As an app developer or online web publisher, you need to ask yourself what your biggest asset is. Can you make money through advertising if no one installs your app or visits your website? Of course not. Do you want to keep your users engaged as long as possible? Of course you do.
The biggest mistake that we see digital publishers make is that they are too hyper focused on making money, which isn't bad (obviously), but it can't be at the sacrifice of your user base. In order to generate ad revenue, you need users or followers - that is the single most important thing. A publisher needs to understand the effect that the different ad units you are running have on these three things: usability, retention & lifetime value (LTV).
How do you do this, one may ask? There are different frameworks that can be deployed where a publisher can test a control against a variant to see the effect it has on user metrics. We see it happen way to often (especially on apps) where digital publishers aren't testing ads before rolling them out to their full population. Be smart and look for ad solutions that don't affect load times and add minimal latency. This will ensure a positive user experience.