How Sweet and Savory Meals Improved Ad Performance Without Sacrificing User Experience

For food bloggers, growth is a double-edged knife. More traffic means more opportunity—but also more pressure on site performance, especially when ads enter the picture. Push monetization too hard, and readers notice. Pull back too far, and revenue leaves money on the table (and groceries unpaid).

That balance is exactly what Catalina Castravet, founder of Sweet and Savory Meals, set out to protect.

A Site Built for Real Home Cooks

Catalina launched Sweet and Savory Meals in 2012 with a simple goal: create flavorful, reliable recipes for home cooks who want meals that actually work. Over the years, that mission scaled—big time.

Today, the site features thousands of tested recipes created by Catalina and her professional team, attracting a large U.S.-based audience across both desktop and mobile. With that kind of traffic comes real monetization potential—and real responsibility to protect the reader experience.

The Challenge: Monetization Without Disruption

Sweet and Savory Meals sees strong traffic across devices, particularly mobile. Catalina knew that mobile readers are far less forgiving when it comes to cluttered layouts, jumpy ads, or visually heavy pages—and wanted to be proactive about preventing those issues as her site continued to grow.

Her priority was clear:

• Maintain a smooth, enjoyable reader journey
• Avoid intrusive or competitive ad placements
• Still increase earnings in a meaningful, sustainable way
  

In short: monetize smarter, not louder.

Testing Mediavine’s Optimized Ad Experience

When Mediavine introduced Optimized Ad Experience (OAE) as an approved experience for publishers, Catalina decided to test it firsthand.

OAE is designed to intelligently adjust ad density and placement to improve layout flow—especially in-content—while maintaining strong monetization performance. The promise? Better stability, fewer disruptive impressions, and ads that feel like they belong.

Naturally, Catalina had questions:

• Would RPMs hold steady?
• Would revenue dip?
• Would readers notice… in a bad way?
  

The Results: Stability, Uplift, and Zero Reader Complaints

After enabling OAE, the results spoke for themselves. Sweet and Savory Meals saw:

• 37% increase in overall revenue
• 31% decrease in in-content ad impressions
• Improved RPM stability, even on fluctuating traffic days
• Clear revenue uplift during peak food-season moments
  

Just as importantly, no reader complaints about ad placements! That last point matters more than it sounds. When you change ad layouts, readers usually let you know very quickly if something feels off. In this case, silence was a win.

A Better Experience, Especially on Mobile

After opting into OAE, Catalina noticed subtle but meaningful improvements, especially on mobile.

The ads feel more streamlined and less intrusive, especially on mobile. Previously, we had moments where ads felt a bit heavy visually or competitively placed, but now the layout feels more fluid. It didn’t affect scroll depth or time on page in any noticeably negative way, which was one of my concerns at the beginning.

— Catalina Castravet, Sweet and Savory Meals

Why This Matters

OAE isn’t just about showing fewer ads. It’s about showing better ads, in better places, at better times. For sites like Sweet and Savory Meals, that means:

• Protecting long-term audience trust
• Creating a cleaner, more modern layout
• Achieving monetization gains without UX tradeoffs