General Revcontent Q's (3)
Really been hitting revcontent hard and have a couple q's that maybe someone with more experience would be able to answer:
1 - Is creative refreshment a thing - adding new creatives to converting campaign unbalancing CTR and ruining campaign. I heard this on the NBN course and think I may have experienced it with two campaigns. Also have never switched of winning campaign, but drop widget bids if I hit a cap as that was something I learned from NBN and yet to test.
2 - Without topics, is the standard way of finding widgets doing RON and blacklisting to top based on conversions or manually picking using Adplexity - which is a tactic I heard from another adv. In beginning, I picked recognisable sites from small RON and used all their widgets / later blacklisted poor performing ones. I got lucky that most of ones I picked had high traffic counts / converted well, but to hit $x,xxx+, I may need more sites and still don't understand how others approach this.
Def. willing to elaborate if questions not clear.
I would say @platinum is probably the top authority on here when it comes to Revcontent, so I'm sure he'll chime in.
I haven't used it regularly for about a year... however I did tons of volume on there in 2019... both before and after they made all their big changes.
Back then I never noticed that adding new ads was bad in and of itself... only if one of the new ads started getting the majority of the clicks but not converting as well as the previous ones... however in that case you would just pause the new ad(s) and the old one(s) would still do well.
In fact, I found Revcontent's ad serving and ad performance to be far more "robust" than Taboola or Outbrain, which seemed more finicky and sensitive to changes. Revcontent's seemed very black and white and "analog" - the opposite of something like facebook or Taboola's smartbid or something like that that is super complicated and can 'fall apart' if you make changes.
For your second question... back then when I started with Revc and the Nothing But Natives course came out, Revcontent still had tons of bot widgets that were just horrible, so whitelists were a big thing since it would allow you to not lose money on the bot widgets...
Once Revc got rid of the bot widgets though (or at least 99% of them) it seemed to me that run of network became the better way to do things... with lots of individual adjustments on widgets...
So for instance the last winning campaign I had on there (before it slowly died out) was run of network but had like 40 blocked widgets, and another 60 that had three or more conversions where I had set the bid to 60% of EPC automatically by using TheOptimizer.
But yeah, I'm getting ready to try to restart that same campaign I mentioned above, so I'll let you know how it goes 
Thanks for the tag @jack_l
Unfortunately I haven't touched much RC lately, however on a small recent test I ran to update myself noticed the following.
When introducing new creatives to a campaign that has received traffic for a few days, the new creative will most likely get a better ctr during it's first day of run. Then after the first day, the new creative's reach may faint out. I'm under the impression this is a test RC system runs by default to compare the new creative against the existing ones. I think it's worth noting that if we're introducing a well-known image (like the ones used for ages that are known for a solid performance) their system will most likely prioritize. Not 100% sure about this last one, but I've noticed this happening with other networks too.
Targeting widgets from what you see on spy tools used to be recommended quite frequently on Malan's forum. I'm personally against it because like you never know if image X or Y; or headline A or B will be a winner, you also don't know if a group of sites will deliver the results you want. On top of that, nowadays it's a bit hard to get a whitelist campaign rolling, so making things work on a RON camp is far better than forcing yourself to make a WL camp work.
Something to be careful with today's inventory on RC is their native email widgets on a high bid. If you'll try to block these widgets after X amount of clicks without generating any landing page clicks, odds are they will still continue to send traffic even after you block them because the email your ad was part of is still delivering.
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