I'm realizing that as I am split testing, I am actually competing against myself. Is this inevitable when split testing on the same traffic source? By changing only 1 variable such as banner image, from campaign 1 to campaign 2, I am now competing against myself. Do any of you guys avoid this buy testing one, then taking it down, then testing another? That would just take ages it seems...
Example:
Campaign 1: banner 1, US, TJ, NTV A
Campaign 2: banner 2, US, TJ, NTV A
variable changed was banner image, all other variables remain constant, but now I am my own competition, making the CPM bid even higher for myself, therefor skewing the results of the split test!
why are the 2 banners in separate campaigns?
There is going to be a chance of self-competition on every traffic source when running multiple campaigns. Sometimes even ads within the same campaign will 'compete'.
However, competing by being shown at the same time isn't necessarily a bad thing.
In that one moment when a user looks at adverts and thinks about clicking, you now have multiple chances of convincing them to click.
On the other hand, on most high volume traffic sources your chances of self-competing are low unless you are dominating all the traffic.
Why don't you just add banners to a single campaign as in the getting started guide that caurmen has written?
http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...TION-AND-INDEX
@craigm and @kamaleon, I am using separate campaigns for each banner because I am using Exoclick, and I have read multiple times on this forum and experienced as well, that it is not in your favor to have multiple banners in the same campaign specifically on Exoclick. Another reason is because I do not know how their rotation algorithm works, I would want to know precisely how it's choosing which banner to rotate.. how often each banner will be rotated? is it evenly rotated? is it based on user reaction or click-to-impression ratio? etc, etc.
By using separate campaigns, I have eliminated this unknown variable from the equation.
For example, say I have 1 campaign with 10 images, I will get a TOTAL impression count. So how would I know the impression count of each banner? I might make a poor decision based on not knowing the impression-to-CVR rate per banner. Traffic source impressions are obviously not a statistic I can see in my tracking software, so AFAIK, there is no other way I can think of doing this. Please do share any insights/knowledge you may have! I am well aware that I may be doing this completely wrong as I am very new to this, it just seems logical to me.
I would love to hear the perspective of a well-rounded Exoclick advertiser who knows more about this!
@zeno,
We can conjecture how it might go either way... i.e. a positive impact or negative. However, as I said it's probably a negligible worry until running high volume relative to the placement(s).
The Exo rotation algorithm you are talking about only has effects when you run CPC because they optimize impressions in order to get the highest eCPM.
If you run CPM, you should get a pretty even traffic distribution, so no reason to micro manage banners in separate campaigns.