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Layout Teardown: Episode 5 - Why Slickdeals.net's Ads Just Work – A Deep Dive

Layout Teardown: Episode 5 - Why Slickdeals.net's Ads Just Work – A Deep Dive

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Layout Teardown: Episode 5 - Why Slickdeals.net's Ads Just Work – A Deep Dive

In this episode, we dive into Slickdeals.net: one of the largest coupon and deals platforms in the U.S.. Ben and Brock unpack how Slickdeals monetises through affiliate links, a community-driven content model, and programmatic advertising. They explore how the site balances UX and monetisation across multiple touchpoints, and share actionable insights for publishers on maximising ad placements without compromising user experience. Tune in to understand how Slickdeals blends retail media, programmatic ads, and user engagement to build a high-revenue ecosystem.

Key Takeaways

  • The audience has their wallets out. Slickdeals sits at the absolute bottom of the purchase funnel. Their users aren't just browsing, they are actively looking for a reason to buy right at that moment. Because this traffic is so close to converting, advertisers see massive click-through rates and willingly pay premium CPMs to be there.
  • They recycle losing ad bids. They run a custom Prebid setup with seven partners, including Amazon. Their smartest trick is something called bid caching. If an advertiser loses an initial auction, Slickdeals saves that bid and automatically enters it into the next one when the page refreshes. It quietly squeezes out an extra 3% to 5% in revenue without anyone noticing.
  • They intentionally slow the auction down. Most sites cut advertisers off after one second to keep things loading fast. Slickdeals breaks that rule and gives them three full seconds to respond. Because the layout is sticky and users stick around, that extra time lets advertisers come back with much higher bids without making the experience any worse.
  • The desktop sidebar is a non-stop money maker. On desktop, a massive sticky sidebar follows you all the way down the page. Rather than showing one ad, they stack three on top of each other. Because that sidebar stays glued to the screen, those three slots can be refreshed continuously with new bids, generating a high volume of impressions the whole time.
  • They skip the useless top mobile banner. Most sites put a tiny horizontal ad at the very top of the mobile screen, which fast-scrolling users blow straight past. Slickdeals skips it entirely, keeping the top of the page clean for Google's search crawlers. Instead, they wait until you've scrolled a little and drop a large square ad just below the first few deals, right where your eyes actually are.
  • They dial back ads for their most loyal users. Forum regulars are also the most likely to get annoyed by ad clutter, so Slickdeals intentionally reduces ad density in those sections. It is a deliberate trade, prioritising user retention over squeezing out a few extra short-term dollars.

What makes Slickdeals' business model interesting from an advertising perspective?

Ben: Hello and welcome to episode 5 of the Layout Teardown with myself, Ben, and I'm Brock, and we're going to be looking at the website Slickdeals. So, we're doing Slickdeals today. It's interesting for a few reasons. It's a giant online coupon business. It's a community and they write kind of financial content as well. And they've got a few different business models that they are working with. So, they've got the coupons — many of these are affiliate links back to the retailer, which is interesting. The second piece is they've got a highly valuable audience that is in market to purchase. And so they've got a few strategies to monetise that user base. And the third one is the programmatic ads, which is what we're interested in, and we're going to bring you through that as well. And they've got quite a sophisticated setup. So we will jump straight in and maybe talk about the business model and how they're probably looking at advertising first. So Brock, when you're looking at Slickdeals, what first comes to mind in those areas?

Brock: Yeah, it's very interesting to me. If you're a big massive retailer, you're likely bricks and mortar, you're likely millions, billions of dollars coming through those channels. And when you see them make their transition over to digital, that's obviously happened over the last few years. We're still seeing quite a slow uptick in the deployment of programmatic. Now they're very conservative about their brand, obviously. And you know, really trying to make sure that their core business streams are maintained and not affected by dodgy ads online. Now I think Slickdeals actually comes from the other side of the spectrum, and you see that when you first launch into the site — they are a community. There are people interacting with each other online. My guess is they don't have 100 stores around the US. And therefore they're able to be a bit more free with how they approach their online programmatic strategy.

Brock: So yeah, initially you see a large usage of ad units across the site. So as you scroll you can see there's a nice sidebar set up, and if you keep going you've got the triple stacker — as they call it, it's the industry term — where they're keeping ad units in view. They're making sure that there's an opportunity to monetise people at all times, which is really, really nice. Pretty smooth. It's definitely high ad density for a site like this, but they've done it in a pretty clean way. I think it's not overpowering. These units are in view for a huge amount of time and we've got refresh on there as well.

Ben: So that's exactly the point. So when I was googling coupons USA, I had Slickdeals and I had BestBuy.com coming up, and you can see there's a vast difference in how they've approached monetising their users, right? I would say under the hood there's probably a lot of similarities, but when you've got bricks and mortar and historical revenue, it's going to stop you from going full-blown programmatic.

What does Slickdeals' traffic look like, and why does their audience command high CPMs?

Ben: Definitely. In terms of the numbers, so they've got a pretty serious amount of traffic. They're doing about 60 million monthly visits, strong average visit duration as well — about four and a half minutes. Most of that traffic is coming from the US. So we work with a similar site in Australia called OzBargain. Generally these sites are kind of localised to a region. You've got deals that are normally localised as well, and those campaigns are kind of in-region. Often you see one of these kind of mega sites or deal sites per geo — at least that's what we've kind of seen. And generally they have extremely high CPMs. You've got users that are showing intent to purchase. They're actually looking at deals and coupons for things that are already being advertised in one way — why not advertise something else to them? And there are high CTRs, and those users are valuable to an advertiser.

Brock: Basically, it's a marketer's dream. You know that the people on this site are at the very pointy end of the funnel.

Ben: Yes, definitely.

How is Slickdeals' Prebid and header bidding stack set up?

Ben: In terms of programmatic setup then — so they've got header bidding running. They've got seven partners in there at the moment. From our look, it looked like they've built their own kind of Prebid setup in there.

Brock: That's right. Yeah. Interestingly enough, they've decided not to name it Prebid. There might be some obfuscation, but it's in there. They've got Amazon plugged in, which is really nice.

Ben: Yeah. I would be shocked if they don't have a bit of Google Open Bidding there as well. Server-side, extra demand in the auction.

Brock: Yeah. And just running through the Prebid stack, I think they've ticked off most of the baseline winners. You can see they've got cases like multisize running, obviously bidders across all sizes there as well.

Definition — Prebid: an open-source header bidding solution that allows publishers to run simultaneous auctions across multiple demand partners before the ad server makes its decision.

Ben: Yeah, I saw they've enabled bid caching, which is great. As you mentioned with the sidebar — as it's refreshing, we might have unused bids that will come through from some of the header bidders that have been included. Obviously Google might take a few, or you might lose out to another bidder in the auction, but if you keep it nice and contained, you're not holding bids forever and there's some standards that you have to abide by. You can absolutely find a few extra percent just by holding a bid for 30 seconds and using a refresh auction.

Definition — Bid caching: the practice of holding onto losing bids from a header bidding auction and re-entering them into subsequent refresh auctions, extracting additional yield from bids that would otherwise be discarded.

Brock: Yeah, it's something we've tested a lot at Publift across lots of different publishers. Generally we're seeing like a 3 to 5% uplift when we use it. Of course it is very much dependent on the volume of refresh. And these guys have done a good job because they're not necessarily a high-dwell-time site in the traditional sense — but on desktop, you've got the sidebar the whole time, which is always in view. Say plenty of opportunity to refresh, times by three ads, and then two or three above. So yeah, a really good opportunity for secondary bidders to pick up good, high-quality impressions.

Why has Slickdeals set a 3-second Prebid timeout instead of the standard 1 second?

Ben: Another thing we noticed was just on the timeout that they had for Prebid. They've set that a little bit longer, which was interesting. It's normally around 1 second — they've set it at 3 seconds. What do you think the reason is?

Brock: There's kind of two paths you can take, particularly at the scale that Slickdeals sits at today. Either you're going to be quick or you're going to be slow. And what I mean by that is: do you actually have a reason to be quick? Thinking about how someone uses this site — they'll likely go through and put a search query in, scroll through, be clicking back and forth out of the deals. Also, looking at their layout and their use of sticky, it really doesn't change a whole lot. There's not a huge requirement to be super quick. Now speed is always important, because across all users and all bandwidths or machines you do need speed in certain areas. But because they've managed to keep ads in view for a longer period of time, they're actually not punished by allowing their bidders to really get their bids in and take a bit more time to pass it back.

Ben: Yeah, that's correct. Then of course when they don't win, but they're still competitive — as we said at the start, highly valuable users — we use our bid caching functionality to ensure that we're getting the most for every auction that we can.

Brock: Nice. The other thing — they are lazy loading as well. So we've got quite a bit of ad density, but we're not loading everything at the same time. And there's pretty significant scroll depth across desktop and mobile. I think mobile was potentially infinite scroll — I think you can get to the end of this one — yeah, so there is pagination. But these ad units that are further down are getting lazy loaded, so we're not dragging it down too much. Definitely a balancing act, I'd say, because there's quite a few units in here, but yeah that's definitely a plus.

What does Slickdeals' desktop ad layout look like, and where are the opportunities?

Brock: Well, one thing we always talk about is the volume impact and the value impact. So in this case, they've definitely gone for a volume approach. You can see there's lots of ads, there's refresh. Luckily for these guys, they have a valuable audience, so the value curve is just generally going to sit higher up the x-axis. So they can get away with it and maintain CPMs.

Ben: Yeah, obviously supply and demand — you reduce the amount of ads you have on the page and how many times you refresh, you can see the value go up. CPM goes up. But of course, you want to actually get the most money you can at the page level, right?

Brock: And by having the pagination there is quite interesting, because my initial thought is they don't have a 970x250. So they do well in the vertical — really tall ads — and they don't have big horizontals, which I think will hurt them a little bit from a value point of view. But because they put the pagination right to the right, it's very close to advertising content. It's not encroaching. So we're not in any ad policy areas at this point, but it actually does solve for a problem which a lot of publishers traditionally would put a horizontal just beneath that bar.

Ben: You still got that unit in view and you've got space. There might be a reason — they might have telemetry that suggests that the trending stores area is more valuable or getting clicks or being interacted with. But what would be interesting is to collect clicks on the next and previous and see — it doesn't make sense to lazy load something horizontal here, right? Or even if you were to do that, do you remove this unit and use that space for more content? It's an A/B test to run.

Brock: Yeah, definitely. I think even that discussion on the lazy loading value curve — still something you'd want to experiment with. If I get my viewability above 70%, am I actually getting that CPM upgrade? Are more advertisers bidding on that inventory? Am I actually making more versus more impressions, slightly lower viewability, but still generating more revenue? Black Friday comes along and the whole curve flips.

Ben: Yes, yeah. Which I'd say is pretty extreme for Slickdeals.

Definition — Viewability: an industry metric measuring whether an ad had the opportunity to be seen, typically defined as 50% of the ad's pixels in view for at least 1 second.

What does the mobile ad layout look like, and what would you change?

Ben: We're going to look through the mobile website now — what their layout and setup looks like. So we'll have a scroll through. First things we can see, they've got some multisize going on which is always good and expected. So they've got your kind of standard mobile sizes in there. We've got some lazy loading at the top — it's not super tight. Maybe they've A/B tested that impressions versus viewability piece that we talked about before. What other things catch your eye on this, Brock, or what things do you think are maybe missing when we're scrolling through here?

Brock: To be honest, if you don't mind scrolling right back up to the top — I'm a big proponent of putting your first MREC just beneath the fold. Right here we've gone one, two, three deals that have the ad. And in this case, they've got a search bar, menu, hamburger menu, different options, and their top picks. For various reasons, I feel like this is the best placement on mobile. One, because you've got a 300x250, which is a standout size. But publishers always love their 320x50 that sits at the top of the screen. Particularly in this case, if you're running a longer Prebid timeout auction, or even a quite tight Prebid auction — the first thing a user is going to do, particularly on this kind of site, is scroll. And off they go. Half the ad for one second on average, it's gone. There's just no point. So I think they made a really good decision with that one.

Definition — MREC: a 300x250 medium rectangle ad unit, one of the most common and high-performing display ad sizes.

Ben: Yeah, then it's really — as you say — how quick do people actually scroll through here? How does that change based on bandwidth and device capability? They've clearly got a lot of buffer in that case — I'm moving really quick as you can see. So they're protecting themselves against blanks and the popcorn effect. But I reckon with a bit of telemetry and running some experiments, they probably could load a little bit differently, particularly by device type or by using some different predictors of likelihood to purchase.

Brock: Yeah. So like, I'm making this up, but perhaps the number of page views that people have actually collected in a session on a listing page like this is some sort of evidence of propensity to buy. And then from there, maybe you reduce ad serving at all — or maybe you just get rid of them completely. You move more into a retail media play, prioritising what's probably a more lucrative revenue stream if you can actually get them to convert and do that affiliate link.

Ben: Yeah, it's interesting. And we can see that they're definitely doing some segmentation on their audience based on what you're looking at. They're layering in targeting as well, and I presume some deals are more lucrative than others too. So my guess is the layout can be dictated by what you're actually looking at. You can see the segments that we've been placed in, and this could probably dictate what you're serving as well. You've got kind of like propensity to buy, what you're assuming based on browsing and how you're doing that. And then also how valuable is the segment that they're looking at — and you can change your ad strategy based on that to try and maximise what matters.

Brock: You'd probably want to collect all data in the one place to make sure you're just maximising the overall outcome, which is revenue. But yeah, I think that's really interesting. Also, just at the top — the benefit is you're not being the ad that pushes everything down, or the LCP — Largest Contentful Paint — for Core Web Vitals as well.

Definition — LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): a Core Web Vitals metric measuring how long it takes for the largest visible element on a page to load. Ads above the fold can delay LCP and hurt SEO.

Ben: Exactly. Yeah, benefits there. And I would be shocked if Slickdeals did not have a very large amount of organic traffic.

Brock: Yeah, definitely. Particularly around the holidays, right?

Ben: Yeah. The other piece we didn't see was AdSense for Search, which would definitely be a money maker on this site. It obviously gets a super high click-through rate and performs very well on sites that have content marketplaces and those kinds of sites. There are two reasons they might not have it — maybe they just haven't looked at it. The other one is that you're sending people away to other deals on other places, and it is third-party advertising. This is their own version. Not typical, I would say, but you can see that they're trying to capture people where it matters — when they first load the page, at the top of their screen, in a way that is shoppable and measurable.

Brock: Yeah. Now that doesn't mean that you couldn't do A/B testing a bit further down. Like, I think this unit you should maintain. Maybe you'd run an AFS versus a GAM test there, which might offer some value.

Definition — GAM (Google Ad Manager): Google's ad server used by publishers to manage, serve, and report on ad inventory.

Ben: Yeah. Key thing is just making sure the CTR across the products isn't being impacted by it — because it does get a pretty high CTR. I think that's the reason it does so well.

Ben: The last thing on mobile — it didn't show here now, but when you first open it up, it pushes you towards downloading the app. And we see that strategy pretty often with these types of businesses. They want you to download the app. Maybe talk about why that is the case and what's different with optimising app as well.

Brock: There's plenty that's different with optimising app — we'll have to do a session on it. But really they do have a much richer environment within the apps. My guess is they have a native iOS app and a native Android app. Teams are able to really customise the experience and be quite shoppable. The other piece is you have implicit intent. Coming and looking at Slickdeals just from a Google search is one thing. Downloading the app, signing in as well — they have a good community of people that come back. They can probably get a lot of data out of that, assuming they are allowed to due to privacy laws and the like. The app is a good way to one, improve the experience, but two, collect information and make the user experience a lot better.

Ben: Definitely. You've got a captive audience that have downloaded it and are going to come back again and again.

How is Slickdeals likely using their audience data, and what does their data strategy look like?

Ben: So we've talked about the strategy, we've talked about desktop, we've talked about mobile — and throughout it, we've kind of alluded to them having a super valuable audience and how they might use that. How else do you think they're using that data? How are they collecting it? What do you think that looks like?

Brock: Yeah, I would say they're using an off-the-shelf CDP.

Definition — CDP (Customer Data Platform): a system that collects and unifies customer data from multiple sources to create a single customer profile, used for audience segmentation and targeting.

Ben: Yeah, that's a very common approach for a publisher or business like this.

Brock: Alternatively, they might be building their own telemetry systems and using some off-the-shelf marketplace categorisation products that they can buy. But generally, one strategy could be to go down the retail media approach and use their captive audience. Try and find diamonds in the rough — try and find collections of people that are interested in very specific things. And go to market with that. So for example, I'm sure if we start navigating and looking at dumbbells and weight plates, that might be putting us into a segment: sporting enthusiast, gym-goer, something like that. And you go to Nike or you go to a manufacturer of these kinds of things and say, "Hey, I've got 30,000, 150,000 people — and they always come back and they've looked at your products before." Because remember, we've got enough metadata: we know what the product is, who the manufacturer is, where it's sold, what the price is. So you can really start to build a map of users based on what they're interested in.

Ben: Yeah. And that is like gold for a product manufacturer across any of these segments. I would imagine all of them would be very excited by the idea of being able to find users that are at the end of their funnel — in one spot.

Brock: Definitely. And even probably more importantly, easier to buy. What I mean by that is the guys at Slickdeals have done a pretty good job of showcasing what their audience is made of and making it easy to purchase. They're very easy — come and advertise on Slickdeals. My guess is there's probably a shoppable way to do it. Here's the segment that I want, here's my pricing, and off they go. It's almost a platform play where you can self-serve a little bit — moving into something like Facebook, and they've got an audience that they can segment out in a similar way as well.

Ben: And from my understanding, the value in the CDP or customer data platform is how you're segmenting those audiences and who you're putting them in front of. They've got people who can self-identify the audience they want, and then they probably have a direct sales team as well that is out shopping those audiences around and showing people what they have available.

Brock: Yeah, I'd say more of the latter for sure, based on what I think the size of the business is. But it's probably important to say that at least on today's tech, you can get really good insights out of cookies. So as a marketer, as an advertiser — why do I buy this audience? Sure, "good results" is an easy way to answer that. But you still have to go out and say, "Hey, here are deal groups X, Y, and Z. You can buy through this platform. You're perfect for this use case because you're a manufacturer of these goods. And you've got to sell the story and let the details come out when you get a nice campaign report at the end saying how many leads you converted." You're right though — it has to perform better than you could with cookies on the open auction. So there is some craft to building those audiences and making sure that they do perform better, and showing that back to the advertiser as well, so they see the benefits.

How does Slickdeals handle ads differently for their power community users?

Ben: Last piece that we didn't mention was just around the community. So often these sites have a fervent community of like-minded people who love coupons and deals. And generally — I've seen it before on a fragrance coupon-slash-forum site — they've got 10% of these users making up about 50% of total page views because they're just obsessed with being in here, finding deals, and talking with each other. Keeping this audience happy is very important to their business as well. And you might look at how do you show a different ad experience to these logged-in users, or those that are often in the forum, to keep them happy versus new or occasional users on the website.

Brock: Yeah. So you can kind of see the density is less in the forum areas. Factually, at the top, nice in view, they've left space, there's no popcorn effect, they haven't gone 300x600. I'm sure if we can find some forums you can see where the power users are. They've taken it into consideration because a vocal audience will let you know in the forums if your crazy ideas with the ad layout or otherwise are causing a disturbance.

Summary: What can publishers learn from Slickdeals' monetisation strategy?

Ben: Okay. So, that is Slickdeals. We've looked at a few areas of their business. We went through their layout across mobile and desktop. Overall, a pretty good setup — strong ad density, nice setup, header bidding enabled, and some cool opportunities being taken advantage of. We also looked at their data strategy as well, which you went through there in detail. You can tell these guys have invested in the programmatic side. They're investing in other ways too — they definitely know they've got a valuable audience and they are taking advantage of that.

Ben: That is our episode 5 of Layout Teardown. I hope it was enjoyable, and thank you so much for watching. Please leave a like, leave a comment, subscribe if you learned something, and we'll see you in the next one.

This is an edited transcript of Layout Teardown, Episode 5. The words are Ben and Brock's own — lightly edited for readability (filler words, false starts, typos, punctuation). No claims have been rewritten or generated by AI.

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Layout Teardown: Episode 5 - Why Slickdeals.net's Ads Just Work – A Deep Dive

Layout Teardown: Episode 5 - Why Slickdeals.net's Ads Just Work – A Deep Dive

Contents
Contents

Layout Teardown: Episode 5 - Why Slickdeals.net's Ads Just Work – A Deep Dive

In this episode, we dive into Slickdeals.net: one of the largest coupon and deals platforms in the U.S.. Ben and Brock unpack how Slickdeals monetises through affiliate links, a community-driven content model, and programmatic advertising. They explore how the site balances UX and monetisation across multiple touchpoints, and share actionable insights for publishers on maximising ad placements without compromising user experience. Tune in to understand how Slickdeals blends retail media, programmatic ads, and user engagement to build a high-revenue ecosystem.

Key Takeaways

  • The audience has their wallets out. Slickdeals sits at the absolute bottom of the purchase funnel. Their users aren't just browsing, they are actively looking for a reason to buy right at that moment. Because this traffic is so close to converting, advertisers see massive click-through rates and willingly pay premium CPMs to be there.
  • They recycle losing ad bids. They run a custom Prebid setup with seven partners, including Amazon. Their smartest trick is something called bid caching. If an advertiser loses an initial auction, Slickdeals saves that bid and automatically enters it into the next one when the page refreshes. It quietly squeezes out an extra 3% to 5% in revenue without anyone noticing.
  • They intentionally slow the auction down. Most sites cut advertisers off after one second to keep things loading fast. Slickdeals breaks that rule and gives them three full seconds to respond. Because the layout is sticky and users stick around, that extra time lets advertisers come back with much higher bids without making the experience any worse.
  • The desktop sidebar is a non-stop money maker. On desktop, a massive sticky sidebar follows you all the way down the page. Rather than showing one ad, they stack three on top of each other. Because that sidebar stays glued to the screen, those three slots can be refreshed continuously with new bids, generating a high volume of impressions the whole time.
  • They skip the useless top mobile banner. Most sites put a tiny horizontal ad at the very top of the mobile screen, which fast-scrolling users blow straight past. Slickdeals skips it entirely, keeping the top of the page clean for Google's search crawlers. Instead, they wait until you've scrolled a little and drop a large square ad just below the first few deals, right where your eyes actually are.
  • They dial back ads for their most loyal users. Forum regulars are also the most likely to get annoyed by ad clutter, so Slickdeals intentionally reduces ad density in those sections. It is a deliberate trade, prioritising user retention over squeezing out a few extra short-term dollars.

What makes Slickdeals' business model interesting from an advertising perspective?

Ben: Hello and welcome to episode 5 of the Layout Teardown with myself, Ben, and I'm Brock, and we're going to be looking at the website Slickdeals. So, we're doing Slickdeals today. It's interesting for a few reasons. It's a giant online coupon business. It's a community and they write kind of financial content as well. And they've got a few different business models that they are working with. So, they've got the coupons — many of these are affiliate links back to the retailer, which is interesting. The second piece is they've got a highly valuable audience that is in market to purchase. And so they've got a few strategies to monetise that user base. And the third one is the programmatic ads, which is what we're interested in, and we're going to bring you through that as well. And they've got quite a sophisticated setup. So we will jump straight in and maybe talk about the business model and how they're probably looking at advertising first. So Brock, when you're looking at Slickdeals, what first comes to mind in those areas?

Brock: Yeah, it's very interesting to me. If you're a big massive retailer, you're likely bricks and mortar, you're likely millions, billions of dollars coming through those channels. And when you see them make their transition over to digital, that's obviously happened over the last few years. We're still seeing quite a slow uptick in the deployment of programmatic. Now they're very conservative about their brand, obviously. And you know, really trying to make sure that their core business streams are maintained and not affected by dodgy ads online. Now I think Slickdeals actually comes from the other side of the spectrum, and you see that when you first launch into the site — they are a community. There are people interacting with each other online. My guess is they don't have 100 stores around the US. And therefore they're able to be a bit more free with how they approach their online programmatic strategy.

Brock: So yeah, initially you see a large usage of ad units across the site. So as you scroll you can see there's a nice sidebar set up, and if you keep going you've got the triple stacker — as they call it, it's the industry term — where they're keeping ad units in view. They're making sure that there's an opportunity to monetise people at all times, which is really, really nice. Pretty smooth. It's definitely high ad density for a site like this, but they've done it in a pretty clean way. I think it's not overpowering. These units are in view for a huge amount of time and we've got refresh on there as well.

Ben: So that's exactly the point. So when I was googling coupons USA, I had Slickdeals and I had BestBuy.com coming up, and you can see there's a vast difference in how they've approached monetising their users, right? I would say under the hood there's probably a lot of similarities, but when you've got bricks and mortar and historical revenue, it's going to stop you from going full-blown programmatic.

What does Slickdeals' traffic look like, and why does their audience command high CPMs?

Ben: Definitely. In terms of the numbers, so they've got a pretty serious amount of traffic. They're doing about 60 million monthly visits, strong average visit duration as well — about four and a half minutes. Most of that traffic is coming from the US. So we work with a similar site in Australia called OzBargain. Generally these sites are kind of localised to a region. You've got deals that are normally localised as well, and those campaigns are kind of in-region. Often you see one of these kind of mega sites or deal sites per geo — at least that's what we've kind of seen. And generally they have extremely high CPMs. You've got users that are showing intent to purchase. They're actually looking at deals and coupons for things that are already being advertised in one way — why not advertise something else to them? And there are high CTRs, and those users are valuable to an advertiser.

Brock: Basically, it's a marketer's dream. You know that the people on this site are at the very pointy end of the funnel.

Ben: Yes, definitely.

How is Slickdeals' Prebid and header bidding stack set up?

Ben: In terms of programmatic setup then — so they've got header bidding running. They've got seven partners in there at the moment. From our look, it looked like they've built their own kind of Prebid setup in there.

Brock: That's right. Yeah. Interestingly enough, they've decided not to name it Prebid. There might be some obfuscation, but it's in there. They've got Amazon plugged in, which is really nice.

Ben: Yeah. I would be shocked if they don't have a bit of Google Open Bidding there as well. Server-side, extra demand in the auction.

Brock: Yeah. And just running through the Prebid stack, I think they've ticked off most of the baseline winners. You can see they've got cases like multisize running, obviously bidders across all sizes there as well.

Definition — Prebid: an open-source header bidding solution that allows publishers to run simultaneous auctions across multiple demand partners before the ad server makes its decision.

Ben: Yeah, I saw they've enabled bid caching, which is great. As you mentioned with the sidebar — as it's refreshing, we might have unused bids that will come through from some of the header bidders that have been included. Obviously Google might take a few, or you might lose out to another bidder in the auction, but if you keep it nice and contained, you're not holding bids forever and there's some standards that you have to abide by. You can absolutely find a few extra percent just by holding a bid for 30 seconds and using a refresh auction.

Definition — Bid caching: the practice of holding onto losing bids from a header bidding auction and re-entering them into subsequent refresh auctions, extracting additional yield from bids that would otherwise be discarded.

Brock: Yeah, it's something we've tested a lot at Publift across lots of different publishers. Generally we're seeing like a 3 to 5% uplift when we use it. Of course it is very much dependent on the volume of refresh. And these guys have done a good job because they're not necessarily a high-dwell-time site in the traditional sense — but on desktop, you've got the sidebar the whole time, which is always in view. Say plenty of opportunity to refresh, times by three ads, and then two or three above. So yeah, a really good opportunity for secondary bidders to pick up good, high-quality impressions.

Why has Slickdeals set a 3-second Prebid timeout instead of the standard 1 second?

Ben: Another thing we noticed was just on the timeout that they had for Prebid. They've set that a little bit longer, which was interesting. It's normally around 1 second — they've set it at 3 seconds. What do you think the reason is?

Brock: There's kind of two paths you can take, particularly at the scale that Slickdeals sits at today. Either you're going to be quick or you're going to be slow. And what I mean by that is: do you actually have a reason to be quick? Thinking about how someone uses this site — they'll likely go through and put a search query in, scroll through, be clicking back and forth out of the deals. Also, looking at their layout and their use of sticky, it really doesn't change a whole lot. There's not a huge requirement to be super quick. Now speed is always important, because across all users and all bandwidths or machines you do need speed in certain areas. But because they've managed to keep ads in view for a longer period of time, they're actually not punished by allowing their bidders to really get their bids in and take a bit more time to pass it back.

Ben: Yeah, that's correct. Then of course when they don't win, but they're still competitive — as we said at the start, highly valuable users — we use our bid caching functionality to ensure that we're getting the most for every auction that we can.

Brock: Nice. The other thing — they are lazy loading as well. So we've got quite a bit of ad density, but we're not loading everything at the same time. And there's pretty significant scroll depth across desktop and mobile. I think mobile was potentially infinite scroll — I think you can get to the end of this one — yeah, so there is pagination. But these ad units that are further down are getting lazy loaded, so we're not dragging it down too much. Definitely a balancing act, I'd say, because there's quite a few units in here, but yeah that's definitely a plus.

What does Slickdeals' desktop ad layout look like, and where are the opportunities?

Brock: Well, one thing we always talk about is the volume impact and the value impact. So in this case, they've definitely gone for a volume approach. You can see there's lots of ads, there's refresh. Luckily for these guys, they have a valuable audience, so the value curve is just generally going to sit higher up the x-axis. So they can get away with it and maintain CPMs.

Ben: Yeah, obviously supply and demand — you reduce the amount of ads you have on the page and how many times you refresh, you can see the value go up. CPM goes up. But of course, you want to actually get the most money you can at the page level, right?

Brock: And by having the pagination there is quite interesting, because my initial thought is they don't have a 970x250. So they do well in the vertical — really tall ads — and they don't have big horizontals, which I think will hurt them a little bit from a value point of view. But because they put the pagination right to the right, it's very close to advertising content. It's not encroaching. So we're not in any ad policy areas at this point, but it actually does solve for a problem which a lot of publishers traditionally would put a horizontal just beneath that bar.

Ben: You still got that unit in view and you've got space. There might be a reason — they might have telemetry that suggests that the trending stores area is more valuable or getting clicks or being interacted with. But what would be interesting is to collect clicks on the next and previous and see — it doesn't make sense to lazy load something horizontal here, right? Or even if you were to do that, do you remove this unit and use that space for more content? It's an A/B test to run.

Brock: Yeah, definitely. I think even that discussion on the lazy loading value curve — still something you'd want to experiment with. If I get my viewability above 70%, am I actually getting that CPM upgrade? Are more advertisers bidding on that inventory? Am I actually making more versus more impressions, slightly lower viewability, but still generating more revenue? Black Friday comes along and the whole curve flips.

Ben: Yes, yeah. Which I'd say is pretty extreme for Slickdeals.

Definition — Viewability: an industry metric measuring whether an ad had the opportunity to be seen, typically defined as 50% of the ad's pixels in view for at least 1 second.

What does the mobile ad layout look like, and what would you change?

Ben: We're going to look through the mobile website now — what their layout and setup looks like. So we'll have a scroll through. First things we can see, they've got some multisize going on which is always good and expected. So they've got your kind of standard mobile sizes in there. We've got some lazy loading at the top — it's not super tight. Maybe they've A/B tested that impressions versus viewability piece that we talked about before. What other things catch your eye on this, Brock, or what things do you think are maybe missing when we're scrolling through here?

Brock: To be honest, if you don't mind scrolling right back up to the top — I'm a big proponent of putting your first MREC just beneath the fold. Right here we've gone one, two, three deals that have the ad. And in this case, they've got a search bar, menu, hamburger menu, different options, and their top picks. For various reasons, I feel like this is the best placement on mobile. One, because you've got a 300x250, which is a standout size. But publishers always love their 320x50 that sits at the top of the screen. Particularly in this case, if you're running a longer Prebid timeout auction, or even a quite tight Prebid auction — the first thing a user is going to do, particularly on this kind of site, is scroll. And off they go. Half the ad for one second on average, it's gone. There's just no point. So I think they made a really good decision with that one.

Definition — MREC: a 300x250 medium rectangle ad unit, one of the most common and high-performing display ad sizes.

Ben: Yeah, then it's really — as you say — how quick do people actually scroll through here? How does that change based on bandwidth and device capability? They've clearly got a lot of buffer in that case — I'm moving really quick as you can see. So they're protecting themselves against blanks and the popcorn effect. But I reckon with a bit of telemetry and running some experiments, they probably could load a little bit differently, particularly by device type or by using some different predictors of likelihood to purchase.

Brock: Yeah. So like, I'm making this up, but perhaps the number of page views that people have actually collected in a session on a listing page like this is some sort of evidence of propensity to buy. And then from there, maybe you reduce ad serving at all — or maybe you just get rid of them completely. You move more into a retail media play, prioritising what's probably a more lucrative revenue stream if you can actually get them to convert and do that affiliate link.

Ben: Yeah, it's interesting. And we can see that they're definitely doing some segmentation on their audience based on what you're looking at. They're layering in targeting as well, and I presume some deals are more lucrative than others too. So my guess is the layout can be dictated by what you're actually looking at. You can see the segments that we've been placed in, and this could probably dictate what you're serving as well. You've got kind of like propensity to buy, what you're assuming based on browsing and how you're doing that. And then also how valuable is the segment that they're looking at — and you can change your ad strategy based on that to try and maximise what matters.

Brock: You'd probably want to collect all data in the one place to make sure you're just maximising the overall outcome, which is revenue. But yeah, I think that's really interesting. Also, just at the top — the benefit is you're not being the ad that pushes everything down, or the LCP — Largest Contentful Paint — for Core Web Vitals as well.

Definition — LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): a Core Web Vitals metric measuring how long it takes for the largest visible element on a page to load. Ads above the fold can delay LCP and hurt SEO.

Ben: Exactly. Yeah, benefits there. And I would be shocked if Slickdeals did not have a very large amount of organic traffic.

Brock: Yeah, definitely. Particularly around the holidays, right?

Ben: Yeah. The other piece we didn't see was AdSense for Search, which would definitely be a money maker on this site. It obviously gets a super high click-through rate and performs very well on sites that have content marketplaces and those kinds of sites. There are two reasons they might not have it — maybe they just haven't looked at it. The other one is that you're sending people away to other deals on other places, and it is third-party advertising. This is their own version. Not typical, I would say, but you can see that they're trying to capture people where it matters — when they first load the page, at the top of their screen, in a way that is shoppable and measurable.

Brock: Yeah. Now that doesn't mean that you couldn't do A/B testing a bit further down. Like, I think this unit you should maintain. Maybe you'd run an AFS versus a GAM test there, which might offer some value.

Definition — GAM (Google Ad Manager): Google's ad server used by publishers to manage, serve, and report on ad inventory.

Ben: Yeah. Key thing is just making sure the CTR across the products isn't being impacted by it — because it does get a pretty high CTR. I think that's the reason it does so well.

Ben: The last thing on mobile — it didn't show here now, but when you first open it up, it pushes you towards downloading the app. And we see that strategy pretty often with these types of businesses. They want you to download the app. Maybe talk about why that is the case and what's different with optimising app as well.

Brock: There's plenty that's different with optimising app — we'll have to do a session on it. But really they do have a much richer environment within the apps. My guess is they have a native iOS app and a native Android app. Teams are able to really customise the experience and be quite shoppable. The other piece is you have implicit intent. Coming and looking at Slickdeals just from a Google search is one thing. Downloading the app, signing in as well — they have a good community of people that come back. They can probably get a lot of data out of that, assuming they are allowed to due to privacy laws and the like. The app is a good way to one, improve the experience, but two, collect information and make the user experience a lot better.

Ben: Definitely. You've got a captive audience that have downloaded it and are going to come back again and again.

How is Slickdeals likely using their audience data, and what does their data strategy look like?

Ben: So we've talked about the strategy, we've talked about desktop, we've talked about mobile — and throughout it, we've kind of alluded to them having a super valuable audience and how they might use that. How else do you think they're using that data? How are they collecting it? What do you think that looks like?

Brock: Yeah, I would say they're using an off-the-shelf CDP.

Definition — CDP (Customer Data Platform): a system that collects and unifies customer data from multiple sources to create a single customer profile, used for audience segmentation and targeting.

Ben: Yeah, that's a very common approach for a publisher or business like this.

Brock: Alternatively, they might be building their own telemetry systems and using some off-the-shelf marketplace categorisation products that they can buy. But generally, one strategy could be to go down the retail media approach and use their captive audience. Try and find diamonds in the rough — try and find collections of people that are interested in very specific things. And go to market with that. So for example, I'm sure if we start navigating and looking at dumbbells and weight plates, that might be putting us into a segment: sporting enthusiast, gym-goer, something like that. And you go to Nike or you go to a manufacturer of these kinds of things and say, "Hey, I've got 30,000, 150,000 people — and they always come back and they've looked at your products before." Because remember, we've got enough metadata: we know what the product is, who the manufacturer is, where it's sold, what the price is. So you can really start to build a map of users based on what they're interested in.

Ben: Yeah. And that is like gold for a product manufacturer across any of these segments. I would imagine all of them would be very excited by the idea of being able to find users that are at the end of their funnel — in one spot.

Brock: Definitely. And even probably more importantly, easier to buy. What I mean by that is the guys at Slickdeals have done a pretty good job of showcasing what their audience is made of and making it easy to purchase. They're very easy — come and advertise on Slickdeals. My guess is there's probably a shoppable way to do it. Here's the segment that I want, here's my pricing, and off they go. It's almost a platform play where you can self-serve a little bit — moving into something like Facebook, and they've got an audience that they can segment out in a similar way as well.

Ben: And from my understanding, the value in the CDP or customer data platform is how you're segmenting those audiences and who you're putting them in front of. They've got people who can self-identify the audience they want, and then they probably have a direct sales team as well that is out shopping those audiences around and showing people what they have available.

Brock: Yeah, I'd say more of the latter for sure, based on what I think the size of the business is. But it's probably important to say that at least on today's tech, you can get really good insights out of cookies. So as a marketer, as an advertiser — why do I buy this audience? Sure, "good results" is an easy way to answer that. But you still have to go out and say, "Hey, here are deal groups X, Y, and Z. You can buy through this platform. You're perfect for this use case because you're a manufacturer of these goods. And you've got to sell the story and let the details come out when you get a nice campaign report at the end saying how many leads you converted." You're right though — it has to perform better than you could with cookies on the open auction. So there is some craft to building those audiences and making sure that they do perform better, and showing that back to the advertiser as well, so they see the benefits.

How does Slickdeals handle ads differently for their power community users?

Ben: Last piece that we didn't mention was just around the community. So often these sites have a fervent community of like-minded people who love coupons and deals. And generally — I've seen it before on a fragrance coupon-slash-forum site — they've got 10% of these users making up about 50% of total page views because they're just obsessed with being in here, finding deals, and talking with each other. Keeping this audience happy is very important to their business as well. And you might look at how do you show a different ad experience to these logged-in users, or those that are often in the forum, to keep them happy versus new or occasional users on the website.

Brock: Yeah. So you can kind of see the density is less in the forum areas. Factually, at the top, nice in view, they've left space, there's no popcorn effect, they haven't gone 300x600. I'm sure if we can find some forums you can see where the power users are. They've taken it into consideration because a vocal audience will let you know in the forums if your crazy ideas with the ad layout or otherwise are causing a disturbance.

Summary: What can publishers learn from Slickdeals' monetisation strategy?

Ben: Okay. So, that is Slickdeals. We've looked at a few areas of their business. We went through their layout across mobile and desktop. Overall, a pretty good setup — strong ad density, nice setup, header bidding enabled, and some cool opportunities being taken advantage of. We also looked at their data strategy as well, which you went through there in detail. You can tell these guys have invested in the programmatic side. They're investing in other ways too — they definitely know they've got a valuable audience and they are taking advantage of that.

Ben: That is our episode 5 of Layout Teardown. I hope it was enjoyable, and thank you so much for watching. Please leave a like, leave a comment, subscribe if you learned something, and we'll see you in the next one.

This is an edited transcript of Layout Teardown, Episode 5. The words are Ben and Brock's own — lightly edited for readability (filler words, false starts, typos, punctuation). No claims have been rewritten or generated by AI.

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