Whitelists – Get the MOST of Each Website (7)
Mediabuying is the art of buying advertising from a media company. In my case I buy advertising spaces from different adult adnetworks which among the most important are Exoclick, Adxpansion, Plugrush, Traffic Factory and TrafficHunt. The whitelist topic is part of a very wide subject that is campaign optimizations, it has different approaches for each adnetwork and full of possible variable parameters.These parameters may be correlated and too much modifications at one time may have a negative impact in the campaigns and consequently in profit. So, mediabuying requires a complete and serious statistical study and data analysis. In this document I will just focus in White list campaigns but other subjects will be soon available.
Websites are just one of the possible parameters we may optimize (Carriers, Operating systems, banners among others). Each time we create a RON campaign in a specific segment (Country + Operating system + Operator) we target all the available websites for a given adnetwork.
Some time after the RON campaign creation, which will depend on the segment, we can analyse data and specifically the websites statistics. An example for Plugrush “referals” (websites) may be seen in the figure below. In order to create a white list you should first choose the websites with best performance by looking into volume and eCPM (Revenue by 1000 impressions) or eCPV, in the case of Plugrush, or eCPC in the case of TrafficFactory, etc. The eCPM will give you an idea of the bid you can set for a specific website or websites list.
There are three cases where it will be fructuous to create one:
- If we have a RON campaign with a few well performing websites (high eCPM) we may try to get a higher bid position by creating a new campaign with a higher bid for those websites. As you go for better quality positions your eCPM will naturally increase as well as the volumes. You may choose a safer strategy bidding slightly below the eCPM value you computed or a more aggressive strategy by increasing the bid above the eCPM with the objective of securing the first place in a campaign and with this getting a profitable eCPM. Furthermore, as you are selecting the best website/s, you can select a wider targeting, by including targets which had been excluded from the original campaign. If they didn’t work with all the websites together, they can be profitable for the best ones only. For a list of websites with good performance you may leave running or stop the websites in the RON campaign. It is more interesting to leave it because then you may compare statistics and analyse the performances in both campaigns. Probably you will be also earning money in both campaigns. When it comes to adnetworks with SmartBid and if you keep the website in both campaigns (RON and whitelist), you can clearly see if you are in competition with yourself if the average cost of the WL is slightly above the bid you set for the RON.
- If we have one or few websites with plenty of traffic and high conversion rate but with negative margin in a RON campaign we may create a white list targeting those websites and with a lower bid. The bid should be always lower than the eCPM value and higher than the minimum bid in order to run away from a position shared by almost all mediabuyers. Logically, your eCPM will decrease. And don’t forget to blacklist those websites on the RON campaign.
- There is one last purpose for creating white list campaigns: for websites with huge volumes, it will be more profitable to create banners adapted for the specific website. You just need to be sure that the adnetwork allows those misleading banners (Mindgeek websites and TrafficFactory don’t allow for example).
After selecting the websites you think are worthwhile of creating a white list you may target those in a new campaign. Do not forget that you should only use the websites list for the particular adnetwork you are analysing. In the figure below, I show an example using Adxpansion.
Those two last figures represent respectively a Ron campaign and a White List campaign created based on the RON campaign statistics. There is a particular website which makes clear the importance of white lists. The website videospornogratis.name was performing well (eCPM: 50.3€). Naturally it was one of the websites chosen to be in the white list created and presented in figure 4. We may see that for the white list this site is performing very well, with more volumes and higher costs but also with a positive daily margin. On this specific website, what happened was: on the RON campaign, the ROI was high but the costs low. On the WL we made the opposite, we decreased the ROI but the margin increased a lot since we invested more.
Another strategy is to use buckets. Buckets method consists in creating more than one white list along with a RON campaign with different bids, same targeting and change the websites from one campaign to another when the eCPM value requires it. The only difference between the buckets is the bid. A flowchart may be seen in flowchart 1.
I hope these considerations can help you to build a solid margin to your campaigns. Good luck!!!
This post is gold! Detailed enough for a newbie to follow but general enough to be applicable to most traffic sources. Thanks very much for posting! 
Amy
@vortex
Thank you very much 
Stay tuned for more articles like this one!
Great post, thanks for sharing!
Very solid write up there
No one has ever done a detailed cover on whitelisting - and I also notice that a lot of people have overlooked this topic. In fact, whitelisting is proven and yet powerful.
I currently have a target which I am spending $40 everyday and it gives me $500 in revenue. Unfortunately due to some issues I am not able to get more volume from it. Anyway just to share the power of doing WL campaign.
Keep the knowledge bomb coming!
Hi
Thank you very much for this post.
I have a RON campaign in zeropark that gets 4-6 conversion/day with a 25$ payout. As suggested in this forum after 1 week running this campaign i got the high epv targets (around 40 site id-s) and created a new targeted whitelist campaign and blocked them from control ron campaign. I left yesterday both campaigns running, the targeted campaign and control campaign. I got only 1 conversion in the end of the day and the conversion came from the Ron campaign. The whitelist targeted campaign 0 conversions.
Which can be the problem?
Thank You
Originally Posted by pronewbie
It's actually complicated to tell you specifically what is the issue without making the analysis of both campaigns and without seeing the parameters. You can PM me in order to discuss the details, it will be easier to be able to give you a proper help.
Thank you!
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