Newbie on Revcontent... Need support (12)
Hi Folks,
I am starting to use Revcontent with Nutra Offers in Asia, Middle East and Europe, however; the new dashboard is really confusing, I would be very glad if you can share experiences on this thread !
Looking forward to kick off camps,
Deema 
Revcontent is a great place to start with nutra; I ran it there for years.
Not sure what specifically I can say about the interface - like any platform you'll get the hang of it as you launch campaigns. Don't get too focused on making one campaign work; launch a few.
Make sure to get in touch with a rep! This will make everything so much easier.
My rev advice for beginners:
1) Build brand/widget lists from your failures, it's essential to get value out of your dud campaigns
2) I almost always opt for brand targeting but topic can be useful for RON research on widget ids
3) Be sure you are tracking widget_id and adv_targets
4) adv_targets can be one of two things: brands (breitbart.com) or topics (conservative_news)
Highly suggest you check out the "virtual whitelisting" feature of kintura because their rev optimizer uses it and it allows you to whitelist (rev stopped allowing whitelisting last march or so). I don't know a single 6-figure buyer not using kintura for tab and rev whitelisting right now. Also, their tracker kind of sucks to get used to but it's growing on me and I'm constantly harassing them to improve it...but trust me when I say there is about $10m/mo running through their whitelister alone because all the big buyers I know use it *just* to whitelist.
Also, you might like Content.ad.
Don't bother with Taboola until you can spend $5k/day. They won't approve anything (and tab is useless without api access).
Originally Posted by barwell
Taboola is where you go when you want to do big scale, but you can certainly start at $100/day if that's all you have assuming you know what you're doing and not being a copy-paste drone. You'll just have to be much more selective about the type of offers you can run what geos and placements to target.
And whitelists are not at all necessary on Taboola like they are on other sources that have tons of bad placements. Only whitelists you should really be making a lot of are for MSN properties to gauge offers on, but beyond that smartbid does majority of the heavy lifting.
Re approvals...get a freaking rep, talk to them, meet them at shows, get a rapport going etc. Too many affiliates used to running more aggressive and not willing to adapt or put in the work and give up so easily. I understand sometimes you can get stuck with a bad rep not able to give you guidance if somethings unclear, but that's a separate issue.
Content.ad also afaik is just resold Revcontent and MGID inventory. Honestly I'd start with PowerInbox if you're new to native to cut your teeth. Very little scale, but good quality and teaches you the importance of good ads to drive traffic.
Originally Posted by barwell
Originally Posted by thedudeabides
You can definitely run Taboola at low budgets, indeed it's probably the best platform of all of them for that purpose as the Smartbid works pretty well whether you're at super low budgets or high ones.
To that end, when I started on natives everyone I 'studied' seemed to be primarily whitelisting on Taboola, so I had definitely heard that too, and when I started I tried uploading whitelists via my rep, but honestly I could never get them to work. The cpc's were either too high or the traffic didn't flow, etc.
I didn't start having success until I just went with the SmartBid and trusted it to optimize. Not that it can make anything and everything work, obviously, but I've had more success with it in terms of high ROI and high volume than I have had through any other method on natives.
It (the SmartBid) also seems to be working much better now than it did 6-12 months ago. Not sure if that's just my imagination though.
And then yeah, I haven't tried Content.ad but I think they do have some good pubs now- some of my best Revc sites in Conservative_News also have Content.ad widgets. Although I definitley seem to detect alot of resold inventory between MGID/Content.ad type networks (if I'm seeing what I think I'm seeing when I click on things).
Appreciate the tip on Kintura though @barwell - I hadn't heard of it I'll check it out!
Also for those not aware, you can still run whitelists on Revcontent manually, they just don't make it obvious. All you do is upload widget id's on the 'Widget Targeting' page.
They did just get rid of Brands though sadly, as I liked being able to target big Brands like that a lot, but they've also gotten rid of a lot of their bad widgets so Topics campaigns typically work much better than they did in the past. Was probably a wise business decision to get rid of Brands though as I bet it was costing them revenue on their smaller properties and likely bidding up cpc's too high on a lot of the brands for folks to be profitable.
Originally Posted by thedudeabides
If I had like a million forum points or whatever...my advice would be to avoid tab under $5k/day.
Taboola can still work very well at lower budgets, even at low hundreds a day.
Just make sure you have some edge before you launch, just going to copy paste a campaign from AdPlexity won't fly.
Thanks alot for the feedback, I have run recently some nutra campains, but it is really bringing nothing till now, they have tons and tons of websites which run for each geo, for example i targeted Italy and it starts eating the budget for nothing, i had to search the good quality italian websites to make sure it goes to the right direction, the main issue is how we can bring the whitlist for any geo as RevContent they reject to provide any
As for PowerInbox, which geo do you recommend that I try, which best for nutra,
Many thanks
Thanks a lot Barwell, I am not sure what is Virtual Whitlisinting, I wish if i can do that, I spent a lot so far and it is a loss, coz they have tons of websies which will eat all the budget, but whitlisting is very important but not sure how it can be done
Deema
Originally Posted by deemadondon123
To do a whitelist on Revcontent you just start a new 'Topics' campaign, select the smallest available topic, turn the target bid on it to 0.01$ so it doesn't provide you any traffic, then go to 'Widget Targeting' and click the green 'Add widgets' button on the top right of the screen, and add in any widgets you want to 'whitelist' along with the bid you want them at.
So maybe you add in 40 widgets with bids in the .20-.60$ range, they'll get all the spend while your underlying 'Topic' you targeted doesn't get any, since your bid on it is so low, thus replicating a whitelist.
Revcontent used to have an actual targeting setup you could choose specifically for whitelisting, but now you just need to be a little bit creative and you can do the same thing.
But as long as they still have that 'Add widgets' button you'll be able to effectively do 'whitelists' through one way or another.
With all that said, even if you have the best whitelist in the world, everything else needs to be 100% on point. Revcontent is ridiculously competitive- much more so than Taboola or Outbrain- in that there's very limited traffic and lots of affiliates trying to run on it because it is so affiliate-friendly and because the interface is so darn responsive and easy to use.
Its very unlikely you'll see profits initially, its really something where you are investing a lot of time and money to buy lots of data that you can then use to make small but consistent profits long-term (ideally).
The people I see on Revcontent who seem to legitimately be making consistent profits seem to usually have a few interconnected verticals that they've been running for years where they know the EPC of every applicable widget and just continually bid under each widget's EPC and are continually split-testing every new offer in that vertical to make sure they're always running the most profitable one.
The nice thing about Revc is that it is hard to 'break' a campaign though, so just keep testing different stuff and getting the hang of the platform and it will get easier and easier
Just to chime in here we do have some taboola buyers who spend a few hundred bucks a day with impressive ROAS but I do get your point. I'm fairly sure we have taboola's largest advertiser on our platform and they basically print money. It's kind of sad because the only difference between the little guy and the big guy is millions in seed funding. What's new, I guess.
I'm actually surprised I don't see signs on the side of the road saying "performance marketing partners wanted" because I believe it's a much better bet for your precious home equity cash-out compared to flipping houses.
--Aaron
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