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Content.ad Campaigns Sudden Death (17)

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Hey, I've been running campaigns on Content.ad for several months now and I keep facing the same problem.

I suddenly lose traffic to my campaigns after several days of being launched. They start at several hundred dollars a day, then by the end of a week they are only spending less than 20 dollars / day.

I have tried making new creatives every couple of days, and increasing bids but this only makes traffic last a couple days longer, and at a lower volume than I started with.

Has anybody else had this problem? If so how did you overcome this?

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Can you post some stats?

I assume Content.ad charges based off CTR, so what is your CTR like? If it is low, particularly if your bid is low, then odds are their algorithm is restricting your reach in favor of more profitable content.

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Right now I am running on the top 100 managed whitelist for December. They start the bids off at what they have set for each domains which I assume is the average bid, so I am bidding with that until I see conversions then I start bidding more aggressively.

As for CTR my ads for keto and ED are ranging between .20 and .40%. I am having trouble getting my creatives past the .40 mark.

This is an example of my bids on the highest spend zones for my ED campaign.

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Also has anybody tested the summary for the creatives on Content.ad and how it affects CTR?

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I would say without a doubt it is those CTRs, that seems way too low. Try to find out what some common CTRs are for Content.ad and those zones. Also, you mentioned spending several hundred a day on traffic, so get a spy tool if you haven't already. Look for how you can increase the CTR on your ads. That'll get you more traffic and keep your campaigns from being throttled so quickly.

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I have been using Adplexity Native and have been trying what seem to be preforming ads and variations of them.

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All I can suggest is keep looking and testing. From the outside looking in, the behavior you have described sounds exactly like the algorithm deciding you are unprofitable and only showing your ads when it has no other options.

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Hey rtking, I can relate.

I think their quality is great, but have encountered similar things you mentioned. Things on their platform seem to be inconsistent here and there.

So far have spent around $5K running a skin campaign on Content.ad over the past 2 months at about -30% ROI's.
This was the first week I've seen $XX - $XXX profit days consistently.

Shared my thoughts below, hope it helps (not an expert so take with a grain of salt):


TLDR:
1. eCPM of your campaign and ad matters.
2. Whitelist / Blacklist management is key.
3. Go deep on your blacklist testing, build up your best quality whitelist.
4. Try not to share blocklists with campaigns or stay very organized.
5. Bigger whitelist campaigns perform better than single domain targeted campaigns.
6. CPC increases don't necessarily win more traffic, and can just increase cost.
7. CTR's don't matter. Use down funnel metrics even with poor eCPM.
8. CTR's do matter. Better CTR ads can help increase campaign eCPM and delivery.
9. Increasing daily budgets doesn't guarantee more traffic. Need to increase eCPM too.
10. Bids reported change constantly and must be updated frequently.

Yes. I think it's due to the following factors:

Content.ad is a mobile push dominated traffic source.

My rep suggested $500/day starting out, but I can only afford $100/day for testing, and wanted to keep spend low for an untested offer.

When running T1 Desktop, the traffic is much more saturated, and doesn't always spend my daily budgets.
When testing mobile campaigns, I could spend multiple hundreds in a few hours.

My rep also suggested content.ad performs better for campaigns with domains grouped together, instead of single or small target whitelists.
(This is still up to debate from my testing).

So I'd try to make sure you build a whitelist as big as possible, of 10-15+ domains with positive ROI's, good CTR's, and run traffic to that.
If not keep running a targeted blacklist campaign, or RON to build this up.


From the campaign level
Content.ad also prioritizes delivery via eCPM (CTR + Bids), and I see better delivery on camps the closer the eCPM is to $1.Past 7 days, my avg eCPM for top delivering campaigns has been around greater than $0.50.

I have smaller WL campaigns with $4+ eCPM's, but get low traffic. I tried increasing bids over the suggested AGR, and not see a big change in delivery. Again, I believe it's due to network competition and available desktop volumes, meaning really high bids would be need to win more traffic on bidding alone which could be risky.

In either case I'd try boosting eCPM of your campaigns by larger grouping of whitelist domains. Then employ on of two strategies.

1. Rotate in 1 or 2 under delivering domains you want to test to your top WL / eCPM campaign, with the same or higher bid, to see if the higher campaign eCPM impacts delivery.

2. Do the reverse with low eCPM campaigns, and rotate in a few higher performing domains to test impact.


For my BL campaign, Daily Impressions averages consistently around 200K on $100/db. CTR's around .30%. Bidding 0.22% of my payout. Doubling spend, doubles impressions delivery pretty linearly.

For my WL campaigns, I've been getting much lower CTR's around .20%, but I bid higher than I did the blacklist campaign, and this helps get my eCPM's up to $0.70. But doubling daily budget has not increased delivery. So I figure I need to find ways to increase the campaigns eCPM.


Part 2 below...

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Part 2 cont...

On Managed WL / Bids
I'm using the managed whitelist for December on my Black Listing campaigns only.
On My WL campaigns, I manual bid by domain, and set bids based on domain performance, epc, etc.

Because the bid ranges shown on the Managed List seem to vary so much from the rec averages, I'd rather just keep profitable domains under my control.

Content.ad seems to prioritize my $100 budget to 1 or 2 domains and ignores the rest for the day.

My rep recommend me to run open budgets to give the system no restrictions on the backend, and to bid about 0.05 higher than suggested bids shown in the Bid by Domain reports, to win traffic.

I need to do more testing to figure out what works best.

On Ad CTR's:

Similar to the above, impact of ad CTR on Content.ad seems to go both ways.

My first ads started out in my blacklisting campaign with avg CTR's around .20%. As I narrowed domains down CTR's and CV's did increased slightly to around 0.30%.

Took my "winners", targeted a whitelist, and some ads had worse CTR's (0.08%), even though they would get the majority of delivery in day.

I think what's happening is less impacted by the ad's eCPM / CTRs, and more so by their algo on small budgets. It deff wont delivery impressions evenly. It seems to pick one ad for the day and runs with it. So I try to evaluate ads less on CTR, and more down funnel metrics like LP CTR, or CVR, over longer time periods (3 - 7 days)

* The biggest impact to reviving a low delivering campaign for me has been making new ad images / ad angles. The increased CTR's of better ads has helped increase my eCPM.

Lastly, try testing out multiple of the exact same ad creative in the same campaign to get higher CTRs. You'll get some interesting results.

In my experience, I tested this in a whitelist campaign and had one ad reach 0.35% CTR, while the duplicate had ~1% CTR and much greater delivery. Pause the lower CTR one.

Haven't tested this method enough to determine if its a fluke, or a way to game their algo.


Test everything. Track everything.

I've been using the same summary text for most campaigns, but DO change them up when adding in new ads. Unfortunately I wasn't tracking these changes so can't give an answer, but I'm sure it impacts things at some level.

Try it out and let us know what happens!


I agree, keeping testing new ads / domains.

For me it was tough to spend a ton of money and return only -40% ROI, but I have some really solid domains starting to perform in response to my new, higher eCPM / CTR ads.

Hope any of this helps!

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@nickatnite good point about eCPM. Ultimately that is the number that really matters to networks, how much are they making off your traffic. I wonder if viewing campaigns in that light will help us better understand why some campaigns spend their budget and others get throttled.

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Yeah, eCPM appears to be a driving factor in getting delivery on Content.ad.

My broader based campaign, and subsequently best delivering, have all had eCPM's between $0.50 - 1.00.

My narrowly targeted campaigns with $2+ eCPM's are getting less delivery.

The last campaign is narrowly targeted, has an eCPM of $3.45 (and second highest CTR), yet it barely received visits.
So to me, If I would to need either work on increasing eCPM through bids / CTR, or broaden the targeting to get more placements and hopefully pull the eCPM closer to the $1 mark.

Cheers!

Here's the past 7 days campaign data for you to see effect on eCPM for my acount:

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The data appears to be missing.

That said, have you checked to see if there is enough inventory to serve out your narrowly targeted campaigns? Do your broad ones get more impressions from those sites?

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Just attached it above.

My rep said a few of those domains are highly competitive, and the lower volume made sense to him with my bids.

I am unsure of the total inventory available on those domains, so you bring up a good point about serving on narrowly targeted campaigns.

In theory, the broad campaigns should have more inventory available with more domains being exposed. This could result in more chances for clicks, equaling a higher camp ctr, which should help increase the campaigns eCPM, and ultimately increase delivery.

Here's some past 7 days data from the a converting domain ID in a Broad and Narrow campaign, at different bid levels.

Broad:
Domain Bid - $0.099
Domain Clicks - 233
Domain CV - 2

Camp Impr - 767,109
Camp CTR - 0.33%
Camp Spend - $67.29
Camp eCPM - $0.731


Narrow:
Domain Bid - $0.176
Domain Clicks - 807
Domain CV - 3

Camp. Impr - 450,931
Camp. CTR - 0.19%
Camp. Spend - $101.30
Camp. eCPM - $0.442


Not sure why the bid price in the broad campaign is lower, but probably was adjusted by the Managed White List. You can see the doubled manual bid price in the narrow campaign led to almost a 4x increase in clicks. CVR for the domain is about the same in each campaign.

I would say the data isn't stat significant, but in theory for this specific domain, I could try to run it at the lower bid in my broad campaign, and monitor for similar or better performance relative to the same domain being in the narrow campaign, over time.

But that seems like a lot of work...

Hence why I believe its easier to build a huge whitelist of top performing domains, to give your campaign the best chance to generate high CTR / eCPMs. The lower volume whitelist domains should get some boost from being in the strong campaign.

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Interesting, your broad one definitely gets a much higher CTR and thus a higher eCPM off those sites, even though the bid is lower. And you're right, no real difference in the CPA, although so few conversions doesn't give a lot of weight to the data on that.

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Interesting right? And yes really need more data to determine significance.

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@rtking, @iwanttofly,

Following up on my Content.ad experience.

I had great success for a week ($XXX / day profits) and then BOOM..... nothing.

Hit the will of no campaign spending, for about 5 days.

But of 10 minutes ago from writing this, my campaigns are getting traffic again.

So not sure what caused the hang up, but last night made a few changes to my account.

Including:

• Depositing funds to have an account budget greater than the total of daily cap from my all active campaigns (giving it always more spending room).
• Paused campaigns to reduce total number of active at one time.
• Resubmitted a new WL campaign at higher daily budget / updated bids to the AVG using Bid by Domain module.
• Hit up my AM on chat until his inbox exploded.

Not sure which one did the trick, or if it was as simple as having got out bid / low account budget.


Hope to get some more info back from my AM and back to greener days.

Were you able to revive your campaigns @rtking ?

Best of luck!

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I wasn't able to revive my campaigns yet... I've been failing pretty hard maybe i just need to try a different product type and see what happens.

The last campaign I launched I had paused after spending $300 and having less than -50% ROI which is normally the point at which I pause campaigns after spending 3x the payout. With this one I let it spend over 5x.

@nickatnite Thank you so much for the feedback your testing definitely has brought up some interesting things I've never thought of. If I do get something running good with somewhat reliable traffic I'll be sure to post!

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