RevContent - Strange Behaviour (7)

Hi guys!

I have a situation with RC that I can't explain to myself.

Below you can see the daily statistic for my whitelist campaign. There are 7 widgets with 5c CPC bid for FR Push traffic at $100 daily budget.

Today CTR increased drastically and 90% of the budget spent one widget.

What's interesting is that widget did convert well in the past. Also today I got one conversion but still it looks suspicious such a high CTR.

I've noticed that also vCPM increased from avg. $0.18 to $0.64 today which is more than 250% increase.

Any idea what's the catch here?

Thanks!

Cheers,
wakeboarder

Could be several reasons ...

1. a competitor dropped out, so more volume is available to you ... and since you are now higher in the chain, the CTR is higher so your ads get more exposure.
2. could be simply caused by their algo, it tested your ads more, they turned out to get higher CTR, so it's pushing you more now.

The above reason depends on how their algo works, I have no idea how it's coded, so I might be completely wrong. But usually, CPC algos work like this, they give certain amount of impressions to each ad, then sort them based on CTR and push those that have the highest one, since they make more money that way. Some algos do an initial test, some will repeat it again after a while ... so really depends on the particular network.

3. the site where the widget is placed started to buy cheap and low quality traffic to inflate their numbers
4. the widget could have been moved to another spot on the site

Could be also a combination ... webmaster started to buy feeder traffic, quality went down, the highest bidders blocked the widget based on that, thus you get the volume now.

5. BOT traffic ... could be intentional fraud attempt or not ... hard to say.

One way or another, you should pause it, wait a few days and restart it again to see if the situation changed, cause it's also possible it was caused by some bug in the system on revcontent's side.

Just for clarification, did you buy Native or Push traffic there?
Because you wrote from widgets but you also wrote that you bought FR Push traffic.

twinaxe I'm buying push traffic there. Targeting all topics with pushnotification prefix.

Originally Posted by matuloo

Could be several reasons ...

1. a competitor dropped out, so more volume is available to you ... and since you are now higher in the chain, the CTR is higher so your ads get more exposure.
2. could be simply caused by their algo, it tested your ads more, they turned out to get higher CTR, so it's pushing you more now.

The above reason depends on how their algo works, I have no idea how it's coded, so I might be completely wrong. But usually, CPC algos work like this, they give certain amount of impressions to each ad, then sort them based on CTR and push those that have the highest one, since they make more money that way. Some algos do an initial test, some will repeat it again after a while ... so really depends on the particular network.

3. the site where the widget is placed started to buy cheap and low quality traffic to inflate their numbers
4. the widget could have been moved to another spot on the site

Could be also a combination ... webmaster started to buy feeder traffic, quality went down, the highest bidders blocked the widget based on that, thus you get the volume now.

5. BOT traffic ... could be intentional fraud attempt or not ... hard to say.

One way or another, you should pause it, wait a few days and restart it again to see if the situation changed, cause it's also possible it was caused by some bug in the system on revcontent's side.

Originally Posted by wakeboarder

Thanks for detailed explanation.

Like you suggested I've paused this widget for now and will wait a few days, turn it on again and monitor closely if I can spot the same performance.

I've noticed a few times already this sudden increase in CTR but never actually do any research because spend was low. Now when I know this stuff, I will definitely be more careful when I see similar patter.

I've tested a great deal of push on multiple networks including revcontent a couple of months ago, and this is what I've learned:

Push traffic can be extremely volatile as you are targeting databases, which may from time to time change.
I can add many other possible reasons on why this might have happened on top of the possible reasons already mentioned, but at the end of the day I am very certain that you will find this happening quite often with push traffic (Not necessarily this specific case, but in general drastic and sudden changes in widget performance).

If you are going for push traffic, my advice is to set block rules that consider data from very short time frames so that you can block profitable widgets which are declining in performance before they become retroactively unprofitable.

Another tip with push is to consistently refresh flows, because you might end up displaying the same flows to the same users over and over again.