About WillyWeather

WillyWeather was founded over 10 years ago in Sydney. Initially, it started as the first national tides database, discovering quite a niche following among fishermen, then expanded into a full weather service in 2009.

WillyWeather is a global provider of local weather services that operates a website and apps for both iPhone and Android. Originating in Australia, WillyWeather also serves the UK and USA, with plans to launch in Canada, reaching over 3 million monthly users.

In Australia, WillyWeather provides up-to-date weather forecast information for over 15,000 Australian locations, on BoM weather radar, satellite images as well as synoptic charts.

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WillyWeather website homepage

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The Challenge

WillyWeather explained that “the main issue with how we previously did things was the number of hours we spent on it. Trying to increase your eCPM is a bottomless pit of wasted hours.”

By outsourcing this part of the business, the team was able to focus more time on creating a great website and amazing content for their users, and less time thinking about what new ad tech to implement or A/B testing different ad layouts and formats.

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"They were helpful in advising us on how much we might expect from different creative sizes, which helped us to determine which ads to include and where they should be placed. They also pushed us to put ads in places that we were initially reluctant to and, in hindsight, I’m grateful for that.”
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Will Bruce, Founder, WillyWeather

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The Approach

WillyWeather has been with Publift for over three years and were originally serviced through a third party header bidding solution before coming over to Publift’s Fuse platform. An initial focus on introducing larger ad formats in more viewable positions combined with the increased demand from implementing header bidding saw significant improvements in revenue for WillyWeather and allowed them to put more focus into growing their international business and audience acquisition. 

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The Results

  • The move over to Fuse Classic saw a significant revenue jump due to improved tag performance.
  • This combined with continual A/B testing and tweaking through the tag has continued to drive incremental improvements for WillyWeather.
  • By focusing on enhancing viewability through layout changes, coupled with finding the optimum refresh rate on key high view-time ad units such as the desktop and mobile sticky units, WillyWeather saw a 121% growth in ad revenue in 2019 with 6.5% growth in page views.

We’re all about innovating, experimenting, and improving – no incremental opportunity, no matter how tiny, goes unseen, so you can be sure we’re always looking out for you. Want to get this level of expertise on your own site? Reach out to us, let’s see what we can do to improve your site performance.