DSP vs. Direct: A Short Comparison (4)
Promised someone I would do a
This is my first ever profitable campaign, and I'm still scaling it direct, so keep that in mind.
Short version: DSP is fantastic for newbies on a budget. Direct cost integration, low daily budgets, can test multiple networks, launch campaigns very quickly, can experience granular campaign optimization.
If you're getting your feet wet with native, or struggling to get a profitable campaign going direct... I would highly recommend jumping on the DSP and giving it a shot.
But when you're ready to run a very large high spend campaign, direct is the way to go.
With the DSP I was having issues scaling up to and past $1k per day adspend.
Direct I'm now running at $1.5k - $2k per day as of this past week, and I could very easily bump that up to $3k spend tomorrow if I wanted to.
The top 2 campaigns are running direct, and the bottom 2 campaigns are running on the DSP.
Toward the last week or 2 of my DSP spend, the cost per view was much closer to the current direct cost per view, which is where I started to hit my ceiling. Scaling on the DSP involved raising my bids, where as scaling direct I just open more topics.
I'm not sure exactly what to say, other than my opinions listed above, so I think it would be best if I just leave this thread open for any questions anyone might have for me regarding my experience running DSP vs running direct.
The campaign listed is running on RevContent. I've also run some very small budgets on Outbrain both direct and DSP but not enough to comment.
One Important Note: It is possible that I could have faired better on the DSP with higher bids. But the problem was that at the time of this campaign, there was no good way to only run on specific categories within a network, so you were essentially forced to run on the the entire network, and raising my bid higher than where I got it to seemed to put me at a loss.
DSP has now introduced a category system where you can choose to focus only on a specific category (although they do not yet allow you to only target specific categories on campaign launch, you can just turn them off as data comes in). This may or may not have changed my experience.
Great work man thanks for the comparison!
And great job on the profitable campaign!!!
First profitable campaign!? Nicely done.
Are you going to try out CPA autoboost? Looks like you've got enough conversion to kick it off if you've been passing those back to Revcontent.
Originally Posted by thedudeabides
Being my first profitable campaign I wanted to keep optimizing manually so I haven't gotten around to figuring out how to postback conversions to revcontent yet.
But I'm moving trackers this week and as soon as I'm moved I'm going to start passing them back.
...It looks like I can't create a conversion pixel to pass sales back to RevContent until I actually create a "CPA ROI" based campaign? So conversions passback will start when I setup the CPA autoboost campaign?
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