Ask Me Anything Voluum DSP - All You Need to Know & Ask Us Anything

Hey Guys,

We’re starting a new thread about Voluum DSP where we will be sharing a lot of tips on running and optimizing native campaigns, insights on top performing verticals, auto-optimization and much more. It’s also the right place to ask questions – ask us anything – we are here for you.

Today we’re highlighting the key aspects of creating a new DSP campaign. We don’t want to bore you with step-by-step instructions that you can find in our Documentation – we will only focus on the essentials.

Before you open any campaign, always go to the DSP tab and check how much traffic is available. We want to be transparent with you so we give you an insight into all our available inventory.



To see the available volumes you can filter the traffic by the following conditions:




Now that you’ve checked the precious Planning Tool you will need to fill in 4 sections when creating a new campaign.

Basic
As the names indicates there is nothing difficult in this tab for a PRO user like you. All we want to point out is that in Advertiser domain section you should put a domain of the owner of the advertised offer, not your landing page domain. This is super important for premium Ad Exchanges – if your adomain is invalid, the campaign will be rejected.
The good news for Voluum TRK users is that they can use their existing flows from previous landing pages and offers. They just need to select them from the drop down list when setting up.



Targeting
Voluum provides you with a wide variety of targeting options which cannot be found elsewhere i.e city, state, region, operating system and carriers.
Important thing to mention here is that we recently added a toggle that enables you to split your campaign by Ad Exchange and Device Type - one click, multiple campaigns ready to test!
Our Dedicated Account Managers will always recommend that you run campaigns separately per Ad Exchange and per Device as it makes optimization easier. With auto-rules the optimization gets not only easier but also faster! We’ll tell you more about auto-optimization in our next post.



Budget
Distribute your budget wisely – use daily limits per placement and control your spend.
Not sure what to bid?
No need to go back to the Planning Tool to check on bid floors and eCPM – just check the Bid Reach section to get to know the recommended bid value for 4 segments of traffic.



Creatives
This is where the magic happens. Bulk upload your creatives and type in multiple headlines. The system will create different creative sets for you with just a few clicks.

Note: Each Ad Exchange has its own requirements for creative size and headline. Hover your mouse over the blue “info” icon to see the creative requirements per specific Ad Exchange, to make sure your main image is not too small or your headline is not too long.



That’s it. Click SAVE and wait till our in-house Campaign Approval team check your campaign(s). This normally takes less than 12 hours.



Stay tuned for the next post on the Best Practices of opening and optimizing campaigns. On top of that our resident Mastermind and Head of Compliance will soon share with you a great article on how you can benefit from auto-optimization. STAY TUNED!


To sum up:
1. Transparency - you can see the whole inventory and the site names before you open a campaign
2. Quick campaign creation (4 steps)
3. Full control over the budget
4. Precise targeting (state, region, city, carriers)
4. Creatives Bulk upload (several ad sets in 5 seconds)
5. Quickest campaign approval (max 12h)

Any questions? Post them here! We are happy to help you.

 

First of all, it’s open RTB which by definition is CPM – Publishers place their inventory at the specific minimum CPM price and it’s the way to go for Advertisers looking for the most cost-effective way to buy it with access to the largest audience.

We buy on CPM model so Networks can sell inventory with less loss to us rather than selling at CPC and not monetize at the impression level. For them, it's a good deal because we can take the fall for paying without performance. This is why our Account Managers focus on helping advertisers achieve optimal CTR so that they can translate CPM bids + high CTR to cheaper CPC than they would get by buying direct.

Just to shed more light on CPM. For many Advertisers, CPM is much better for testing purposes if run a lot of ads - especially if you are not interested in as many clicks as possible, but in the most converting ones.

In Voluum DSP, we focus on how your campaigns perform and are optimized more than CPC networks might because we focus on the end to end campaign performance at the impression level. Because if you can't make CPM work better or at least to the same standard as CPC, we're buying the wrong traffic for our Advertisers and that's not a scale-able business model. Just like our Advertisers, we optimize how we buy traffic. We keep tabs on the inventory we're buying by helping Advertisers optimize their campaigns and filtering for the right traffic based on global performance.

 

We are integrated with +20 native Ad Exchanges (Polymorph, My6Sense, LiveIntent, MGID, RevContent just to name a few) and you have full visibility into all of the placements (sites, apps and widgets). If you want to give it a try just register using this link and one of our Dedicated Account Managers will reach out to you after you sign up with a Getting Started Guide and more insights about the top performing inventory per GEO and vertical. Oh and obviously - you can track all of your DSP campaigns in VLM Tracker for free.

 

I'm actually really glad you asked this question, so no worries That was the idea behind the post - Ask Us Anything!

You don't need individual accounts on any networks, you just need one VLM DSP account to run on Polymorph, My6Sense, LiveIntent, MGID, RevContent, and more. We also have our in-house Approval Team checking the campaigns and making sure we are compliant with Networks' policies so it's much faster to get your campaigns approved than when buying directly from the networks.

If you already have a Voluum account, I can give you access to DSP with just 1 click Let me know & thx!

 

As we mentioned in our previous post, we’re here to provide you with as much knowledge about Voluum DSP as possible.

Today we’re posting some insights on top performing Ad Exchanges, verticals and GEOs. You can expect these insights on a regular basis!

How did we get get this information? We took internal data from the last 7 days and identified the crazy performing segments of traffic. This is a good starting point for those of you looking to understand what's trending now.

This week’s TOP Ad Exchanges:
Powerinbox
My6Sense
Outbrain
LiveIntent
Polymorph

This week’s winning GEOs:
RU
US
IT
UK
FR

This week’s top-performing verticals:
Crypto
E-commerce
Gambling
Nutra
Gaming

Tomorrow we plan to shed more light on our Auto-Optimization – our advertisers’ absolute FAVORITE feature – and we’ll add a great case study to boot, so stay tuned!

 

Hey guys,

We'd love to help you to get your highest ROI by running on autopilot AKA Auto-Optimization feature in Voluum DSP. In today's post we're explaining what exactly Auto-Optimization is, how the algorithm works and why it's so awesome. The next post will be a real life case study, so stay tuned!

Anyone of you already using it? Share some feedback with us! Just leave your comments here.
Anyone has any questions? PM me or connect on Skype with our Account Managers: live:johnsmithkrakow

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Tired of searching for profitable traffic sources? Pausing placements and adjusting bids taking too long? Thanks to years of development (and bunch of smartass data scientists) we’ve solved all your problems at once, by creating our Auto-Optimization feature. It’s a free to use, built-in feature for Native ads optimization in the Voluum DSP platform.

Voluum DSP is a high-performance platform oriented towards getting your native campaigns the best payouts. Thanks to exclusive traffic from Revcontent, MGID, Outbrain, Polymorph, and Liveintent among many others you can easily run campaigns on multiple Ad Networks at the same time. Moreover, we offer a huge variety of optimization features, giving you – the user – complete control over your spending strategy with full transparency in where your traffic is coming from. Additionally, we focus on satisfying performance-oriented advertisers, where we know, each conversion counts. Therefore not only can you fully adjust your campaign targeting to your specific needs, but you can also support your campaigns with our Auto-Optimization machine learning algorithm which optimizes campaigns for you.


So what exactly is Auto-Optimization and why is it so awesome?

The usual journey of any media buyer is a cycle of running a campaign, making mistakes, learning from said mistakes, adjusting targeting options and repeating. This cycle can equate to thousands of dollars spent just to “probe” the traffic and collect whitelists.



The ultimate weakness of this cycle is how much time we waste on the testing process. Each action is supported by hours of checking reports and analyzing which traffic segments bring the best results.

This step by step optimization revolves around analyzing traffic segments which are responsible for campaign performance. An example of traffic segments for a campaign is for example “sites” as displayed below:



In the above diagram, we see a simplified form of the optimization process where the advertiser will pause Site X and Site Z for not delivering optimal results.
In the below diagram, however, we can see extended granularity by adding “Browser” type to each “site”. Instead of pausing all traffic from Site X, the advertiser can pause only the underperforming “Browsers” from Site X and keep “Browser A” which is profitable.

As per example above, we can see that in fact, even though Site X didn’t look profitable at first, it was profitable under a specific browser (combination Site X – Browser A). So, is Site Z in fact not profitable? To check that let’s add once another dimension – device. As you can see in the below diagram, with the additional “Device” dimension, certain traffic from Site Z can be profitable.



In conclusion, pausing Site X and Site Z would have been harmful for the campaign’s performance because there are in fact profitable segments when we go deeper.

What does that mean for you? Our Auto-Optimization feature will identify these granular segments responsible for delivering results.



That means our machine-learning model will decide to bid more on specific traffic segments for you (like Site Y – Browser E – Device A), and will drop bids once it’s certain that specific combinations don’t deliver good results (for example - Site X, Browser B – Device B). As per this example you see only 3 levels of granularity, but our Auto-Optimization feature works on almost 20 dimensions!


Examples of traffic dimensions our machine learning algorithm uses:

Bundle/Site
Widget ID
AdExchange ID
ISP
Connection type
Region
City
Device Model
OS version
Browser version
Browser language
Hour
Country
Creative ID

Also, our algorithm is able to differentiate between traffic responsible for “visits”, “clicks”, or “conversions” so you can set the Auto Optimization feature to favor certain types of user action. If you still want to manually optimize campaigns, our Auto-Optimization feature can work in the background as you pause/adjust your bids.


So, how do we start using Auto Optimization?

Auto-optimization is enabled for all Voluum DSP users without any additional fees. You can select it in the targeting section of the campaign’s settings.



As you can see, this feature can optimize your campaign towards specific performance metrics – iCTR, CPV, CPC and CPA (for CPA optimization – please contact you Account Manager at Voluum DSP).
The only thing you need to specify is the optimal value for your selected metric goal. You can check out a more detailed guide on how to set this up.


It’s always learning, and the more data it will eat, the smarter it gets.

Unfortunately, we are not fortune tellers (not yet). That means to make auto-optimization work, your campaign will need to gather minimum events needed to identify profitable segments of traffic. The first version of the optimization algorithm for your campaign is created after 100 successful events (visits for CPV and iCTR, clicks for CPC and conversions for CPA optimization). Once your campaign reaches the minimum events, your campaign’s Auto-Optimization algorithm will be initialized with your specified goal. Your campaign will take its first optimization steps, but with each added impression – our optimization algorithm will get smarter and make better and more granular campaign adjustments.
Below, you can see a timeline of this process:



Day 2 – 100 events reached, first version of the algorithm appears

Day 2-8 – campaign collects more and more events with different parameters, effectively increasing algorithm accuracy

Day 8 onwards – Auto-Optimization is on full-steam, buying 80% of its inventory from the best-performing dimensions according to the algorithm

Why will only 80% of the traffic be bought accordingly to the optimization algorithm? This is strictly because we know that traffic streams can surprise any buyer, disappearing placements, spikes of traffic can affect your ROI. Therefore the campaign will always buy 20% of its traffic from not verified traffic streams to possibly enrich it’s dataset and learn even more. It’s always learning, and the more data it will eat, the smarter it gets.



So, in the end, what we did was take the classic optimization process of any old media buyer and set it on hyperdrive by adding a few dozen layers of granularity and dimensions to the traffic we optimize.

If you’ve got DSP campaigns running now without Auto-Optimization, stop what you’re doing, log in to your account and turn it on for your campaigns ASAP! Then, take a seat, grab yourself a beer and let our algorithms do your optimization work for you.

Not a Voluum DSP user? Please find more details here.

Finally, we will do our best to share more insights about setting up an optimal goal and real life case studies in the near future.

Stay tuned!

Thanks!
Justyna