Bidding strategy by MGID (7)
When launching the first campaign, everyone wants to be sure that their budget will be spent rationally and a perfect balance between cost per click, place in the auction and CTR of teasers and landing pages will be reached.
The recommendations in this post are your lifesavers. By following the under mentioned tips you will not only save time but also set up your campaign smoothly by smartly allocating your budget and optimizing your income. So, let’s go!
Allocate your budget for testing and daily expenses
Prior to starting the campaign, decide how much you are ready to spend at the beginning. Take into consideration the type of your offer, available funds, and time frames.
With higher budgets, you can collect more statistical data and determine what is a prime time for your offer in a few days of testing. We suggest starting with at least $ 500 deposit. This amount provides MGID users with several benefits, including a 25% welcome bonus and a personal manager, who will help you optimize campaigns.
Average CPC depends on the primary budget
If you are a newbie in affiliate marketing and start at $100, we recommend you to set a low bid. By doing so you will get more days and more clicks to test, rather than to set a high bid and quickly waste money. At least you will be able to collect some statistics for the first “small steps” of optimization. Moreover, do not hesitate to ask your account manager for assistance. AM is always here to help you choose the vertical, determine average CPC, share traffic insights and answer all your questions.
If you are an experienced marketer with a solid budget, we recommend starting with a slightly above average CPC. So you can get more traffic and impressions. As a result, you will understand the dynamics of earnings and performance of particular websites.
In any case, your personal manager can provide you with the recommended CPC and answers every question regarding traffic, GEOs and campaign settings. Moreover, we suggest you share payout data with account managers. Otherwise, they will give you wrong advice, which will result in poor campaign performance.
First Optimization Steps
So, let’s imagine you have set up a postback, and you have an opportunity to monitor which websites bring the conversions. Without a doubt, every advertiser is interested in receiving more traffic from best-performing sites. Don’t worry, MGID got you covered. Our Selective Bidding tool enables you to manually raise/low the bid on any site.
IMPORTANT! If you decide to delete the site from your White List, we strongly recommend you to check all the subdomains. Sometimes some of them can convert well and do not need to be switched off. When the campaign is working smoothly with high results, it is better to keep working without any changes, otherwise, it could result in a drop in traffic volumes.
Campaign Volumes
After completing Several optimization techniques, you are able to increase the volume of traffic and, consequently, earn more. Hereinafter are several ways:
- Increase bid on the teaser with - «Boost» button. It calculates how much traffic you will get if you increase your bid. “Boost” button takes into account the targeting settings and teaser CTR.
- Create teasers of different categories. It’s important to know that after submitting your creatives, your campaign will be given a rate, according to which your teasers will be placed on particular publishers. Here are the rating types: PG, R, NC-17, NSFW.
To reach most of the websites, we recommend starting with R-rated campaign. R-content excludes erotica, illicit or digital drugs, medicine, nudity, partial nudity, pornography, weapons, and explosives.
MGID reviews the image, headline, and landing page to determine overall content guidelines. We make sure that advertisers and publishers create a match made in heaven. Engaging content builds new relationships and offers additional value to existing audiences. Bear in mind this classification, in order to meet the requirements of the publishers and reach your target audience. However, most of the top publishers do not allow NC17 and NSFW teasers to maintain the appropriate appearance of the website. Moreover, It is a common fact, that NC17 and NSFW campaigns will bring you more clicks, but not all of them will lead to actions. By creating PG 13 and R teasers you can not only increase impression rate but also conversions. It’s better no to rely on sexual and shocking pictures, but instead design high-quality and creative teasers to reach premium websites.
Please note that if you are using a landing page in the funnel, then it must be also aligned with the teaser category.
- Unique and catchy teasers with high CTR can significantly increase your place in the auction. It is also important to know that if several users run campaigns with identical teasers, then more clicks will receive advertiser with a higher CPC. It creates fake competition, which should be avoided in order to rationally spend the budget.
- Expand targeting. It's all quite simple - too precise targeting settings do not allow you to take the necessary amount of traffic.
- Regularly update blacklists, as sometimes low-performing sites start to perform better with other teasers.
Account Manager Assistance
Set up postback. Even if you use a tracker, it will not give you the opportunity to see the real situation from your MGID dashboard. By post-backing conversions, you can reach the most precious performance of your campaign. Do not understate your payouts. Account managers know the system very well, they can help in the most difficult situations, but they are not wizards. If your payout is $ 10, and the CPA goal is $8, but you will persistently repeat that you need to reduce it, then the account manager will have nothing left but to switch off large, expensive sites, add a lot of small, but cheaper ones. If aiming for quick and enormous profit now, you will lose in the long run.
Maintain your Place in the Auction
Plan long-term campaigns. Permanently engage in site optimization, update teasers and do not stop the campaign. By doing so you may lose your position at auction. It will entail the bid increase in order to recapture the right amount of traffic. So you will face additional costs.
If you have any questions about this post, feel free to ask them in the thread, we will be happy to answer!
This has been great information! I'm a newbie on MGID and I'm looking to start my first round of optimizations. Would you recommend starting off with taking the top performing image and split test headlines first? Or try and optimize the presale page? My AM has been great, but figured I would ask here as we want to try and ramp this up.
Originally Posted by vvm_54
I've heared that a native campaign should always start with the minimum daily budget and the highest CPC that you can afford, in order to let the algorithm estimate the CPC of your creatives by using the highest quality placements.
Could you please confirm if this is true or not for MGID?
Why do you not have any bidding indicators when setting up a campaign?
Would be great to sort of know the range of which to bid in.
Hi! Not yet done, but we plan to implement it in the future.
Originally Posted by mr blob
It is true (setting the highest CPC) only if you have an unlimited budget
When you run the campaign with a big budget and highest CPC and make sure your ads show up on best converting placement and you did get the chance to see how publishers perform for you.
If you set very high CPC and set a minimum budget - this will only result in your campaign hitting its daily cap within 30 minutes and being paused for the rest of the day.
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