Running a offer in native and right now my offer converts around $1.20 EPC.
I have a bunch of widgets that spent about $4 with no clicks to my lander but only about 10 or so clicks on my images.
Would it be wise to block these widgets? The offer pays out about $25 so one side of me feels I should block these since they
got 0 clicks to my lander for $4 way pass my EPC, but the other part of me says leave them cause they didn't spend past the offer payout yet.
Not sure which way to go about optimizing and was looking for feedback.
As a basic rule, you should cut widgets based on the offer payout, not the EPC. With low payout offers, it's good to spend 2-3x the payout, with higher ones it's not recommended to wait that long and you need to focus on other factors to help you make the decision. For example ... the final price of an LP click and a realistic CVR.
For example : You've spent $4 and got 10 clicks but nobody clicked on the LP ... 40cents per click isn't that high, but since you didn't get an LP click yet, the cost of these will be more than $4 per LP click ... is it realistic to convert the offer at let's say 1:5 LP clicks? If not, then it's likely not gonna work with this widget. To put it simple, if a widget sends traffic that's not going through a proven LP, it's possible to cut it quite early.
It's still quite early though, $4 and 10 clicks is hard to use for any proper judgement, unless the funnel you are using is a good performer and other widgets are working well on it.
I'm far from an expert on this yet but thought I'd chime in too... if these widgets are giving you a really low landing page click-through-rate I definitely think that can be a legitimate reason to block them. It depends on what the expected landing page click through rate is and what the traffic is though.
If its some offer on Outbrain and these are super high quality widgets AND a normal landing page click through rate for your funnel would be 10%, then I probably wouldn't cut them very soon at all, and would only take in ROI/revenue into account rather than landing page click through rate.
If on the other hand its MGID or Revcontent, and you're running a short landing page that should get 50% landing page click through rate, then I might cut 0% lp-ctr widgets after as little as 5 or 10 clicks, just because otherwise you can get hit by hundreds of the darn things that collectively add up to a lot of money.
If a widget SHOULD have a 50% lp ctr, the likelihood of it it getting 10 visits and 0 click-throughs is Extremely small statistically.
But if you're expecting a 10% ctr and that's "normal" for the offer, then its totally different.
I absolutely think you need to be mindful of the effective cost per click to the offer (eCPC).
Especially if you're testing a large number of placements and your offer payout is high, using a CPA multiplier as your primary signal on placements quickly becomes very costly and impractical.
As you run more traffic on through that source and to that vertical/offer, your metrics will become more clear and it will be easier to know what to shoot for.
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Sure there will be outliers, like a placement that spends $10 with 0 clicks, only to get a few clicks trickling in maybe hours later, but I find it's better to focus on big picture metrics with native.