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If an ad position wasn’t sold in advance, it ends up in what’s known as remnant inventory — unsold inventory left over when the sales team doesn’t manage to fill all available spots with direct campaigns. Every day, thousands of ad impressions are served on websites, but some remain unsold — and that’s exactly where remnant inventory comes into play.
Remnant inventory on a website refers to the leftover ad inventory that wasn’t sold in advance through direct sales. It often involves ads that appear during off-peak hours, or simply when demand doesn’t meet the available supply.
Why does this happen?
It’s due to fluctuating demand, campaigns coming and going last-minute, and a limited number of advertisers who may not fill the entire available inventory. For media outlets, this can lead to a significant loss of potential revenue, as unoptimized or unfilled ad inventory represent missed opportunities to generate income.
Don’t waste valuable ad inventory. Turn remnant inventory into revenue with Content Exchange.
In Google Ad Manager, remnant inventory is easy to spot:
Bid Requests = Available ad opportunities
Filled Impressions = Ads actually shown
Bid Requests – Filled Impressions = Remnant inventory
If many bid requests go unfilled, that gap is your remnant inventory.
👉 Example:
If you have 100,000 bid requests, but only 40,000 ads are served, that means 60,000 opportunities were left unfilled.
That’s 60,000 potential impressions with zero revenue.
The challenge with remnant inventory is also in its unpredictability. Gaps in ad inventory can appear at any given moment – especially with sudden spikes in traffic or the unexpected cancellation of campaigns. Since this happens quickly and often flies under the radar of editorial and sales teams, it’s hard to monitor and even harder to control in real-time.
Make your inventory work for you – even when it’s unreserved.
If you have ad space on your site that hasn’t been sold, it’s a shame to leave it empty. At Content Exchange, we’ve been working with leading digital media for over 25 years, purchasing their unsold (remnant) ad inventory.
This means we can bring you additional revenue every time a spot that would otherwise remain unfilled becomes available. By partnering with us, you can avoid annual revenue shortfalls due to unsold impressions, while maintaining complete control over all of your ad positions.
Contact us, and we’d be happy to show you how we can collaborate.
The Content Exchange team is working hard on a mission to make the online world a better place. Our interdisciplinary team of experts thrives as one to help you Connect, Grow and Monetize to deliver the best business results.
