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Help with CTR (6)

12-23-2015 06:27 PM #1 vycmajoris (Member)
Help with CTR

Hi, I've been an AN for about two weeks now. I just went right in and started promoting through paid traffic. I've been using Yahoo Gemini as my traffic source and unbounce as my lander. Now here is my question and I welcome and advice and tips.

1st scenario
Sometimes I will upload my campaigns and get a low .39 % ctr in Gemini but a decent 10% ctr on my lander and a conversion rate of 3.5% (which was yesterday. My only conversion).

2nd scenario
I uploaded more of the same ads today but today I was getting higher ctr of about 2-4% in Gemini and about 5% ctr on my lander with no conversions as of yet.

I saw my ad spend going up really fast without conversions so I decided to pause the campaigns. After 20 minutes I activated them again and now am at the 1st scenario again.

I will like to know we're I'm I messing up? Should I have kept the higher ctrs from Gemini running despite the direction of the cost? Or I'm I doing something with my headlines that I'm not converting as much?

12-24-2015 05:05 AM #2 zeno (Administrator)

I'm a little confused as to what you are asking here.

Banner and lander CTRs will fluctuate with the time of day, day of week, and with the placements that traffic is coming from.

I am not sure how much you are spending but it may be wise to step back a little and focus on some very targeted campaigns with low spend to learn how systems work first, before getting too confused by everything (especially if you have only been learning about AM for 2 weeks).

There are a lot of things to learn in AM when getting started, and a lot of rookie mistakes worth avoiding as they will waste a lot of money.

It may be worth reading the forum a bit more and coming up with a focused strategy about what you are going to promote, where, why you chose that and how you are going to collect data.

12-24-2015 09:36 AM #3 vycmajoris (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by zeno View Post
I'm a little confused as to what you are asking here.

Banner and lander CTRs will fluctuate with the time of day, day of week, and with the placements that traffic is coming from.

I am not sure how much you are spending but it may be wise to step back a little and focus on some very targeted campaigns with low spend to learn how systems work first, before getting too confused by everything (especially if you have only been learning about AM for 2 weeks).

There are a lot of things to learn in AM when getting started, and a lot of rookie mistakes worth avoiding as they will waste a lot of money.

It may be worth reading the forum a bit more and coming up with a focused strategy about what you are going to promote, where, why you chose that and how you are going to collect data.
Do you know of any good threads that focus on the collection of data, what data counts and how to use that data for your campaigns?

12-24-2015 11:52 AM #4 matuloo (Legendary Moderator)

Quote Originally Posted by vycmajoris View Post
Hi, I've been an AN for about two weeks now. I just went right in and started promoting through paid traffic. I've been using Yahoo Gemini as my traffic source and unbounce as my lander. Now here is my question and I welcome and advice and tips.

1st scenario
Sometimes I will upload my campaigns and get a low .39 % ctr in Gemini but a decent 10% ctr on my lander and a conversion rate of 3.5% (which was yesterday. My only conversion).

2nd scenario
I uploaded more of the same ads today but today I was getting higher ctr of about 2-4% in Gemini and about 5% ctr on my lander with no conversions as of yet.

I saw my ad spend going up really fast without conversions so I decided to pause the campaigns. After 20 minutes I activated them again and now am at the 1st scenario again.

I will like to know we're I'm I messing up? Should I have kept the higher ctrs from Gemini running despite the direction of the cost? Or I'm I doing something with my headlines that I'm not converting as much?
So, is it sometimes, or it happened once and gave you one conversion? 1 conversions is literally useless and you cannot base any decision on it.

I assume you are using CPC bidding model, this is pretty commong with that. The algo works like this : it throws some impressions at your creatives, it gets no, or very low clicks, so it gets pushed down and only receives some impressions here and there. The second scenario : the ad gets some impressions and gets some early clicks, from whatever reason, so now it will get pushed more by the algo because it means more money for them since you pay CPC.

Sometimes you simply need to reupload the banner or make a duplicate campaign and it might start working properly, asuming that the creatives have some potential of course.

12-27-2015 02:36 AM #5 vycmajoris (Member)

Ok. I see what you mean. To answer your question, yes this happens all of the time. The traffic and ctr %'s aren't consistent but with your example I can see why they will vary from day to day.

Quote Originally Posted by matuloo View Post
So, is it sometimes, or it happened once and gave you one conversion? 1 conversions is literally useless and you cannot base any decision on it.

I assume you are using CPC bidding model, this is pretty commong with that. The algo works like this : it throws some impressions at your creatives, it gets no, or very low clicks, so it gets pushed down and only receives some impressions here and there. The second scenario : the ad gets some impressions and gets some early clicks, from whatever reason, so now it will get pushed more by the algo because it means more money for them since you pay CPC.

Sometimes you simply need to reupload the banner or make a duplicate campaign and it might start working properly, asuming that the creatives have some potential of course.

01-03-2016 08:54 PM #6 roryltm (AMC Alumnus)

Hey VYC - I've been running a Gemini/Unbounce setup the past month or so and experience the same thing. Are you using Google Analytics to track your lander stats? You can use the Real Time view to see which urls are the top referrers. Any time you start to see memes.com, huff.com, tango.me as all the top referrers, you can be pretty sure you're receiving crap (ie. Yahoo partners) traffic.

I've also found that if I see any individual campaigns start skyrocketing CTRs (like when one camp is 2.15 when everything else is around .40), you should pause that campaign asap. It's a extra work and feels a bit like whack a mole, but if you can keep an eye on things it can really pay off.

So far I've been unable to find any way to blacklist urls or IPs directly within Gemini. A friend was able to get a rep to blacklist certain sites, however the rep could only do it at the individual campaign level... so it's not really a long-term solution. (Often times I launch 50 campaigns a day.)

Are you still running the Gem traffic?

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