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Follow Along : Firstwefeast (25)

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Hi,

I signed up to STM because I have recently started dipping my toes in the media buying business. I have a couple of years of experience in the adult vertical, so I thought that would be the perfect place to start out.
I own a profitable company and delegated some of my tasks lately so I have more free time on my hands to diversify my income. My budget is big enough, so I am prepared to lose some money while learning, that is not going to be a problem.

Because I am totally new in this business, I have lots of questions. I believe in communities like STM, so I don't want to just 'take', I also want to give back something too. So I want to share my journey with you, from zero to hero hopefully. Perhaps others can learn from it, or just read it purely for their enjoyment. Also; sharing my journey makes me have to focus and it puts some pressure on me, which is good for me.

I have spent about 3 weeks reading obsessively about affiliate marketing and watching a lot of content/videos. Wish I would have started on STM as the information here is way more valuable than anywhere on the web. I have learned more from people like Matuloo in a couple of hours then I did googling stuff for 2 weeks.
I have the feeling I know enough now to start running some campaigns seriously. I also know that focussing on 1 specific area works best and makes for a shorter learning curve.


My focus-area will be
- Adult Dating offers
- Banner ads
- TrafficFactory and TrafficStars as traffic sources

I set up the following stuff

* Free RedTrack 14 day trial
* Bluehost VPS with SSL
* Custom domain with SSL
* Purelander subscription (any opinions on this?)
* Accounts on CPAMatica & CrakRevenue
* Accounts on TrafficStars and TrafficFactory

Strenghts and weaknesses

+ Good photoshop skills (can create ads and design LP's pretty easily and fast)
+ Analytically decent/good (love the optimization part of media buying)
+ Experience in the adult vertical (I pretty much know how things work in this business)
+ Creativity (I can think of lots of angles to use for new ads or LP's)

- No coding/html skills at all (creating landers will a no-go for me)
- Very little experience with the tracking part of media buying(the technical part that is. Still learning)
- Pretty much have a 'wanna-do-everything' mentality.(focussing on a small niche/area will be hard for me )

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I will be using the simple funnel:
Ad --> LP --> Offer

I already started some test-campaigns to see how eveything worked: picked some random offers, found out that tracking was not setup correctly sometimes, got a handful of conversions, lost a bit of money, which in turn resulted in having more questions.
So I hope you guys/gals can help me out here. I will be starting my first serious campaign soon, and will share it with you.

Questions

1. I noticed most dating offers have built in landers/prelanders or a multiple pages signup-process. It seems to me everyone will be using those, so where can you differentiate there, other than just the ad? Do you add another prelander? (I feel the funnel gets way too long this way) Or do you pick only offers with direct-to-form pages? Or don't use your own landing pages/prelanders, just the ones the advertiser hands you?

2. I noticed a significant difference between the clicks registered on TrafficStars vs the clicks registered in RedTrack vs the clicks registered on affiliate networks like CrakRevenue and CPAMatica. Is this normal? For example; I would have 120 clicks on TS, 102 on Redtrack and 71 on CrakRevenue.

3. I read something about sending postback to the Traffic Source. I'm not sure I want to do that. What's your opinion about that? Can you leave the S2S postback field empty in Traffic Sources in Redtrack?

4. Not quite sure if I should pick CPC or CPM. In some cases CPM seemed cheaper, but I can't track impressions/costs which is annoying. In other cases CPC was cheaper but I would get a lot less traffic. What are your opinions on this?


Thanks in advance!
- Firstwefeast

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Good luck and welcome! Sounds like a good base to start with... @matuloo will definitely chime in (no pressure mate!)

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Hi @firstwefeast Welcome ! I would love to help you with some of your questions,

1 - it really differs from offer to offer, but it is always advisable to use pre-landers, ive seen most of the good results with pre-landers.
2 - There is always some click loss due to redirecting traffic from one tracker to the other, but in case you see a discrepancy of more than 20 - 25%, reach out to your traffic source and ask them to help you, in a case of low discrepancy you can do some optimization on your own and fix it.

3 - yes!postback is always optional, but to be honest it is the best tool that will help you with optimisation, with Postback tracking you can always compare the cost of conversion at your end and at the source's end, especially in case of discrepancy.

4- generally with adult CPM works better, but its not the case with every traffic source, so this one can depend on the traffic quality of each source.

I really hope my insights help! we at Ezmob got great traffic for adult, if you want to discuss more, please add me on Skype - Live:surya_642

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Hi, thanks for the welcome and answering of my questions.

2. Don't think I quite understand this. Is the error mostly on the Traffic Source side, or on the Ad Networks? Seems to me that, in my example, the ad network registered a whole lot less than my source and tracker did.

Will focus on Traffic Stars and Traffic Factory first, but I will keep Ezmob in mind for the future!

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So I finally started up some banner campaigns:

- 4 offers from CrakRevenue
- Country: Australia
- Device: mobile
- 4 campaigns (1 per offer)
- 6 banners
- 2 LP's
- TrafficSource : TrafficFactory

Came up with a couple of angles for my banners and LP's, inspired by creatives I see currently running on other big GEO's.
Placed my CPM bid ($0.06) a bit above the minimum required bid ($0.05).

Optimization process after significant statistics:
1. Check which offer does best in terms of ROI. Cut the worst offers.
2. Check which banner/LP combo has the most conversions. Cut the worst ones.
3. Try some new banner/LP combo's vs the benchmark combo I have left after step 2.
4. Optimize based on browser/carrier results.
5. If offers still have -30% ROI or worse I stop them after these tests. (will try to spend max 8x payout per offer)
6. If I find a (near) positive ROI after this, I will try to scale or increase bid to get better traffic.


First thing, right off the bat I notice is the big difference between registered clicks between traffic source, ad network and my tracker.
After ~6000 impressions:

Traffic Source: 14 clicks registered
External Tracker: 19 clicks registered
Ad Network: 3 clicks registered

Does anyone have any idea why this difference in registered clicks appears? Or is this normal?
Perhaps any comments tips in regards to my campaigns/plan of action?

Thanks!

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You seem to know what you're doing so far. I'm going to subscribe and follow you along the way, good luck!

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Thanks!

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Alright so the first day results are in. Not that many impressions and conversions, so I don't value these numbers too much right now.
It did however raise a couple of next questions I hope someone can help me with.

Global Stats per campaign:


Impression Stats on Traffic Source


As you can see the real costs are a bit higher than RedTrack tracked, because I cannot import impressions. So right now I have just entered an estimate cost per click which turned out to be a bit higher than I filled in.
Any ideas how I can tackle this problem? I understand lots of traffic sources don't support 'impression tracking'. But there must be a better way to track my impressions and real costs in RedTrack?

Also; does anyone know in Traffic Factory where I can see the impressions per hour per day?

I don't feel I can put too much value on the results of LP's and banners just yet. Would you just let it run for a couple of days, and evaluate then? Or would you try to get more impressions in, by raising the CPM bid for example?


Thanks!

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Another thing when analyzing the clicks in RedTrack is:

1. I see lots of clicks coming from outside of AU. I have contacted my AM from Traffic Factory, she was going to check with their tech department. Haven't heard back since yesterday. Is it normal that a decent % of clicks come from outside of Australia? I have targetted only AU in my campaigns. I see clicks from NL, IR, RU, GB, CA, etc.

2. I also see a lot of double, triple clicks from the same IP's or sometimes even 6 clicks from the same IP, which is obviously the same person. Is this normal?

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Hello,

let me address the concerns you have And sorry for being a bit late, I'm on a semi-vacation, so still checking the forums and posting but not that much and I missed your thread.

1. the click discrepancies : each of the sides have different priorities... traffic sources want's to present as many clicks in the stats as possible, the trackers wants to be as accurate as possible and the affiliate network wants to show the highest possible earnings per click. So the traffic source and tracker will always show higher numbers than the affiliate network. Sources/trackers count all raw clicks/hits (sources tend to ignore some bots), affiliate networks prefer to show uniques or scrub the amount of clicks in some other way. It's fine as long as they don't scrub the actual leads.

Then there is the LP in the funnel, so don't mix up the ad clicks with LP clicks... with campaigns that use LPs, the clicks in traffic source will be way higher than what the affiliate network records, as only certain % of the users actually click through the LP.

2. cost tracking ... in case you're bidding CPM and the network doesn't support impression tracking, there is no way to track 100% accurately. You have to use the CPC model in your tracker and use an average price per click that you calculate after a few hours of running the campaign.

With CPC bidding, it's easier, just keep the clickloss in mind and set a bit higher CPC than you pay, so it compensates for the lost clicks. Or the other way around, in case the tracker counts more than the source bills you for.

3. mismatched GEOs... this is also a common problem with many sources, it's because of imperfect GEO filters. Many of these clicks will be VPNs or bots, so it makes sense to redirect these to some fallback offer, in order to keep your lead quality higher on the main offer. With sources that make it possible, opt out of receiving VPN traffic and target the official language of the GEO your running, that will further improve your quality.

Multiple clicks from the same IP can be bots or VPNs again, but in some cases it's not a problem... it's quite common for many users sharing an IP, especially in cities, large blocks, office spaces etc... But if you see a lot of clicks from the same IP, feel free to block it as it's gonna mess up your stats and chances are it's "a fake click".

Some more things that caught my eye:

You don't have to create individual campaigns for each offer, it's actually better to split test several offers in the same campaign, especially if the offers are from the same vertical.

I didn't hear anything good about bluehost... it's an entry level hosting company for bloggers who want to save money on hosting. I'd suggested using something else... digitalocean or vultr work well for me, for example.

I would suggest to register with a few more networks, the offer is truly the king in dating these days, so you will have to test a lot of offers. Good networks to register with are, for example : gotzha, advidi, clickdealer, rebll ...



So much for now, lemme know in case you have more questions

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Hi Matuloo,

Thanks for your extensive reply.

1. I found out that the ad network is indeed showing LP clicks. That's why the big difference appeared. The difference between the registered clicks of RedTrack and Traffic Factory is not too big, so that's fine.
2. Okay, got it. Thanks.
3. Good suggestions! Blocking IP's is done on the Traffic Source website I assume? Did not find that option on Traffic Factory yet.

Will switch to Vultr, read a lot about that. Does Vultr have a standard cpanel, or file manager I can easily work with?
Already signed up to Gotzha, Whalecash and have Advidi and VIPOffers pending right now. ClickDealer did not approve me for now.

One question though; I raised my CPM bid to 0.07 from 0.06. Will that make a big difference? Right now it takes a decent amount of time to get some serious statistics I can work with. Would you recommend speeding it up by raising the bid and getting more impressions in a shorter time? Or is this approach better? (letting it run for a day or 4 to have some more stats and go from there).

Again, thanks for the input.

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Nope, you need to block it in the tracker, traffic sources do not offer such options.

I have a coder who is setting up these things for me, then he just gives me the ftp access for a domain... not sure about vultr, but I messed with digitalocen myself and I used the serverpilot service to set things up there.

Trafficfactory is one of the sources where the bidding position plays a big role in regards to the traffic quality. You need to be high enough to get the good clicks. Hard to say where you stand with the 6 cents bid and hot much higher the extra cent will get you, but it may have a significant impact on quality in case your bidding position improves substantially. Based on my experience, it's the best to be the 2-5th bidder in TF... being the top bidder is usually too expensive, going lower than 5 (+/-) means quite a big decrease in traffic quality.

To really get a complete picture of the traffic performance, you need to run several days at least, a full week is preferred so you catch the weekend too. Then one more week to compare the results to spot the trends, if there are any.

But, this is expensive and time consuming, so yes, usually I just up the bid to get data fast... and since I'm already running dating for a while, I know that if I ran the test on monday, I can expect better results on saturday.

To sum it up... it's ok to speed up the testing by bidding higher. Once you have narrowed down some winners (offers, ads, LPs) you can focus on optimizing the whole flow and testing the performance on different days of the week.

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Pretty basic stuff. Most of the scripts they offer are available for free in the Tech part of STM. The vibrate script they still promote, is outdated since 2018 or early 2019.

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Today's Update

First of all; the numbers. They are quite messed up right now, because I have been changing CPM bids so the real costs are higher. Too bad there is no simple solution for this, like just tracking impressions (+their costs) straight from the Traffic Source. Also 1 conversion has been tracked double for some reason. Support of RedTrack is looking into this. For some reason the tracking-part of media buying is still not going as I would like it to, while I seem to have set up everything correctly.





So actually there should be 1 conversion less, and the costs are a bit higher.
Not much going on still. My CTR% has dropped drastically in day 2, compared to day 1. No idea why, perhaps it is variance kicking in.

Other developments:

1. Tried buying Adplexity Adult spy tool, credit card got rejected. (never had my CC rejected for anything)
2. Tried buying AdPeriscope Adult spy tool, credit card got rejected. (even contacted my bank, they see no problems)
3. I went through all complete flows of the four offers, and found out 1 offer had bugs in their LP. Customers can not proceed past a certain point. Just keeps loading. Immediately killed that campaign. Lesson I learned here: always check the entire LP flow of the offer you are going to run.
4. Started a push campaign on PropellerAds to the same three offers. Created 4 creatives for that and decided to just run the campaign. Never did a push campaign before, so it's merely just checking out how that works.

Question:
Is it too early to start removing the worst ads and replacing them for new ones?

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Yeah found that out too. It's good for really simple LP's, if you can't code. I get really good scores on website speed tests for the simple LP's. I couldn't tell the difference between a script and a frying pan, so I really need to find a good tool, or outsource this in the future.

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Since you got rejected at two services, there could be a problem with the bank. Try to reach out to adplexity support, they might be able to tell you more about why the transaction got denied.

btw: adplexity adult is the best adult spytool out there imo, I wouldn't bother with the other ones as long as the higher fee doesnt pose a problem.

Yup, checking the offers is a good idea, sometimes there are problems as you learned yourself with this one.

Not all push sources allow adult offers, but most of them will take dating stuff that doesnt show any nudity... make sure you're using the right offers or a push network that is ok with adult. Just a bit of warning, push traffic is more prone to lead quality problems, so don't be surprised if you're asked to stop running traffic to some offers. It's not always the case, but it's more frequent than with banner traffic. You will lose offers with banners traffic too, it's just more frequent with push.

You don't have a lot of leads, but maybe there are some ads that are clearly falling behind? Very low banner CTR (expensive clicks), poor LP ctr (expensive LP click), no conversions while some other ads do convert... maybe post a screen of ad data from the tracker.

But anyways, the campaign doesn't look that bad, you're not that negative. The screenshot from the tracker you posted, what is it sorted by? Is that 4 campaigns or?

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Day 3:

Results

The results so far after 3 days: (I decided to just manually fill in the data in Excel, so I can have a better view of the ROI.)


This is without any form of optimization other than increasing the CPM bid for offer A & B to $0.1
Still this seems to be way to less. My average position is still 26th or something. I have increased the bid to 0.15 now. Annoying thing that you can only see the positions the day after, right?


Banner time!

The first thing I see is that some banners perform well in campaign A, but not so well in campaign B. Which is strange, because I would expect them to be globally the same over my 3 campaigns.
See image:


This leads me to believe the data is not significant enough to filter out variance at this point.
I have cut the worst performing banner this morning for all 3 offers, with a global CTR% of 0,13 and 0 conversions.

When I look at CR for banners, all 8 conversions come from the four bottom banners. The best banner in CTR (0.19%) has 0 conversion. Again; don't know if I can really put any value in this because of the samplesize.


ProppelerAds

Started a push campaign for the same three offers. I did not get rejected or anything but, with pretty decent push ads, I had a bit dissapointing results. I decreased the bid from 0.09 to 0.045 to see if a lower bid would still have potential.
For now these are the results:



I am not ready to give this up just yet. I have excluded some underperfoming zones and will try to add some more aggresive ads, and see what I can get away with.

Question though;
The preview of my ads all look like this. Is this normal? It crops my ads in a terrible way.

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Yeah I know. I cleaned up the ads, but am still linking to my casual dating offers. Don't know if it's a good fit. Curious to find out :-)
I always thought that people accepting push notifications and clicking them, would convert better than random banner clicking people and would result in better quality for the advertiser. Guess I was wrong there. Thanks for the heads-up. Are there traffic sources focussed on purely adult push traffic? Maybe they would be a better source than PropellerAds.


I started 4 campaigns, 1 per offer. Killed one campaign because of the error in the LP from the offer. You were right; I would have been better off putting all offers in 1 campaign. Makes analyzing a bit easier.
I cut one of the 6 ads that was clearly underperfoming. Upped my bid with 50% today. So kinda curious to see if it will get me more conversions or only more costs.

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One of the verticals you've chosen for your campaigns is dating. Let us give you some tips on how to increase CTR in this niche:

• Choose Western Europe, the USA and South Korea as GEO. In these countries and regions dating has been showing nice results for a long time.
• Use the approach of personalization. You can play for the city of the user including macros [CITY] in the headline or message.
• Use targeting according to the browser language (this way you will not lose the audience with a few state languages).

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Day 6 Update

After 4 days there was 1 clear best offer, so I went with that one, and cut the other 2.
Here are the results for this offer after 6 days:



As you can see this offer was nearly break-even, slighty losing ROI after a couple of days. Which is fine, because I had done no optimization at all.
One thing I saw was that my average banner position was very low: 26th on average.
So I gradually started increasing the CPM bid from 0.06 all the way up to 0.25. The position did not improved all that drastically, and yesterdays ROI was terrible.

I thought "the higher the CPM bid, the higher the position, the better the quality of traffic."
But after 211 clicks, I only got 2 conversions yesterday.

For me it feels really unnatural raising the CPM bid this much, and not getting anything in return. Only higher costs.
I did not change anything so far, except remove 2 out of 6 banners, that had bad CTR and zero conversions.

Am I not seeing anything clear here? Is this too small of a sample size to draw conclusions from?
What would be your play here?

Also; is 0,25 usd CPM for AU not a bit much? I only got to 16th positions average with this bid.

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Yes it is annoying, on top of that, the positions change all the time so it's not the most accurate number anyways. But it helps still. You will need to go higher than 26th though, the good traffic is up in the chain

This is normal, it depends on what the rotation looks like. As I mentioned above, the position is not constant, it changes based on the competition situation so the CTR also changes. You're also right that it has to do with the size of the data sample... the "bigger" the campaign is, the more stable it usually gets. The daily budget and campaign budget also influence the rotation, if the budget limits the traffic, the campaign get's throttled and the rotation get's affected too. Which translates to unstable behavior again.

You don't have that much data, but if I read the data correctly, the banners already spent multiples of the offer payout, so you should be able to identify the worst ones by now.4 banners converted, which should be enough to keep in the campaign and continue with just those.

To be honest, the sources that are not purely adult, can perform better with adult offers, if you manage to get them approved So maybe try to test if a bit more on propeller Richpush (who replied above) used to work pretty well for dating when I was running it on push

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Yeah I did cut 2 banners which did not convert so far and had bad CTR's.

If I'm doing the calculations real quick:

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I'm at $0.25 CPM bid
Average CTR of 0.17% (used pretty good banners, a mix of ones that are being used often in casual dating campaigns, with some edited ones and completely new ones)
Offer payout = $3 per SOI
CR = ~2%

That means I am paying 58.8 x $0,25 = $14.70 for 100 clicks.
Even if I had a CR of 4%, I would still lose money with $12.00 revenue.

I can't imaging banners doing a lot better than 0.20% CTR, or offers+LP's doing a lot better than 4% CR.
And then to realize $0.25 CPM is not even high enough to get to the 2-5th positions.

Assuming I would need to bid something in the lines of $0.40 - $0.50 CPM to get to those positiosn, I would need CTR's of 0.40% or CR's of 8-10%.

How is anyone making money on these campaigns?

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Most of my green campaigns actually do convert SOI offers at 1:10 LP clicks or better.

So with your current bidding situation... 14.7 cents per click... realistic LP CTR is like 20-30%, so out of 100 clicks, 20-30 should click through to the offer and that should translate to 2-4 leads, which is still below your target.

With TF, you can reach better CTRs though, especially in the top spots, sometimes I have 0.4% and that would completely change the math.

You need a bit better banner CTR, then a bit better offer CVR and a bumped payout would help it further... or a better converting offer.

It's possible, the people you see running their ads in the top spots are not doing that because they enjoy losing money

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Thanks for the reply Matuloo. Really appreciate your input.

I understand some people are making profit on these ads. For a starting AM it is just pretty difficult to compete with people who have bumped Payouts or who sell to the advertiser directly.

Looking at banners/LPs: there is not much difference. Everyone is using the same ones, with very small variations. I see them in all GEOs, for all offers and on all tube sites. There are like 5 or 6 LPs in play, with some small adjustmenst here and there. I might be wrong but if you rip a few you should be getting the same results on creatives as all other players in the casual dating vertical.

So the big advantage the profitable AMs have, is the higher payouts, better contacts, and deeper pockets, it seems to me. But I might be wrong

I was wondering; how can you see what competing AMs are bidding? Sometimes I read a follow along or case study where one says "I bid 10% lower than my competitor". Are there traffic sources where you can see other peoples bids? Is there a website with for example the average CPM bids per position, per geo?

Thanks!

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Yup, it's not easy to compete against these big guys, that's why we always recommend to stay away from the most competitive GEOs and placements, that's where those with proven campaigns and bumped offers play. But they won't bother with small placements because they can simply spend their times better elsewhere and that's what the newbie affiliates should focus on

YES an NO

First thing: sometimes it's the female model used in the banner that makes all the difference, or the right part of the image. The layout itself is just a part of the success... advanced affiliates don't just rip banners, they change something on them. So even if the banners really look almost the same, the word "almost" is important. You can have two banners with exactly the same copy and layout, but a different main image and the results would be completely different.

Second thing: you only see the banner, but you know nothing about the bid and targeting... they might be running only during certain hours, targeting a specific traffic segment, OS etc... so unless you know the exact targeting settings and bid, you cannot really recreate the same scenario.

This is right from the most part... but add what I mentioned above - targeting, the right AD, the right LP. Contacts, better payouts, deeper pockets... that's one half of the puzzle, your marketing skills is the other one.

This info is not publicly known on many sources, but it's something that your AM at the source "might" tell you... given that you have a good relationship with them and your ad spend justifies this extra treatment.

It's also possible to "manually guess" what your competitors are bidding... raise your bid incrementally by a small amount at a time, when you bypass a competitor there should be an increase in traffic. As soon as the effect stops, you are likely the top bidder. And with sources like TF that pass you the bidding position, you can do this with quite decent accuracy.

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