By Andrew Byrd
Ad operations don’t always get easier when a publisher has a strong first-party data foundation to build on. In some cases, the strength of the underlying data can actually make monetization decisions more complicated.
Ancestry’s ad ops team has a wealth of deeply personal user data to draw from, including user-submitted DNA tests. But subscriptions – not ads – have always been the core focus of the company’s business model. Meanwhile, ads have to live alongside community-driven content that’s often created by subscribers who don’t want to be bombarded with ads.
That complicated reality shapes every ad ops decision the company makes, from how inventory is segmented to how far teams are willing to push the auction, according to Tami DeLeeuw, Ancestry’s senior manager of ad operations.
For Ancestry, ad ops are less about chasing revenue growth at all costs and more about building systems that can scale without undermining user trust.
“You’re never just plugging in campaigns,” DeLeeuw said. “It’s always evolving and always a puzzle.”
Tailoring the ad experience
While Ancestry is best known for its subscription-driven genealogy platform, it also operates a network of sister sites, including properties like Find a Grave (a virtual tombstone-searching site) and Newspapers.com.
Across that network of sites, Ancestry’s ad business doesn’t simply split users into logged-in versus logged-out buckets. Rather than relying solely on its user identity graph, Ancestry groups users by engagement signals: page views, frequency, depth of interaction and the types of content they access.
It passes those engagement signals through the stack as audience attributes, creating clear distinctions between super users and casual visitors and breaking out several more granular user groups in between.
Those engagement signals don’t just inform ad targeting; they determine the entire ad experience, including ad density, the mix of featured formats and how often ads refresh.
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“For community-heavy sites, especially with [user-generated content], you can’t treat every user the same,” DeLeeuw said. “Some of these people are contributing content. That changes how aggressive you can be.”
How privacy shapes the ad stack
All of those ad ops decisions are driven by data, not guesswork, according to DeLeeuw.
Externally, it might be easy to assume Ancestry has unlimited first-party data to draw on. After all, its subscribers are even willing to share their DNA with the company. Most publishers dream about just getting more users to log in with an email address.
However, internally, Ancestry places tight controls on how that user data can be accessed, and its ad ops team operates within strict boundaries, DeLeeuw said.
Even when user signals are available, they are abstracted, encrypted and stripped of anything that could identify an individual, she said. Ad ops also works closely with legal, privacy and product teams to define what can be passed into the auction and how it can be used.
“That process takes time,” DeLeeuw said. “You don’t just decide to use something and flip a switch.”
As a result, Ancestry’s stack prioritizes contextual and engagement-based signals over anything that could compromise user expectations. While that limits some forms of targeting, DeLeeuw said, it has also pushed the team to focus on cleaner execution, higher-quality inventory and better-performing placements.
Data hygiene is especially important given that Ancestry does not run a direct sales team and all of its demand flows through programmatic channels. Which means auction health, transparency and performance consistency are critical, DeLeeuw said.
“Data alone doesn’t fix bad monetization,” she added. “If the fundamentals aren’t solid, it doesn’t matter how much [data] you have.”
Balancing ads and subscriptions
But advertising is just one part of the equation for Ancestry. Its ad ops team also has to balance its flexible ad experience with its evolving subscription business.
Although some of Ancestry’s properties remain subscription-only, others blend subscriptions and ads. For instance, on Find a Grave, the model has evolved to combine advertising with a sponsorship option where users can pay to support the site and remove ads entirely.
Any decision to introduce new revenue models, like Find a Grave’s sponsorship option, is tightly coordinated between ad ops and product teams, DeLeeuw said.
Ad ops is also deliberate about making any changes to the user experience. Ads are introduced slowly, tested on small percentages of traffic and evaluated for impact before new experiences are rolled out to wider audiences.
From a technical standpoint, Ancestry keeps its internal development work focused on the functionality of its sites. Most ad-specific execution – including audience segmentation logic and spinning up testing frameworks – is handled by outsourced partners, such as Media Tradecraft.
That structure allows Ancestry’s ad ops team to move faster without pulling engineering resources away from the subscription business, DeLeeuw said. It also frees ad ops to monitor ad performance daily, with constant attention to how different user groups respond to changes in the on-site ad load behavior and tweaks to auction dynamics.
Recently, the ad ops team has been focused on reducing unnecessary impressions, DeLeeuw said. The team closely manages viewability thresholds, lazy loading and refresh timing to determine which impressions are expendable. Over time, that approach has demonstrated that fewer, higher-quality impressions often outperform heavier layouts.
“We’ve seen cases where pulling back actually improves revenue,” she said. “You don’t need every ad slot you can technically fit.”
Ancestry uses higher-impact formats like video and interstitials selectively, with strict frequency caps and limited exposure. The goal is to add incremental value without creating friction for users who are deeply engaged with the content, DeLeeuw said.
“We’re always testing,” she said. “But we’re also willing to stop when something doesn’t serve the user.”
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