Finding an equilibrium between user experience and monetization is one of the most challenging operations that digital publishers can face.
Today, consumers are in complete control of their content-consuming environment, and with the rise of ad-blockers, it’s not difficult to realize that UX design enhancements are now more needed than ever.
However, the UX improvements can come at a price. Advertisements are what generates revenue for a digital publishing business, and when almost all the content is free, the ad monetization income can be the saving grace for online publishers.
For that reason, you need to know how to build what readers and advertisers want, and what to prioritize as a WordPress publisher.
How UX Affects Digital Ad Revenue?
The rule of thumb is that the better the UX, the bigger the digital publishing revenue. However, both of them are often analyzed differently, and that’s the misconception that we want to touch on in this article.
There are lots of important user experience testing elements of your CMS that you need to take into account that have an enormous effect on your media publishing revenue.
Measuring UX
Users assess your UX with every page and every click on your site. By continuing to read and browse or bounce off, they’re telling you exactly what you need to improve in your WordPress layout and performance.
The three key things to gauge the effectiveness of your digital publishing UX are bounce rate, page views per session, and session duration. Each of these metrics can be further investigated according to geo-location, landing page, and browsing device.
With that, you’ll get more insight into how various users browse the articles on your site.
Performing a good website audit based on them will demonstrate how various users browse the articles on your site, and give you ideas for improvement.
Those are the equivalent measurements that Google utilizes for the search algorithms to gauge the site’s quality and content, and they provide you with the exact information on what readers think of your UX design.
Subjective vs Objective Data
A creative team of front-end developers and UX designers can produce a real online publishing site masterpiece. However, the data you measure on those sites does not always indicate whether it generates better user experience, or an improved bottom line for the publishers.
Ultimately, a site with better UX design and metrics usually earns better revenue overall. When you think about gorgeous design and looks, you need to think about mobile users as well and try to not lessen their experience with unnecessary images and design elements.
At the end of the day, you need a CMS layout that will bring you readers, website revenue and attract advertisers on your pages. If your goal is to have a work of art, perhaps digital publishing is not the industry that you should be in. To increase your revenue and provide better UX overall, you need to let the data guide your UX design decision-making.
As we said earlier, the UX is determined by the users themselves. For example, for mobile users, page speed is a highly important factor. The density of your ads has a different effect on desktop and mobile devices as well.
This is why measuring UX metrics and elements as a WordPress publisher is vital. When you alter the elements according to the analytics and audience feedback, you can optimize the CMS for much higher website revenue.
CPM vs ECPM
The ROI (return on investment) of digital publishing is hard to be quantified if metrics are not involved. For the majority of niches, there are metrics that determine the success of a campaign.
The digital publishing industry is not an exception, and metrics such as CPM and ECPM are crucial. When digital publishers, ad ops teams, and advertisers are involved to improve the UX, increase the site traffic, earning, and overall success.
Many publishers can become confused with CPM and ECPM thinking they’re basically the same metric. But, that’s not the case. Let’s begin with CPM.
CPM is short for “Cost per Mille”, or the cost per 1000 impressions. To illustrate, if an ad budget is set at $20,000 and the ad receives 200K impressions, your CPM will be $100, calculated according to the following formula:
This is an excellent user experience design metric that can help you measure the costs of your campaigns, how much you’ll get paid per 1000 impressions, and to gauge the overall success of displaying ads on your pages. The higher the traffic, the better the CPM.
ECPM stands for “Effective Cost per Mille” and you can use it to determine the revenue that you’ve generated out of thousand impressions of an ad campaign and gauge the performance of a WordPress publisher’s inventory that is sold to various channels.
For instance, if a digital publishing campaign generated $10K in revenue and received 100K impressions, the ECPM would be $100 according to the following formula:
This measurement can be used as a vital indicator of a digital publishing campaign’s performance, as well as help you optimize your pages and revenue better according to the results.
However, as good as they are as measurements, they do not take into account factors like SEO and UX and how the ads impact them. If your earnings per thousand visitors are going down, unmistakably, you’ll make less revenue per visitor.
A higher CPM or ECPM does not always guarantee higher revenue. As a WordPress publisher, you need to dig deep down into your analytics and learn what parts of your pages need to be optimized for better revenue and a better reading experience in the process.
Are Better UX and Bigger Revenue Possible?
How do you perform the right user experience testing to connect the dots?
It’s the point in which everyWordPress publisher baffles with. To discover the right formula, you need to conduct a lot of A/B and multivariate testing on your most important pages and where you want to integrate the ad units.
Let’s say that ‘Page One’ has the following stats after the testing period:
- 1.1 page views per visit
- 80% bounce rate
- ECPM = $25
On the other hand, ‘Page Two’ might have the following stats during the testing period:
- 2.1 page views per visit
- 40% bounce rate
- ECPM = $15
The ECPM is smaller than ‘Page One’, but in terms of page views and bounce rate, the page definitely has the better UX design and layout for the users. If it’s a unique page in your CMS, it might not be worth that much to your publishing business.
But, if you optimize the rest of the pages accordingly, you’ll find that having similar pages to ‘Page Two’ is much better for the bottom line in the long run.
This is why UX is firmly tied to revenue. The manner in which the ad units, page layouts, and your content are laid out affect both the user experience and the overall earnings from your visitors. That’s the direction that you need to analyze your data towards.
Improving the revenue is not the only benefit from UX enhancements. It will also complement other important business metrics such as average revenue per user, user retention, loyalty, and productivity on your pages.
9 UX Tactics To Boost Revenue In 2025
User experience design (UX) has become a mainstream focus for businesses that invest in digital publishing in recent years, and for good reason. The ROI of UX is not just about money. It involves customer satisfaction and the impact on their loyalty to your product or service.
UX design ROI statistics are linked to long-term business goals and also result in competitive advantage. In other words, a well-designed website or app can not only save you money in the long run, but it can also help you get ahead of the competition.
Therefore, a successful WordPress publisher doesn’t necessarily have to choose what to prioritize, UX or revenue. Here are 9 UX Tactics that stood the test of time when it comes to increased business revenue:
- Optimize your sales funnel
- Reform your task management
- Optimize your landing pages
- Invest in remarketing
- Personalize
- Focus on customer retention and loyalty
- Utilize video in content
- Pay attention to customer feedback
- Perform competitor analysis regularly
Wrapping Up
If you want to achieve equilibrium between UX and revenue, you need to start paying attention to each element of your WordPress media publishing site.
Your target audience can only be scaled on top of quality content and positive UX. Remember, initially, readers are not there for the ads.
This is why you have to be careful when you drive people to your content and the ad units that they need to see. It’s all about a simple and positive experience, and the revenue comes as a result of it.
If you need help in scaling the UX and audience of your media publishing company don’t hesitate to contact us! At DevriX, we’ve helped scale some of the biggest WordPress publishers to hundreds of millions of monthly page views, maximizing their revenue and cut down on recurring costs in the process.
Our WordPress Core expertise is combined with our Managed Hosting Pagely partnership, our Inbound Marketing partnership with HubSpot and AdOps services for bigger traffic generation, improved user experience design, and immense return on your investment.