Outbrain scaling question (5)
Hi guys,
I don't have too much experience with Outbrain so far so I'm asking for your opinions, recommendations. I recently created an Ecom campaign on Outbrain with the following targeting & settings:
- Country: US
- Device: Smartphones
- Browsers: All
- Blacklist: none
- CPC: $0.35
- Daily budget: $200
- Offer: a proven one, ran by many people on TOP placements.
- LP: a proven LP + some variations made by the team.
- Creatives: 9 proven HL + img combos (seen on the first impression on VPN / top of spy tool)
The goal: create a profitable campaign in the long run and build a blacklist that I can use later on.
1st day: At first, my budget maxed out almost straight away - after like 60 minutes - which was expected. I got lots of clicks on a few placements that didn't make any sale and the LP CTR was really low - somewhere around 0-3% CTR even after 100 clicks. So I stopped those placements. In the meantime, I've got 3 sales in which was a lot less than I spent (spent $240).
ROI was around -40%.
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2nd day: Next day I maxed out my budget after like 60 minutes again. Only made 1 sale and blocked a few placements that had 0 sales or had 1 sale but spent like 3x-4x the payout + have a very low CTR like under 3-4%. So spent $220 again.
ROI was around: -80%.
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In the meantime, I'd like to mention that my overall campaign CTR was around 0.12%. I have also started to slowly reduce the CPC by $0.02 so at the end of day 2, before day 3, I had $0.31 CPC.
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3rd day: Maxed out budget very quickly again and blocked placements that did not meet my above rules. Spent $210. Made 2 sales.
ROI was around: -60%.
This was the point when I thought I blocked like 15 placements that were draining money and was looking forward to receiving traffic from better placements.
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4th day: Raised the budget to $300 and since I set the "air time" to 6pm New York time, it didn't spend $300 until midnight. Only spent $150. CPC remained at $0.31. However, I got a few sales, because the placements were a bit better. But most of the traffic I got from only 1 placement.
ROI was around: 0% (break even)
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5th day (today - at the day of submitting this post): I thought I'll increase the budget to $400 and set the CPC to $0.45 to give the campaign a bit of a boost. Also submitted 3 new creatives and stopped some of them that had very low CTR. I've set the "air time" to the morning in NY time. It's been running for like 8 hours and got 2 sales. Only spent around $200 so far.
ROI is around: -40%.
Overall CTR is around: 0.09%
CPC: $0.45
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So it's obvious that I'm not doing something good. The question is what am I missing?!
First of all, there is an issue with scaling. After stopping the sites that were draining money, it seems like the traffic plummeted by a lot, barely getting clicks. Neither sales, but that's another story - that could be fixed.
This offer and similar offers are TOP on Ad spy tools and even if I spy manually. They're getting tons of traffic, using the same creatives and the same LPs - and they obviously are in profit.
Any idea, what am I doing wrong? My goal is to get as much quality traffic as possible while getting into at least close to break-even. (by quality I mean, not those bot traffic sites) I'd be happy with like -20% ROI if I'd be getting like 30-40 sales a day to optimize from there.
Is it possible that Outbrain has moved this campaign to a lower traffic tier and there's not too much there + the quality is not good?
Any input would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers!
Hey @grasson,
here's what our
- try to add more creatives - test different angles, contexts - before you upload more, check which of your current creative sets got best CTRs and try to find something similar
- play around with the headlines - how about you search for some free online tools that evaluate the headline emotional value and make use of the highest-scoring headlines
- test more landing pages - maybe find some localization techniques for the LPs and try to improve them
- keep blocking some under-performing placements
Keep in mind that traffic is traffic, it fluctuates, and do not give up on testing!
Good luck and keep us posted
Thanks for the reply Justyna. We are currently doing all those already. What I'm looking for is a way to go to the Top of the traffic source and get the most traffic for the cheapest. I guess I just need to find the right banners.
It's pretty interesting how can other advertisers bring insane amounts of traffic to the same banners whereas I get next to no traffic, or only for very expensive.
I don't know man I'd be pretty happy with those results... you broke even on your 4th day of a brand new RON campaign- that by itself is quite rare.
But yeah, the only thing I would have done differently (not that I'm a huge Outbrain expert mind you) would have been not to suddenly up the bid to .45$. I think on Revcontent that would be fine where the bidding is super dexterous/responsive, but it seems that on Outbrain the system really needs time to acclimate and re-acclimate, and you only want to make small changes in bid (say up to five cents a day).
I think most Outbrain experts or their reps would tell you to focus on getting the cpc right first, by gradually lowering your bid each day until you hit the sweet spot where your budget is capping but doing so slowly and not going 20% over, etc. You'll know at that point you're at a 'good' cpc. Then, start raising the budget in a gradual manner if you want to, presuming you're profitable, and if the budget has trouble capping then raise the cpc's a bit.
While doing that do all your placement optimizations and creative optimization and landing page split-testing and etc.
I think most people who start new Outbrain campaigns plan on it taking 7-10 days to get the cpc's down enough and the placements optimized enough to be profitable, presuming its an offer/funnel that is already working on another network/able to be profitable in general.
Outbrain also seems big on the need for new campaigns to 'rev the engine' at the beginning. So, you need to start out bidding a bit higher than you eventually want to, and then lower it from there. As long as your ads have good ctr's you might get to X bid eventually, but you won't be able to start there, because unless Outbrain's system knows your ad ctr's are really good they won't send you traffic at that low of bid.
But yeah, you're making sales and building a list of good and bad placements and you broke even on your 4th day, so I think it sounds pretty good so far!
great post there
i am looking at outbrain as well. have you checked if its your landing page speed issue since u doing smartphone ?
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