, it's worth rethinking goals, metrics, and incentives department by department, rather than assuming everyone chasing the same top-line number is enough.

What Ad Network Profit Is Actually Made Of

Start with the most obvious part, the one everyone focuses on when they talk about turnover and its growth: advertiser spend. That's the side paying for traffic, and whatever they pay is what we earn. It's a simple lever and a difficult one at the same time, because it means convincing the advertiser to spend more with us: raise bids, expand limits, keep campaigns running longer. Ask for more on the traffic, to cover our costs and earn on top.

It's a logical story, but it has a limit. At some point even the most loyal advertiser starts counting their costs, checking their metrics, and realizing it doesn't fit their KPIs anymore, because they're paying $3.5 CPM for a popunder on India or Brazil. Doesn't sound too profitable, does it?

That's when advertiser churn and shrinking budgets start. And we need someone to replace them, whether that's new advertisers brought in by marketing (if there is any) or by the hunting team, or winning back the ones who already stopped, which is not the pleasant part, since re-engaging an advertiser who decided to leave is much harder than launching a new one or keeping a current one.

Now the less obvious part: optimization. Buy low, sell high is an old and simple scheme, and it works with traffic too. We agree with a publisher to pay a dollar per 1K impressions, and tell the advertiser the same volume costs $1.50. We pocket $0.50 as earned. That's an exaggerated example, since not every advertiser is willing to buy out all the traffic from a site. Usually they need a specific slice that actually converts. When we buy and sell under the same model, say CPM, this is fairly low risk, because we bought an impression and sold an impression. If the advertiser doesn't need a particular slice, the user simply doesn't enter the auction for that campaign and goes wherever it fits by targeting instead.

But what if we sell under a different model than we buy? And why would we do that at all?

Some traffic slices bring in more conversions than others, and conversions are worth something. When the earnings from those conversions exceed what we'd earn selling that same traffic by impressions or clicks, selling by CPA while buying by impressions or clicks makes sense. But there's a risk: while we're searching for that profitable slice, we're losing money somewhere else. Quality optimization, meaning filtering out the slices, placements, and targeting that don't work, is the key to minimizing that problem.

And finally, the publisher team, worried their publishers are dropping off and blaming it on their traffic not being bought at a high enough price. Even though that publisher's traffic passes through several hands or systems, each with different goals and algorithms. That's why it matters that at every step a user takes from the publisher's site to the ad itself, the systems and people involved are pointed in the right direction, so their actions lead toward selling the purchased inventory as effectively, and as expensively, as it reasonably can be sold.

We've now covered where the money comes from, and where departments can either help each other or get in each other's way, even while moving toward the same goal. So how do you motivate each department so its metric actually pulls company turnover up, without the illusion of busy work?

Incentives That Point Everyone the Same Way

Start again with the people who work directly with advertisers. It's worth separating a few fundamentally different types of work here, because they need different skills and different incentives.

The first role is support and growth of current advertisers, usually account managers. Their job is to find where, in a specific account, there's still room to grow. Loosen limits, increase budget for new formats and geos, raise bids, expand traffic volume. You do this by showing the advertiser which of their own goals get met: allocating budget to a traffic slice that already converts within their KPIs, where a bid increase would grow the number of those conversions. Incentives here should be tied to turnover growth per portfolio, and more specifically per account, to avoid concentrating everything on a couple of big clients.

The second role is acquiring new advertisers, whether inbound or cold outreach. This role has access to an effectively unlimited pool of advertisers on the market, which is exactly what makes it a bottleneck. Or maybe more of a fire hydrant. If you incentivize hunters purely on the number of advertisers brought in, they'll bring in everyone, because they need to hit quota. You end up with hunting hitting its plan while account managers clean up the resulting churn. We don't need everyone. We need advertisers who look like the ones already profitable on the account management side. So incentives here should be built on the number of qualified leads. That means before launching any search, you need to lock down the criteria for a qualified lead together with the hunters: which vertical the product is in, which geos and ad formats they're ready to run, potential daily or monthly spend. A few criteria like that narrow the search and turn the department from a constant fire hose into a well filtered tap with a steady, moderate flow. Just hold out the glass.

The third role, often not called out separately, is win-back. It usually falls on account managers as "try reaching out to whoever churned." If an account manager spends the whole day switching between squeezing more budget out of an active client and figuring out why someone stopped, both tasks end up done worse, because they're genuinely different jobs. The focus of this role is understanding the reason behind each stop and turning that into a prioritized list of problems: where it's price, where it's traffic quality, where it's missing targeting, where it's simply a human factor on the advertiser's side. The second focus is reactivation itself. Winning back one specific advertiser is a one-off win. Fixing the systemic cause behind why a whole segment leaves is a systemic effect on retention.

Then there's a role we haven't touched yet, one that formally doesn't sit inside the advertiser-facing departments but I'd still call commercial without hesitation. That's product, and the product manager behind it, without whom the whole collected list of churn causes and growth opportunities just stays a list. The product manager's core job is to find problems that matter to the platform's key personas and propose solutions that move their metrics, and through that, the network's core metrics: eCPM, LTV, ARPU, retention.

Inbound signals from account management, from the win-back team, from optimization, from publishers should all be treated as raw material for discovery. Product needs to know how to turn that raw material into priorities: what to fix first, what will move the needle most on retention and turnover growth. And here's the useful part: with those same metrics in mind, you can evaluate solutions for internal departments the exact same way. If optimization asks for a new tool, if publishers want the onboarding process changed, the evaluation runs through the same filter: how does this affect the core metrics of the key personas.

Now to the optimization team, whose job is to find exactly which slice of traffic has money buried in it. Their priority is finding and scaling profitable slices: placement, device type, geo, vertical, ad format, and every other condition that together earns more per impression or click than the current average sale. This is the team that sees performance across the whole system and understands the actual price traffic should be sold at. It matters not to confuse average placement profitability with a genuine increase in efficiency. Average ROI blends strong and weak slices into one number, while margin gained per unit of traffic shows exactly what that specific impression or click earned above the blend. If you incentivize optimizers purely on raw ROI, you create a conflict of interest with the sales side, who are focused on advertiser spend. One side thinks in volume, the other in average quality, and without a shared denominator, both are right by their own metric while getting in each other's way.

Close with the publisher team. They're often treated as a purely technical function: find a placement, connect it, forget about it. But this is really demand reconnaissance running in the opposite direction. Their job isn't just buying traffic, it's collecting feedback from advertisers and translating it into requirements for publishers: which site topics actually convert, which verticals perform better on those sites, what volume and at what price an advertiser is ready to buy consistently. If this team operates cut off from what's happening on the demand side, that traffic doesn't find its buyer, or gets bought in insufficient volume. Either way, the publisher ends up unhappy with earnings, pulls the code, and leaves, which is a very easy thing for them to do. Winning back those clients is nearly impossible, probably harder than winning back an advertiser.

How It All Adds Up to One Number

"These aren't all the departments," you might say. Where's marketing? Tech? What about billing and cash flow?

You'd be right, because those teams play their own roles in turnover too. Documents and cash flow matter enormously, since what's the point of everything above if we can't collect money from a client or pay a publisher for traffic. Support and new feature development matter because they keep current data stored and delivered to clients, alongside the new functionality the product manager prioritized based on core metrics, functionality whose implementation gives a systemic boost to turnover. Communicating about that functionality, and about the value of working with the network in general, through marketing channels matters just as much, since that's the very start of the funnel. The more presence a network has in its clients' information space, the more trust it builds, and the more inbound leads follow. We can have a great offer, a great service, and a great product, but if nobody talks about it, who's actually going to know?

Put it all together and you get a chain where each department pulls its own part of the overall profit formula, just in its own way. Account management grows turnover through existing clients. Hunting grows the base with quality clients, not just any clients. The win-back team keeps churn from turning into a silent leak, and along the way diagnoses systemic problems. Product turns all those signals into prioritized decisions that move the key personas' core metrics. Optimization grows margin. Publishers make sure the traffic being bought actually matches what can realistically be sold at a good price. None of these metrics works toward a single goal that, at the start of this piece, we just crudely called "we need more money."