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How can you tell if competition increased? (8)

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Hi,

People always telling "competition increased" but to me it always seemed vague like some black magic called "competition" running away with your conversions.
How exactly do we define it, what are we looking for, what do we notice, and who do we beat up?

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So its basically some one else bidding on the same traffic as you are,
same Geo/device/browser/bid/sources it could be anything.
traffic is always categorized in terms of volumes according to the targeting, and if one of more people are looking to buy the same traffic it increases your competition.
always refer to your win rate or position, to understand how competition is affecting you.

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Some tell-tale signs are:

-Decrease in traffic with the same bid

-Decrease in CTR and/or conversion rate

-Decrease in payout

-Increase in scrub rate by the affiliate network or advertiser

The tricky thing here is that these signs can also be a result of a number of other possible causes.

The "good" thing is we don't need to attribute the decrease in performance to an increase in competition per se. Let's just agree that all campaigns will die eventually - we do what we can to delay the inevitable, until the profits no longer justifies the effort of keeping the campaign running.

Here are some of the things we can do to delay the inevitable:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...gn-Performance

And of course, testing new creatives from time to time can help. In fact, for banner ads or push ads, this is an essential part of campaign maintenance.



Amy

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I think that the best recommendation to avoid high competition it is avoid bragging your good result with traffic. As much you share info, as much you lose money)

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This is a decent way incase the traffic source has such a metric, otherwise - it's also good to look at metrics that we for sure can know is available on the side of marketers always

Thanks alot amy! Ugghhhh it's still ambiguous to me

@twinaxe can you verify that? what do we notice?

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Which part? A decrease in traffic, CTR and/or CR when you haven't changed anything, should be easy to spot.

As for course of action to combat a decrease in performance:

1)https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...gn-Performance

2)Also: Here are the best threads I've read on the topic of bidding wars you could check out - oldies but the basics still apply today:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...he-Competition

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...ic-Bidding-War

3)Replace ads on a regular basis. @twinaxe has already covered that here:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...-101-Creatives

Read the section on "Creative Fatigue".



Amy

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Those are all great reads!

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Hey @roiter123

We wanted to add to what amy said here. Another quick way to see how much competition there is in a particular Geo would be to check directly with your ad network.

At Pushground we show how much competition there is in a more precise way on our CPC rates page which is calculated on the number of bids competing for the same opportunity.

Another thing to note is that as the competition rises the CPC for a supply becomes more fragmented. This means that instead of all the sources for a supply going for roughly the same CPC, the source CPCs would be more dispersed because there would be more people setting different bids for the sources they find successful.

This makes it much easier to quickly overbid or under bid on a source level especially if you are under experienced.

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