Never stop your profitable campaign! Else you'll loose it

[28popugaev]

Hi anybody,

I want to share you a story about why you should not allow your profitable nativ ad campaign to stop if you don't want turn it to non-profitable.

Couple of monthes I've tested a few native ad networks for my business. I had got it to right settings, individual prices for publishers etc. And it begin to work pretty well. Good income.

Accidentally my money at the account had finished and I'd got a breake of my campaign for a couple of days. When I'd started it again I was very suprised: my campaign had stopped its' good working, had stopped good converting and had stopped with good profit.

I'd inquired about what is wrong for my support manager of ad network. And he had send me manual about "how to work with native ads" and "why you should not stop your profitable campaing"

And here it is:
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Very important!

Once your campaign got profitable, never stop it. Do not allow money at your account to finish.

When you stop a campaign, your ads lose the best places in the rotation. This way, you can be faced with a situation, that it may never start be as profitable as before when you run it again.

Anyway, you will have to set it up again from the very beginning. But the best unit in the rotation would be occupied already.
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I've never got my profit back from that campaign again.

 

[Juliar]

It can look obvious but that's a good reminder, thank you for your story !

 

[Peter T]

Yes I know many people who have had that experience me included. However I have to say I have also had many campaigns that i scaled right back to focus on other that seemed more profitable, and then I was able to scale them right back up as if nothing had happened.

In these cases though I did not stop them altogether which may have had some impact.

 

[Hunter S Robbins]

Wow. That's pretty scary.

I had no idea that native ad networks put ads into rotation on a first come, first serve basis. Not knowing any better, I was thinking they are randomly distributed to targets.

Was the problem that you were optimizing for distribution to target by time of day, and when you ran out of deposit you lost your time of day spot?

Was the problem that your ads just never got back into rotation?

Could you share some other things that change how ad networks rank ads in their networks?

I guess the take away is that not only must all the other variables be optimized, to get a winning campaign, the campaign has to be in the proper place in the rotation. I'll have to do more research of native ad rotation algos.

So, is it true that everything could be perfectly optimized but if the campaign is not in the right place in the rotation, it would still come out a loser?

 

[thommy]

I assume that was a CPC network with automatic self bidding and YES that happens and it is a little mess to get back to the old position after a campaign was stopped.

The problem is clear when you look at the circumstances what leads to that:

For a publisher and the ad network, your CPC is not the only criteria of a good position. There is also the click rate
what makes a huge difference if a publisher can make money with it or not.
That´s why there is an algorithm (intended by Google Ad sense) what is called the YIELD FACTOR.

By using this factor an ad with a bid of 5 cents can overbid an ad with 10 cents when the CTR of the 5 cent bid ad is double as high +1 as the one with 10 cents (i.e. 0,2% versus 0,41%)

usually, these networks are running historical CTR data. in our network, for example, it is a mix of last 24 hours, last 72 hours. last 7 day and last 30 days.

as in the start of an ad these historical data are not known, they are replaced with the network average.

to make it more simple, let's say an ad have0,5% CTR and the average of the network have 0,5% last 72 0,75% on last 7 days and 0,5% on last 30 days.

this ad will have after 24 hours this values:
0,5% 0,5% 0,75, 0,5% /4 = 0,5625 YIELD VALUE

(the division at /4 is not correct because every of this values has an individual weight but I do not want to go so far here)

so now let´s say in the next periods within 30 days this ad have the following results

0,5% 0,6, 0,65%, 0,6 /4 = 0,5875 YIELD VALUE

now it can be that these values are good enough to be on top but WHAT MEANS ON TOP ?

Top means that this ad is one of the first shown to a visitor what enters a page.
The first shown ads have also the highest chance on a click and this is why they keep a good position BECAUSE this good position is an additional kick for the CTR.

That leads in many cases to the circumstance that advertisers DROP the bidding price (what can but not MUST be without effect)

In case your campaign stops now, the upper historical data are gone (in parts or all) if you start your campaign in that circumstance again and do NOT INCREASE YOUR BID you will not show up in the same high position - that means that you will LOSE the kick of the first position and your campaign will NOT be able to reach the same historical data as it had before.

So if you want to get this campaign running again, I would recommend you to do the following:

Stop the campaign for a week

Then INCREASE your bidding (even when it is far over your reachable limit) and start it again.

If the network has good information tools you will see your position increasing a bit every day, and if it is a yield based network you will see your CPC dropping automatically.

Try it out and tell me if that worked

 

[Ebisu]

Thank you for your story.

 

[28popugaev]

We are here to share that kind of stories

 

[BoostAff]

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