I don't know how long this will be... but I'll try to update it pretty frequently as we continue.
I'm not going to get into the niche, offers, or networks... but I'm going to share some tips that helped me get m3 of my current campaigns from negative - to breakeven - to today my best campaign was $200 positive.
Before I do - I want to mention I was also $20 negative on an insurance offer today... spending $20... a complete loss but I'll come back to that some day.
OK - so here goes...
I started the campaign with a pretty broad reach. I set up 3 campaigns to start with a $20 budget on each per day. Beforeeven thinking about starting a campaign... get your OWN banners made up. I'm sure this is out there elsewhere on this forum... but it's worth repeating. I started with 5 banners. For this particular niche I started with 728x90s and 300x250s as those are obviously two of the most widely used sizes. I don't bother starting a campaign with 468x90's/ 125x125 cause they tend to get mixed in with the "noise" of the website because they are too small.
The three campaigns I set up are:
Contextual - Where I could target certain networks and then target based on the type of site or category. This is a cheaper way to target, as SiteScout is expensive enough as it is right? For instance - if you are targeting an insurance offer, it doesn't always make sense to pay the .75 CPM fee just for the ability to target specific car owners. That's a lot of money to pay just for that information when most people own cars... we don't need to know what type they own to make money from them.
I started the CPM on this around .4CPM because we are still already going to get a TON of traffic at that rate. You can learn a lot from "win rate" but a 100% Win Rate isn't always what you want. This campaign is currently at a 40% win rate and I'm getting plenty of traffic from sites I "assume" are going to be pretty good for this niche. You get a lot of fraud but you just remove them and add them to a blacklist. I'm promoting a lead offer with all of my campaigns so I can push tracking information all the way through the funnel... hello tracking macros! If you are using SS and you aren't using Tracking Macros... you are setting up to fail. Most affiliate platforms have subid tracking... set this up and track the banner and the SiteURL. This will tell you what sites are sending you REAL traffic! From here we continue to refine our Whitelist, and find sites that we can keep using in other campaigns.
I also set up 3 Impressions per 12 hours PER CAMPAIGN. Meaning, It will only show 3 impressions to the same person per site visit. This way if someone is going deep into a site and not clicking my banner, I don't continue to show it to them a banner they aren't going to click.
Boom! I'm $12 negative on THIS particular campaign, but pulling it in after I got hit in the face with a TON of fraud. This will be a campaign that makes me $100/ day within the week.
Time to get new banners, and start split testing some new blood.
General - This is a campaign that gets a LOT of traffic. And about 1 fraud click for every real click. It's tough to navigate, but also my most positive campaign today. Again I am promoting a lead offer, and I'm SMOKIN' IT! It's showing 1300 clicks - but the affiliate platform I am promoting only shows around 600. So it's been a tough day of eliminating fraud sites and bots... but it's coming together nicely. Getting a REALLY nice list together of some good sites that have ZERO fraud and a lot of good clicks/ leads. Weird sites too which I love. Like sites I would have NEVER guessed would be good for this niche.
This campaign is limited to 2 impressions per 12 hours per campaign because this is pretty non specific traffic, so at first I want to limit my spending however I can. Still the same amount of banners as above and I make changes to my domains list as I find them from the other site. I am targeting only premium placement because this is cheap traffic anyways... so i'm going after the best placement. After a littles testing I saw only ATF 300x250s were really profitable... so I only bid there.
All of my campaigns are set to optimize... I mean, why wouldn't you right? I also set this campaign up to spend my budget evenly throughout the day. I don't know if this stops fraud, but it definitely HELPED cause no one could unload 500 clicks on me in 1 second. I am not doing any day parting because I don't need to. This niche is good at all hours.
My banners are pretty specific, but my CTR is still strong. Once I see impressions coming in I eliminate sites if they are getting a lot of impressions and no clicks... too many clicks... or it's a really odd or strange looking CTR. If you are getting 1% (yes, 1%... not .10) it's likely fraud unless it's a REALLY targeted site.
This campaign is Positive $200 today on $100 spend... it's a smokeshow!
Retargeting - First let me say... screw SiteScout for being one of the few DSP's that doesn't offer a "look-a-like audience" tool. Ok... vent over.
I have around 250,000 people in a retargeting pool I've collected from multiple sites in this niche. If you are pushing traffic through a bridge/ squeeze page... START RETARGETING! This traffic is dope! Worth 2-5x what my best contextual click is worth easily... but I'm not paying much more honestly.
Super qualified, very responsive... just straight sexy looking traffic. It's a good feeling being literally BEGGED for more traffic from one of your subids.
Not going to go too much into retargeting other than to say Don't place too much emphasis on win rate vs. CPM. I started at $3.00CPM and saw a 98% WinRate... instantly I started moving it down... I'm down to $1.50 now and still winning 95%... so I'm not losing much audience, but saving a TON of coin... still working it on its way down, but it's not much traffic as it is... so seeing how it turns out.
Hope this helps someone out there... I'll be back with more later. Happy bidding!
Whats up travizia thanks for the post this was indeed helpful in many ways to me. Can I ask you couple questions?
Definitely - ask away.
Nice write up! I have been thinking about doing some Site Scout advertising, if only find good sites to do DSBs with. What do you mean by "win rate"? Are you talking about conversion rate or what?
Nice write up, when I started I tried Sitescout and of course failed and moved away, will be nice to come back today with more experience to the platform.
What kind of Verticals do you have success with on Sitescout if you care to say? Was it mobile or Desktop traffic?
Good luck, hope to hear more of your success stories.
I could never really get campaigns scaled on SS. Lots of traffic if you have the right offers.
Sorry for my delay - been traveling... I'll answer these now
@simcity - Win Rate describes the percentage of people in your audience you are winning with your current bid. So if you are winning 90% or above your bid is high enough to win 90% of your bids.
@omrikos - you can be successful with any vertical I think. If you take a different, less easy, approach to buying media from them. For instance... put together a list of 100-200 sites that you KNOW are specific to whatever niche you want to promote... then use that as a whitelist in SS... then you can know that your audience is relevant.
what % of your landing pages were yours vs. the offers? ive always wondered if i should start direct linking or with my own pages becuse it would be nice to retarget.