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🔵 Weeding out some stuff on Native... (14)

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So I'm going hard on Native the coming months and I have some questions I need to weed out.

I'm going to start out with RevContent.

1. My strategy after doing some intel here and around the web is this: gather a WL from adplexity spying and run that FIRST to prove the funnel.
IF funnel is converting start a BL campaign and start weeding out shitty placements and whitelist good ones.
Is this a solid strategy to start with on REVCONTENT?

2.If i'm targeting let's say FRANCE, GERMANY, DENMARK etc but choose English as language
will it show my ads on sites in that country or US based sites that a German may visit?

3. As a newbie to Native (spent 500 bucks on MGID with 200 back in rev. MGID have too much shitty traffic) BUT not new to media buying, would you rather start outside of US, UK and CA with your first campaigns and go for TIER 2 countries?

4. Is it a big NO NO to include multiple GEOs in the same campaign? EX: SWE, GER, FRA.

4. Is there a way to track once a visitor has started to checkout IE Initate Checkout as in Facebook (either on the tracker FunnelFlux or on RevContent) ?

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I'll throw my two cents out on a few of them...

2. The language feature in Revcontent will be based on browser settings. So if you choose English then your ads will only show to people whose browser is set to English. So if you did Germany and France and Denmark and selected 'English', then your ads would run to anyone in those countries whose browser is set to English who is visiting sites within the Topic(s) or Brands or Whitelist you are targeting.

3. I'd experiment with both. The U.S. has much higher-traffic sites though, so you may have an easier time spending 100$ a day selecting one single 'Brand' in the US on Revcontent then an entire tier-3 country with every topic selected (once the bot widgets are weeded out at least).

4. No- you can include 100 geo's if you want, but be aware that doing so could cause you go to way over budget if you target too broadly. Conversely, targeting too narrowly could mean you get next to no traffic. It really depends on what topics or brands or widget ID's you are targeting. You just gotta experiment and see what gets clicks, but be careful not to put yourself in a bad position re: overage.

5. That's going to depend on the tracker you use rather than the traffic source. Unless you're talking about tracking that within the traffic source, in which case it will depend on the specifics of their pixel/conversion-tracking logistics. A lot of folks don't even use the traffic source's conversion pixel on Revcontent.

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Jack covered mostly everything, but just to add a few little points that pop in mind:

1. I haven't started with this strategy, but I heard of a lot of people that did and managed to make it work.
However keep in mind that Adplexity's data is not always reliable. Some of the publishers / widget IDs displayed are not necessarily good nor guaranteed to work for your campaign. When looking at my own ads, I frequently see terrible widgets that fucked my BL campaigns big time listed as my "top sources" . So you would have to have a pretty decent sized list from Adplexity to run any reasonable volumes as there is a good chance many of these widgets will not stay in your WL for long... You could also get a WL from your traffic rep, which also isn't always reliable. But between the two options, it should be a good starting point to hopefully find some profitable widgets that will leverage your future BL campaigns

4. Definitely not a no no. In fact I found it useful in some cases when targeting low volume GEOs.
One of the main difficulties with this though, is calculating accurate net per country since revcontent does not display spend per country and is not able to pass click cost to the tracker.
So when calculating ROI per country, you would have to rely at approximate data at best

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I don't know about about a building WL from spytools on revcontent. If someone's running RON or a huge WL in a geo, the data from a spy tool is going to be incomplete if not misleading, and may give you the false impression those are they are the winners when in reality they could just be part of a bigger targeting.

Better to get a small to mid sized WL from your account rep if possible.

Another option would be to start out testing on brands, or just 1 brand site, eg westernjournal.com testing a few campaigns to see what does best. If you can get close to break-even on brands in positions 1-5 you should be in really good shape to launch across wider targeting.

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Fantastic points from @daanja and @thedudeabides -

I should add that while I've recommended the 'adplexity whitelist (or rather 'greylist')' idea, that is not what I myself did. I created a database on excel of hundreds and hundreds of good and bad widget id's from running R.O.N.... I was in a position to be able to do that because 1) I had a decent budget to work with, and 2) I was able to find a profitable campaign pretty early on with which to 'explore'.

Doing that is probably the best thing to do so that you truly find the 'gold nugget' widgets you wouldn't otherwise ever find.

The reason I usually suggest using Brands to start or using a whitelist (greylist) of widgets you find in Adplexity is that it cuts down on the amount of money you'll have to spend on horrible bot widgets, and I know a lot of folks are starting with very restrictive budgets and 200$ bot widget 'attacks' happening every few days is liable to be traumatic and stop them short of ever truly getting the hang of things.

If you have a decent budget to invest and prior marketing experience, and you really want to make Revcontent a long-term thing you invest time and money into mastering, then doing the dirty of work of trying each topic one by one and identifying the bad widgets and the good ones is probably the preferable option.

As both of the wise gentlemen above referenced, the widgets you'll find in adplexity absolutely will include some bad ones. For me too, when I look at my own successful campaigns in Adplexity, I definitely see widgets that were horrible that I blacklisted at some point, as well as so-so widgets, but also a lot of my better ones. I actually like to go visit the websites of widgets I see on adplexity, and you can *sort of* gauge the quality that way, but still not foolproof.

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Hey Jack, what would you recommend as a safe budget to start with native these days - considering both approaches (1. provided whitelists or using Brands, 2. running RON and blacklisting)?

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Hey ostblockguy-

I don't know... I'd probably refer to daanja and thedudeabides up above as I think they've been doing it longer and probably have a clearer idea of what's needed, but I don't know... maybe 5k... depends... you could probably learn the traffic sources pretty well with less than that, and just knowing how to use them is an extremely valuable skill... but to find a profitable offer and get it going and hopefully then have some cash to reinvest into more campaigns... probably 5-10k minimum but I'd say the more the better..

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Hey @kinged,
What you can also do to drive as much traffic as possible for testing is to buy RevContent traffic, along with other native Networks inventory (for example: Liveintent, My6Sense, Polymorph) thru our DSP. Once you register, you can ask your Account Manager for a good Whitelist for your vertical/offer. The min. deposit is $500 and you get access to +20 native networks and you can track, optimize and scale your DSP campaigns easily using Voluum Tracker (no subscription needed).

You can not only target specific GEOs, but also regions, cities, mobile carriers, OS, etc. A lot of Advertisers who run with us target EU GEOs and use ENG-language landers, offers and headlines so you are good to go this way and then your traffic should come from your targeted countries only.

Go ahead and target more than 1 GEO in a single campaign and then run a report per country and compare the results.

You can also use Custom Conversions feature to differentiate between different conversion types.

If you wanna give it a go, just PM me or register your account.
Thanks,
Justyna

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There are too many variables involved into deciding on how much budget you should commit with to a native, which for me personally becomes very difficult to answer. But bottom line is - native traffic isn't cheap and native has a lot of variables you need to test and optimize.

But I was to give a number to someone starting from scratch - 5k minimum without expectation to become profitable

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Hello daanja and all,
Would you pls kindly elaborate the need for 5k? Because I am just starting out on native and may I ask, if I do whitelist widget ID or uses brand targeting, will it be different scenario? And doesn’t need to use 5k to start ?

Is 5k to start on the basis of assumption that budget is needed to smoke out bad bot traffics ?

Will the answer is different if using my strategy above ? Eager to know ! Thanks a lot in advance

John

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Basically the more variables you are testing on native (offers, ads, landers, placements, web vs push etc), the greater the budget you'll need.

If you go in expecting to test everything at once, it's not unrealistic to expect to spend $5-10k just building up a whitelist, often after you've already found a winner.

This is why native has reputation for being expensive.

To decrease the budget needed to test you can do a few things:

1. Test lower payout offers, eg a $12 casino app install or COD offer vs a $100 nutra straightsale. The increased points of data due the higher conversion rates will enable you to make decisions faster and with greater accuracy, allowing you to go further with your budget.
2. Run international, avoid US as it's more competitive and will take more spend to get ahead.
3. Narrow your targeting. Either a WL from your rep, or at least a list of high performing sites to start.
   
   • Run on just one medium to high traffic brand site. This is will greatly reduce the variables you test initially.
   • Run one device type - mobile is a good place to start.

Other tips to save $$$:

• Avoid running unproven offers; try to run stuff you know for sure others are making work
• If possible and/or practical, add mention of the pricing in ad. Will lower CTR and volume for same bids a fair amount, but should help a bit with conversion rates.

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Thanks a lot
Just duplicated my desktop campaign and make one with mobile !

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Just be mindful of certain offers that may appeal more to users on desktops, eg older audiences. If you're only running on say one large brand site initially, I'd still test all devices to start.

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@jack_l , @daanja and @thedudeabides ... guys thank you very much for your replies. They are really helpful.

I'm planing to move to native in the upcoming weeks. My budget is somewhere between 15-20K. I hope it's gonna be enough

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