Bidding To Win Part 3: Crushing The Competition (10)
In this third and final part of my series on bidding for AM, we'll look at the tough side of bidding: competition.
Part 1 of this series dealt with uncovering the bidding landscape for your campaign, and part 2 looked at more specific strategies for particular situations.
In part 3, we'll look at how to deal with the thing that makes your bids so expensive in the first place: competition. Here's how to fake out your competitors, burn down their budgets, and get an unfair advantage.
Let's pwn some n00bs.
High-bid Fakeout
Many traffic sources show the maximum bid for a particular placement or targeting combination.
However, they don't necessarily take account of the budget of those bids. That means that you can scare your competition off without actually having to break your bank balance.
Simply duplicate your campaign, then run one of those duplicates at the lowest possible daily budget, and a bid that you judge to be high enough to scare anyone else off. Anyone who scopes out that placement to consider running a campaign there will see your terrifyingly high bid and scarper.
Obviously this won't work if someone's already running on this spot, but if you've found an obscure "pocket of profit" and want to protect it, this is a pretty good way to go.
Engage The Budget Burners!
Some traffic sources allocate all or nearly all the traffic to the top bidder. At that point, it becomes a vicious knife-fight for the top spot on popular placements.
But there's a hidden weakness in almost everyone's armour. Their daily budget.
On a traffic source where there's an auto-bidder or auction system of some kind in place ( indie traffic source Project Wonderful is a great example of this ), you can burn away over-confident bidders very easily. ( By this I mean some system where an ad buyer sets their maximum price, and the system automatically then offers them any price below that which is availabile. )
Once you determine there's someone bidding more than you want to pay, start slowly raising your bid until you figure out what they've entered as their maximum possible bid. There's a good chance this is a lot higher than they'd prefer to pay.
Now, set your bid to just below that maximum. You'll force them to burn their daily budget as fast as possible. Keep an eye on the placement (either manually or with a bot), and sooner or later you'll see their daily budget exhaust, at which point you've got less competition and can re-price the bid radically cheaper without Captain Deep Pockets in spot #1.
Remember to lower your own maximum bid at that point. You don't want to fall victim to the same trick you just used.
On sources where there's no auction / auto-bidder system, you can still do this, but it's a lot trickier. You'll have to figure out when your opponent is online, then manually bait them into a bidding war. This is usually more hassle, more expense, and more risk of getting emotionally involved than it's worth.
Don't Think In Units Of $0.10
Most people, when bidding, bid round numbers. $0.10, $0.20, $1.20, etc. Sometimes they'll mix it up with a $0.15 or $0.85.
Don't do that.
You can often snatch the top spot - and a whole pile more traffic - just by thinking outside the box. Bid one cent more than the round number - $0.21, $0.81, etc. You'll shoot past everyone bidding in whole numbers for the cost of a single cent.
On sources that don't reveal the bid levels everyone's paying, this can often be an extremely cheap way to snatch the top spot.
Of course, some people already do this. That's why, personally, I tend to bid 2 cents above the round number...
(I look forward to seeing a whole load of $n.n3 bids on traffic sources in the near future.)
Think Outside The Input Box
But what if your traffic source restricts you to 5-cent or 10-cent increments and you can't enter anything else on the box?
Then think outside the box.
(This tip's for techie affiliates.)
If the traffic source is just using a form value as your bid value, try doing a manual GET request to the form action with arbitrary numbers as your bid amount. You may well find that they don't force the bid numbers on the back end - it's just a "convenience" on the front end. And now you've got an advantage no-one else has!
Of course, if your traffic source tells you to stop doing this, do. There's a fine line between a workaround and unauthorised access, and you don't want to be on the wrong side of it.
Don't Get Too Caught Up In Bidding PvP
Finally, remember - while PvP tips can help you get an edge in bidding wars, they're not the reason you're doing this.
It's very easy to get caught up and emotionally invested in a bidding war. That can lose you a lot of time and a lot of money. Either is a bad thing - whether you're spending hours watching your competitors' bidding like a hawk or blowing money to "win", you've lost sight of the objective.
Always ask yourself whether the effort and cost is worth the financial upside. As soon as it's not, stop PvPing with your bids and go do something that's more likely to make you money.
Bonus Tips!
If you want some more awesome tips on surviving in the trenches of a PvP bidding war, Finch wrote a great post on the subject over here. Read, learn, absorb!
And that's it! Do you have any other sneaky bidding tips you'd like to share? Confused by anything I've suggested? Won a bidding war using one of these tricks? Post about it below!
"On sources that don't reveal the bid levels everyone's paying, this can often be an extremely cheap way to snatch the top spot.
Of course, some people already do this. That's why, personally, I tend to bid 2 cents above the round number...
(I look forward to seeing a whole load of $n.n3 bids on traffic sources in the near future.) "
haha i was thinking exactly that!
Great series... Thanks caurmen for sharing
Hi Caurmen, thanks for this amazing guide :-)
Can you elaborate on the following:
"Simply duplicate your campaign, then run one of those duplicates at the lowest possible daily budget, and a bid that you judge to be high enough to scare anyone else off. Anyone who scopes out that placement to consider running a campaign there will see your terrifyingly high bid and scarper.
Obviously this won't work if someone's already running on this spot, but if you've found an obscure "pocket of profit" and want to protect it, this is a pretty good way to go. "
Is this only to scare people to even start the campaign? Or do you also use this to optimize the bidding strategy (finding out the effective bid)?
@whtang - this is just to scare people off 
No where else can you find this info, you guys don't hold anything back. Big thanks!
A friend of mine is a stock broker... On some points this is simular right? Would it be a smart move to include him (he is looking for something else to do)?
@spartanen - I don't know enough about stock trading to comment, I'm afraid. The very, very base principles are similar ("Someone else has a thing; several people including me want to buy it; I want it as cheap as possible") but I believe from discussions with people who know more that the tactics involved diverge pretty rapidly from there.
great guides, just finished reading all 3 of them as I've just started my first campaign and was completely in the dark about what my first bids should be, if I should constantly keep watching them and change them every hours or so ( which I did ) or I should let them like i first picked them and change them once a day.
still have a lot more questions about bidding but now I feel more confident of trying stuff out myself. As for the bidding war, just an idea that popped into my head while I was reading, hasn't anyone though of automating this process, or some people did but are not talking about it, or it's simply forbidden so no one does it?
@massplanner - oh, yeah, automating bidding is definitely a good idea, and lots of people are doing it in various ways. It's not at all trivial, but if you have the skills required or can hire them in it's a very powerful advantage to have.
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