Huge Bids numbers (12)
Hi, all,
I just started another Appetizer campaign about 20 hours ago and the data is coming in slowly. Thanks to Mr. Green, Caurmen, Zeno, Dr. Ngo and Last but not least, KoKofai, I am finally putting my acts together and dive right in again.
I picked a GEO that is in the top 10 and doing the usual App/Site/Mobile/Wifi. However, I notice that two of my wins are quite low percentage-wise (< 1%) as the bids are very huge in only 20 hours (i.e. 6.4M and 12.5M). This can only mean MANY people are fighting for the ad space and the winning bid amounts are much higher than mine.
My question is, should I raise the SMART CPM (CPA Goal) in order to grab more impressions at least? Until then.... more simmering...
Thanks.
What's your budget set to? I assume there's >$50 in your account?
If you want more then yeah, bid higher.
Thanks Zeno. Since it's quite a newer global offer, I am setting my testing budget to $100 or more for this offer (but to only one GEO for now) and yes I do have more than $50 in my account. I adjusted the CPM goal to a few bucks more than $8 and I can see the wins (%) became three times more. I will simmer a bit longer yet...
On the other hand, I noticed that one of the Apps of one of the campaigns has had 18.6M bids in two days and I have won NONE at all. I suppose as a newbie I don't need to worry about bidding on specific apps but to focus on Carriers, handsets, placements, OS and banners. Is my head on the right track?
Thanks in advance.
Based on the lack of wins it's likely that it's a highly competitive placement that others are bidding much, much higher on.
What values are you actually bidding now?
The actual CPMs you are paying are very low, so don't be afraid to really push CPM bids a lot. To be even safer, you could duple this campaign and only target those placements you're not winning impressions on and bid manual CPM, slowly raise the bid, and figure out where the price floor is.
Other competitors can't lock you out of the placement if you are willing to bid higher than they are to get data. Such is the nature of auction-based RTB platforms.
Hi, Zeno, when you asked what values I was bidding, were you referring to the CPA Goal/ Daily Limit? For this particular campaign, I had set the CPA Goal to $0.811 and Daily Limit to $12. As suggested, I just duplicated the campaign and only targeted a few high bid placements and now set the manual CPM to $1.1 and Daily Limit to $25.1.
Immediately, my wins SKYROCKETED and now went back down to 88%!! I guess $1.1 was a bit too aggressive, huh! Apparently, I missed your instruction to "slowly raise the bid and figure out where the price floor is", instead, I shot myself through the Ceiling instead! Okay, it looks like I will need to go back and adjust the CPM manual down to something more reasonable...
This is REALLY good learning experience so far! Thank you.
Yeah so look at that CPM - $0.35, vs the CPMs of about $0.05 that you were paying earlier - hence why you were not winning on those placements at all.
With the Smart CPM you'd have to raise your CPA goal a lot to get traffic from those placements and at the mercy of how the algorithm operates.
If people bid on specific placements with high CPM bids as you just did, chances are they can lock out people bidding smart CPM by driving pricing up and outside the limits of what the smart CPM system would venture to.
Very interesting and helpful method to test and gather data and squeeze out the data at will!
But why would those people want to manually bid on these SPECIFIC placements to begin with? I can only conclude that they knew there was GOLD in these certain placements and therefore they went specifically after these. But how did they single these placements out in the first place to know there was gold? I suppose I don't know how their conversion rates are while using THEIR creatives and angles. Do I assume too much if I say I smell something good in these placements merely based on the competitiveness of the bids?
Would you say 19 million bids in two days is a pretty good indicator that these ARE some hot placements? What are the crazy placement daily bid amounts you have seen? I would presume they must be in the top ten Daily Traffic list.
Only a couple of hours after I had duplicated the campaign bidding on four specific placements, my new wins are sitting on the 50%- 55% mark and the CPM is around $0.23. And this is the first time I see my CTR being over 2% across all eight banners (and I thought that's pretty decent).
Unfortunately, the conversions don't seem to roll in just yet from these high-bidding placements... What is the problem? It seems that the users' interests dropped after arriving this particular Google Play App page. Humm..I will just continue to simmer more... Any comment?
What country is this?
One thing I've found with decisive is it seems some countries all seems to work, and others are always a flop.
Russia.
So when I look at the 20M bids, does this include only the Decisive customers or does this include ALL all other traffic sources in the same placements in the same Geo?
I think you're overthinking things a bit.
1. People will manually bid on placements to take as much of the traffic as possible. Why? Because they have run a campaign, they know that it is profitable for them on that placement, so they want as much of the traffic as possible. It's just simple money logic. If something is making you money, you want it to make you more money, so you try to take all of it. This doesn't mean much to you because you're not them, you don't have their campaigns, you don't even know what their campaign is without some diligent spying. All that the competitiveness about a placement tells you is that someone is making something work on it.
2. 19 million bids means nothing. Bids are just impressions. The volume a placement has tells you nothing about how good it is.
3. Just because the placement requires a high bid doesn't mean it will work for your campaign. You just need to test it and treat the results like any other placement, it's just data.
4. The 20 million bids (in the planner?) is just how much Decisive has access to. You may never win them all since multiple platforms will be bidding on the same impressions - you are not just competing with people on Decisive. Decisive plugs into various exchanges, as do many other platforms, so it's a shark-eat-shark arena for impressions.
Thanks Zero. What you said made complete sense. Overthinking seems to be one of my weaknesses. The raw data is just right in front of me and I will continue to learn to interpret and make sense of what I am looking at.
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