So the other day I was in London at the LAC and bumped into an old affiliate manager friend who now works for a new tracking company.
He claims they have been working on a new tracking solution which provides actual widget spend from Revcontent and also let's you quickly upload multiple creatives - combining in bulk images and headlines much in the same way as Brax.io.
Currently widget spend information is only available when you take advantage of some select API - which is all fine and dandy if you're a developer or have access to one, but for everyone else the only current option is a bit of guess work!
For instance, if you spent $1000 with Revcontent, you would update your stats manually and enter in your costs - this cost is split equally over all of the publisher widgets - of course this ins't entirely accurate!
You never bid the same amount on each widget, as it's a real-time-bidding auction after all, and Revcontent only allows you to set a maximum CPC usually on a TOPIC basis, not per widget.
So, imagine this for sake of argument - your $1000 was spent targeting 10 widgets, each had 100 visits -
So -
widget 1 = $10 spend ($1 CPC)
widget 2 = $10 spend ($1 CPC)
widget 3 = $10 spend ($1 CPC)
widget 4,5,6,7,8,9,10 ... well you get the idea!
However, the true cost might have been -
widget 1 = $5 spend (0.50 CPC)
widget 2 = $2 spend (0.20 CPC)
widget 3 = $10 spend ($1 CPC)
You can quickly see why it's so important to get the true cost, you might be blocking things which are actually costing very little and could be profitable for you campaign.
So...
I've not had chance to personally test this as I'm mid-launch with one big project, but I will be porting all of my campaigns over soon. I've had a live demo at the London Affiliate Conference and can say this thing is the real deal.
The key benefits of this software are -
That makes sense. Right now I run into that problem. 200 widgetids, and overall cpc says .14, however on select widgetids you could be paying .06 only and be profitable, yet you might pause it b/c the overall spend of all widgets combined says .14. This then leads to pulling out widgets individually so you can see the spend - tons of manual work. A solution to that would be awesome.
Yup, this is indeed a problem that makes optimization complicated. Whenever I'm using a source like this, I simply have to pull reports based on placements or widgets and compare it with reports from whatever tracker Im using. My coder made me a handy excel table for this, so I basically just copy&paste the data ... but it's still an annoyance. It would be cool to be able to get real spend per placement/widget from sources indeed.
Hey guys, we just launched Drive for STM users that does many of the functionalities you guys discussed in this post and already has auto-blocking of widgets based on custom rules. Check it out here, we have a special offer going on.
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...imited-access)