The effectiveness of digital ads could be measured by the conversions these ads make. These conversions depend highly on the user experience.

Ad experience is a mix of a web-site’s layout, its behaviour, its content and ads it carries. Experience decides whether a user will come back to the web-site or not. A publisher has to plan the ad experience which generates ad revenue, and makes it comfortable for the user.

Decluttering provides better ad experience. There are annoying ads, e.g. ads that auto-play with sound, pop-up ads, ads that interrupt the reading etc. The NYT carries ads only in banners, and uses the power of native ads. These are more effective than display ads. They seamlessly integrate to the content.

There should be immersive user experience. The idea is to create highly viewable and performance-driven ads. These should flash across display, video and native. They should engage for more time and generate page views.

The Guardian puts several high-impact ads throughout its contents, thus leading to enhanced user engagement, and thus revenues. These ads are interactive.

Page-load time is a key factor — it is the time a web-site takes to load. A user switches to another web-site if the web-site is slow-loading. It leads to loss of ad revenue. It is observed that by improving page load time, the performance increases. The Washington Post uses native banner ads to have excellent page-load time.

A user continues to stay on the web-site. It can be assessed by a heat map. It assessed by a heat map. It shows how a user interacts with the different elements on the web-site. There should be layout optimisation depending on the time spent on a particular element.

The actual content of the ads too matters. The number of ads on a page also matters.

The relevance of the ads to matters.