A news publisher with 88% mobile traffic activates a 320×50 bottom-anchor sticky unit with conservative defaults. Mobile eCPM lifts from $0.62 to $1.31 over four weeks. AdSense policy review post-activation finds no issues. The publisher's previous attempt with a different vendor in 2023 triggered AdSense account-level action.
The publisher serves regional news content across Vietnam and the Philippines, with 88% of sessions originating on mobile. Monthly pageviews are approximately 4.1 million. Editorial output is daily news coverage with high session frequency from a returning reader base.
In 2023, the publisher had activated a sticky anchor unit through a different SSP vendor. Three weeks after activation, the publisher's AdSense account received a policy review citing inadequate dismiss controls and ad-stacking concerns. The publisher disabled sticky immediately and worked through the AdSense review process; the account was reinstated after two weeks. The experience left the publisher unwilling to attempt sticky again without strong configuration confidence.
The Pub Clarity engagement began with a detailed discussion of the previous failure. The 2023 vendor had used a delayed-display dismiss button (visible only after a 5-second viewability window) and had allowed the sticky to display at heights above the AdSense policy limit. Both choices were policy violations. Pub Clarity's sticky configuration defaults explicitly preclude both.
The activation used Pub Clarity's default sticky configuration: 320×50 bottom anchor, always-visible dismiss button at standard size, hard 50px height limit, 30-second viewability-gated refresh, session-level frequency cap (one unit per session), mobile-only with no desktop activation.
The configuration was reviewed against AdSense's mobile ad policies line-by-line before activation. Specifically: the dismiss button is visible immediately on render (no delayed-display); the unit cannot grow taller than 50px under any condition; refresh counts down only when the unit is at least 50% visible; after dismiss, the unit does not return until session-end (no reappearance, no re-render on navigation).
GAM line-item setup mirrored the previous successful Pub Clarity sticky activations across the publisher cohort. Single line item, targeting mobile-only, with creative size mapping to 320×50. AdSense backfill was disabled on the sticky line item; only Pub Clarity demand fills the sticky slot. This separation simplifies AdSense's view of the publisher's inventory.
Week 1: sticky fill rate was 94% with average eCPM of $0.92. Mobile session yield lifted 14% above the pre-activation baseline.
Weeks 2–3: fill rate 96–97%, eCPM stabilized at $1.20–$1.34. Mobile eCPM combined across all units lifted to $1.18, up from $0.62 baseline — an 89% lift. The sticky unit was contributing approximately 31% of total mobile revenue with a fraction of the inventory.
Week 4: mobile eCPM settled at $1.31, a 2.1× lift over baseline. Dismiss rate was 11% (within Pub Clarity's benchmark range of 8–14%). Session-level frequency was respected; no reader saw more than one sticky impression per session.
A post-activation AdSense policy review was triggered at week 5 by AdSense's standard new-format-detection process. The review found no policy issues. The publisher's account standing remained unchanged. The contrast with the 2023 experience was complete.
The case study validates two operating principles. First, sticky compliance defaults that look conservative on paper do not, in practice, leave significant yield on the table. The 2.1× eCPM lift is consistent with the strongest sticky activations across the Pub Clarity publisher cohort, achieved with the most conservative configuration in the dashboard.
Second, AdSense policy risk is asymmetric. A sticky activation that triggers AdSense action can cost the publisher weeks of revenue across the entire account, not just the sticky slot. Conservative defaults eliminate that risk. The yield achievable under conservative defaults is more than sufficient; the additional yield available under aggressive configurations does not, in our experience, justify the asymmetric risk.
The publisher's response to the case has been to enable sticky on a sister property after seeing the four-week results. Activation on the sister property is scheduled for the next quarter; we will publish the comparison data when available.
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