Home > Paid Traffic Sources > Native

---

RevContent Topic Targeting (11)

---

Hi guys!

Every time I ask my RC rep which topic to select for a particular offer I got the same answer: Editorial News and Conservative News.

How do you use topic targeting? Does it make sense when testing a new offer to match offer niche and topic?

Thanks!

Cheers,
wakeboarder

---

Yes, matching offer niche and topic allows you to get better ROI. But after that you should expand into more topics to get volume.

---

If I understand you right, you start testing with smaller and more relevant topic and when you have a winning combo you expand to bigger and less relevant topic (eg. Conservative news)

How do you choose the initial bid for a particular topic when testing a new offer?

There is Bid Range column in RC dashboard which represents min-max bid. Do you orient based on this or something else?

Thanks!

---

Based on my experience, topics are a bit irrelevant in your targeting for the long run..

For example, we had good success running financial offers on health and beauty topics despite our rep insisting it would work best on business wealth and money topics.
Each topic has a pool of high and low quality widgets, and in my opinion the widgets are all that matters..

Just as @momopotato said, it makes sense to initially focus on the topic which seems most relevant to the type of vertical you're running, especially if you're on budget, but you shouldn't limit yourself to it in the long run, and testing other topics could potentially work out well for you.

And the bid range represents the average of network total, regardless of device/goe targeting.
e.g - it will show you the same bid range if you're running India mobile or US desktop (trying to make an extreme example)... So I wouldn't pay to much attention to it

---

Use your offer payout, average CTR average CR to gauge your bid. This will be based on your personal experience so you'll have to run some test traffic, filter out the bot placements and get some initial CTR/CR numbers and set an initial bid, higher if you're aggressive, lower if you're not. For native, ROI usually will not be high, dont try to aim for 100%. On average you should probably aim to get 20-30% ROI from your bid.

---

I do it the same way and it does seem like the widgets are better for optimizing. I rarely ever cut topics unless the topic itself blows a lot of $$ with absolutely no conversions.

Only reason I can think of starting with 1 or 2 topics is if you're running US. With a massive population that kinda makes sense... but if you're running Colombia or Belgium or Netherlands why not target everything?

---

Yes please note what i mentioned was only related to US. As other geos have so little traffic compared to the US, it makes sense to target everything at 1 go.

---

I've added GA code on my pre-lander and after first $100 spent the average session duration is 5 sec and bource rate is 93%.



I'm targeting Canada/editorial_news with average bid $0.45 and I'm blacklisting widgets with super high/low CTR.

This looks to me really a crap traffic. Is this normal situation and I just need to spend a few hundred bucks or am I missing something here?

---

If you run in the US In my experience on Revcontent, Conservative News and Editorial News are the only ones worth running because of quality+volume. Other topics are full of shitty sites and lots of bot traffic. I'd move to other things outside Conservative and Editorial only when you have everything fully optimized.

---

A good amount of that is probably bot traffic, which you are most likely not paying for in a tier1 geo. If you want to cut widgets based on CTR you should use an API tool to get the real cost spent per widget, and try to take steps to stop bots clicking links on your page by using javascript links for starters. Eg only show correct link when user scrolls on page.

Regarding bids, bid high to start at minimum daily spend, then slowly lower over time (few hours, or next day depending on your budget).

Topics are so-so depending on offer as others have mentioned. Regardless of what you do on Revcontent it's good to start with a small subset and get your ads, lander, and offer dialed in before scaling to save yourself from going too deep in the red to start.

---

One of the reasons to run on Conservative News is because conservatives sites are full of buyers. Way back in 2004 to 2008 I ran a lot of banners on NewsMax (then they changed all the ad units that worked so I bailed) and the traffic was great-- still see a conversion from some of them on occasion. If you go through the ads on the top trafficked conservative sites, especially the more intense ones, you will see a lot of direct response ads that go to direct response ad copy/video sales letters/etc. and run for a long time.

One of the best things I learned from my direct mail and magazine advertising days was that you had to target BUYERS. No way any direct marketer would run in Time Magazine back then, but Black Belt Magazine was great-- it was full of ugly, direct response ads that ran over and over, meaning the publication was full of buyers. Interestingly, Reason Magazine, an odd libertarian/far right publication was the magazine to test ads in before you went to bigger publications-- if it didn't work in Reason, it didn't work anywhere. An audience of BUYERS is far more important than topic, and you can write ads, landing pages, etc. that "call out" to your prospects.

---

Home > Paid Traffic Sources > Native