What the First 90 Days With a Managed Ad Stack Look Like

You signed with a managed monetization partner. Now what?

The question I hear most from gaming publishers during onboarding is: "When do I start seeing results?" The honest answer: the first changes usually become visible within the first month, but the full optimization takes around 90 days. There is no shortcut. Each phase builds on the previous one, and rushing stages leads to worse results.

Here is what a typical first 90 days looks like, phase by phase, based on how we onboard the gaming sites we work with. The exact timing depends on your site's architecture, your developer availability, and which formats your games can support, so treat the week numbers as a typical sequence, not a promise.

Weeks 1–2: Audit and Tag Deployment

What happens

Days 1–3: The baseline audit. Before changing anything, we analyze your current setup. This means pulling data from your existing ad server (Google Ad Manager, or whatever you are running), reviewing your analytics, and documenting your baseline metrics:

• Current page RPM by device, geo, and page type
• Active demand partners and their fill rates
• Ad unit placement and sizes
• Ad-block rate measurement
• Page load speed with current ad tags
• Viewability scores by ad unit

This audit is not a formality. It establishes the baseline that every future optimization is measured against. Without clean baseline data, you cannot prove (or disprove) that changes are working.

Technical integration. Your development team adds the new ad tags to your site. For most gaming sites, this involves:

• Deploying the header bidding wrapper (typically Prebid.js) with an initial set of demand partners
• Configuring Google Ad Manager line items for header bidding price granularity
• Setting up ad units in the correct sizes and positions
• Adding the analytics and reporting pixel

How long this takes depends on your setup. Sites with clean CMS templates can often finish in a few days of developer time. Custom-built game portals with complex page structures or many templates take longer, and the rollout moves at the pace your team can support.

Verification and soft launch. Once the tags are in place, they go live on a subset of traffic first (typically 10–20%). This phased rollout catches integration issues (broken layouts, ad loading errors, conflicts with game iframes) before they affect your full audience.

What you should see

Revenue during this phase stays close to your baseline. You are not optimizing yet; you are establishing infrastructure. Revenue can dip slightly during the cutover as new demand partners calibrate their bidding on your inventory. That is normal and temporary.

Weeks 3–4: Header Bidding Activation

What happens

Full traffic migration. Once the split test confirms stability, the new ad stack takes over 100% of traffic. The old ad tags are removed.

Demand partner ramp-up. Header bidding partners need time to learn your inventory. Their bidding algorithms analyze your traffic patterns (device types, geo distribution, user behavior, content categories) and calibrate their bids accordingly. In our experience, most SSPs reach stable bidding within one to two weeks of full activation.

During this phase, your account manager is doing two things:

1. Monitoring bid density. How many demand partners are bidding on each impression? Healthy competition from quality partners supports CPMs. If a partner is not bidding, they investigate: it might be a technical issue, a targeting mismatch, or an inventory classification problem.

2. Adjusting price floors. Initial floor prices are set based on the audit data, but real-world bid data quickly reveals whether floors are too high (suppressing fill rate) or too low (leaving money on the table). Expect frequent adjustments in the first few weeks.

Connecting gaming-endemic demand. This is where a gaming-specialized partner differs from a generic one. Beyond the standard SSP connections, demand sources that specifically buy gaming audiences get switched on through the SSPs. Negotiated private marketplace (PMP) deals for your site come later, once there is performance data to show buyers (see weeks 11–12).

What you should see

This is usually where the first meaningful change appears, as header bidding competition and gaming-endemic demand start to lift CPMs above your baseline. How much depends on your traffic mix and how your previous setup was configured. It is only the beginning; format work in the next phase usually matters more.

Weeks 5–8: Format Optimization

What happens

This is where the revenue stack gets built out beyond standard display. Each new format adds a revenue stream that did not exist before.

Rewarded video activation (weeks 5–6). If your games support it (and most HTML5 games can, with modest integration work), rewarded video goes live. This involves:

• Identifying placement points in each game (continue screens, bonus rewards, daily claims)
• Integrating the rewarded ad API with your game wrapper
• Connecting video-specific demand partners (some SSPs specialize in video and bid more strongly on it than general SSPs)
• Setting frequency caps (typically 3–5 rewarded views per user per day)

For games with a natural value exchange, rewarded video is often the highest-impact format we add. Its contribution depends heavily on how many of your games have a sensible reward to offer.

Interstitial optimization (weeks 6–7). If you were already running interstitials, they get re-timed to align with game session events rather than page navigation. If you were not running them, they get added with game-aware triggers:

• Post-game-over interstitials (the natural pause between games)
• Level transition interstitials (between stages in multi-level games)
• Frequency caps per session, not per page (a critical difference for gaming)

Properly timed interstitials add revenue without degrading user metrics. Poorly timed ones (mid-gameplay, too frequent) increase revenue short-term but destroy session depth. A competent partner never trades session quality for ad revenue.

Adhesion and sticky format optimization (weeks 7–8). Mobile adhesion units (sticky bottom banners) and desktop sidebar stickies are tuned for gaming sessions:

• Close button (visible and usable from the start, never hidden or delayed)
• Scroll-lock behavior on game pages vs browsing pages
• Size optimization (320×50 vs 320×100 on mobile: the larger size usually earns more but must not obstruct game controls)

What you should see

Each format activation tends to produce a visible step up in daily revenue, so the revenue chart often looks like a staircase. The size of each step varies a lot by site: a portal whose games all support rewarded video will see a very different curve from one where only a handful do.

Weeks 9–12: Advanced Optimization

What happens

The foundation is built. Now it gets tuned.

Floor price optimization (weeks 9–10). With six to eight weeks of bidding data, floor prices can be set with much more precision. This is not guesswork; it is price-elasticity analysis on your own bid data:

• By ad unit: a top-of-game leaderboard might support a $5 floor while a below-fold banner performs best at $1.50
• By geo: US traffic floors are often 3–5× higher than Southeast Asian traffic floors
• By device: mobile and desktop have different demand curves
• By time of day: CPMs are often noticeably higher during US evening hours than overnight

Dynamic floor pricing (adjusting floors in real time based on bid density and historical win rates) typically adds a further increment on top of well-set static floors.

Ad-block recovery (weeks 10–11). Now that the core ad stack is stable, ad-block recovery layers go live:

• Acceptable Ads enrollment (recovers impressions from users of Adblock Plus and similar blockers that allow acceptable ads)
• Server-side ad insertion for preroll on your own video content
• User messaging for remaining blocked sessions
• Revenue tracking for recovered impressions

In our experience, ad-block recovery recovers part of the revenue lost to blocking, often 20–30% of it. As an illustration: on a site where 35% of pageviews are blocked, the blocked traffic represents 35% of potential revenue. Recovering 20–30% of it adds about 7–10.5% of potential revenue, which is roughly 11–16% on top of what the unblocked 65% currently earns.

Private marketplace deals (weeks 11–12). With performance data to show advertisers (viewability scores, completion rates, audience composition), your partner can now pitch PMP deals to premium buyers such as gaming hardware brands, game studios, and esports sponsors. These deals take a few weeks to negotiate and activate. Once live, PMP CPMs are often 2–4× open-auction CPMs for comparable placements.

PMP deals do not cover all inventory (typically 10–20% of impressions), but they lift blended CPMs meaningfully.

What you should see

The optimization phase produces more gradual improvements than the format activation phase, but the gains build on each other. Floor optimization, ad-block recovery, and PMP deals each add an increment on top of the format work.

Why Results Vary

Across our publishers, the average RPM increase after 60 days live is 130% (see how we measure it). Your own result depends on:

• Your starting point. A site coming from a single demand channel has more headroom than one already running a tuned header bidding setup.
• Geography. Sites with high US traffic concentration usually see higher absolute RPMs than sites with mostly international traffic.
• Format fit. Games that support rewarded video and natural interstitial breaks give the stack more to work with.
• Viewability and page speed. Well-structured pages earn more for every format.
• Integration pace. Every week a phase slips, the later phases start later.

What Happens After Day 90

Day 90 is not the end. It is the point where the major structural optimizations are in place and the work shifts from big steps to continuous tuning. After day 90:

• Demand partner performance is reviewed monthly; underperformers are replaced
• New PMP deals are negotiated as advertiser budgets cycle
• Seasonal optimizations (Q4 CPM peaks, summer gaming peaks) are planned in advance
• New ad formats are tested as they become available
• A/B testing on ad placement, refresh timing, and floor prices continues through the year, with new tests paused during the busiest Q4 weeks

Publishers who stay engaged with their monetization partner (reviewing data, testing new games with ad integration, giving feedback on ad quality) keep finding improvements after the initial ramp.

What This Requires From You

Your side of the onboarding involves real work, particularly in the first two weeks:

• Developer time for tag integration: roughly 10–20 hours in weeks 1–2, depending on your templates
• Rewarded video integration: roughly 5–15 hours in weeks 5–6 (varies by game architecture)
• Weekly check-in calls: 30 minutes per week for the first 8 weeks, then every other week
• Decision-making on ad quality: approve or reject advertiser categories, review ad quality policies
• Access provisioning: Google Ad Manager, analytics, and CMS access for your partner's team

Added up, that is roughly 20–40 hours from your team over 90 days, front-loaded into the first month. After the initial setup, the ongoing commitment drops to an hour or two per week for performance reviews and decisions.

What to Do Next

Ninety days is not arbitrary. It is the time required to build, activate, and tune a gaming-optimized ad stack. Shortcuts exist (skipping rewarded video, using default floors, ignoring ad-block recovery), but each one leaves revenue behind month after month. The publishers who get the best results commit to the full process, make developer time available for integration, and stay engaged on the weekly calls; the ones who struggle expect results without that involvement.

To see what this process has looked like for other gaming publishers, see publisher results. If you want a sense of your own starting point, you can get a revenue estimate.