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SmartCPM Sucks?! Even with whitelist? (15)

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How do you apply the Smartcpm bidding model?

I have a successful CPA campaign that has been running for over 2 weeks.

I’ve collected 100+ conversions and built a pretty nice whitelist.

So I take this whitelist and create a new campaign use the EXACT SAME TARGETING with the EXACT SAME FUNNEL.

And it bombs! -70% ROI or worse!

I don’t really understand how this is possible but extremely frustrating to say the least.

I tested 2 bids 1 at the recommended rate and another at 20% above the recommended rate because it’s a whitelist. Again both failed miserably.

How are you juicing extra volume using SmartCPM?

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WL on SmartCPM ain't easy, especially pops. Remember WL is better for testing quality and new offers. They're not usually great for scaling.

But.

There are still a ton of different ways to pummel them into submission. Test a few things out:

Take your highest converting, most profitable zone, and whitelist just that zone. Bid as high as possible. See what happens.

Take the top 5 zones, bid the average CPM across those zones. See what happens.

Do that again, but bid at the highest CPM of those top 5.

If any of those work, consider a straight CPM camp at your target bid.

Also, if the offer is still working on the CPAg camp, I would run a SmartCPM on RON with an average bid (and aggressive cutting rules) or BL, so you can start building a solid BL --which is what you want long term.

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Thank for clarifying that - I must have had a fundamental misunderstanding. I thought that if a campaign was high ROI that meant that there was room to go in with a CPM campaign and increase the bid.

Still working on my scaling. I guess it's better to just incrementally increase the bid in the successful campaign. Like increasing CPA from .28 to .29 for example.

I've never had any consistent success with the SMARTCPM bid model.

Also what does RON mean? Tried looking it up and couldnt find anything

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If you have zones that are doing consistently extremely well, of course you can put them in a cpm campaign and laser adjust your bid.

Run On Network. Basically it is wifi + all mobile carriers; meaning all available traffic.

It is not easy. You either need a really good offer or a good offer and lots of data. In both cases of course you need a good lander too or one of the few offers that perform great without lander.

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Thanks, I've done this just didnt know there was a name for it.



It's funny you say this, I am grappling with this right now. I want to add LP's to my mix. I have good quality traffic with targeting lasered in and an offer that converts well on it's own.

But now that I want to test some LP's not sure which approach to take. But I'm thinking CPA whitelist with highest converting zones.

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If you have a camp that is running profitable --> keep it.

You can launch separate camps. Just don't change too many variables at once with new camps. Otherwise you lose track of what is bringing you success or failure.

Don't know which traffic source you want to use for CPA. But usually it is best to only use proven lander for a CPA camp since algo tries to optimize the camp.

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Running on Propeller, I don't have any proven landers yet so I need to test some. Having success with direct linking. Starting a seperate campaign with identical targeting and same offer + landers. Maybe I'll just run on it on a handful of the top converting zones using CPM.

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So you are referring to cpa goal.

I would not use it with a WL or BL. Usually you get far less volume by doing so. Maybe better to try it RON and start with a low bid.

BUT be careful. Cpa goal sends you the best and most expensive traffic in the beginning. So you need to have an eye on it until the initial boost is over.

If it is only a few zones you can manually check the traffic chart for each zone. This way you avoid overpaying.

Single zones can be working quite fine, especially when they receive a lot of traffic. Then you will actually see an effect when changing the bid.

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At first it depends on your WL.

When you have a WL with all placements that converted at least once somehow then ti could also be that it´s filled with placements that only generated lottery conversions, thus the quality of the WL won´t be that good.

That´s why I always have several WL to work with.

For example WL with placements that have at least 5 conversions and more than 0% ROI, 10 conversions and more than 0% ROI, 20 conversions and more than 0% ROI.

Then you will never get the full potential from your WL when you run it on SmartCPM.

SmartCPM is good when you want to keep better control over the adspend, when you run a good and proven WL you want to get maximum traffic from these placements.

When you run these WL on SmartCPM you run them very cost effective but won´t receive the volume that you would receive on higher bids so it´s better to run a good WL on fixed CPM bids.

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Yeah I have not had allot of success running CPA goal with whitelist for this reason. Volume is too low. Good to have someone else confirm this.


Interesting point. I only have 1 whitelist right now but I the list only includes zones with 2+ conversions to eliminate r reduce the "lottery conversion problem. But I had not thought of segmenting the list further to 5,10,20 conversions etc.



This is the part that I dont understand. In Propeller the SmartCPM bid model is the only one that allow you to manually bid on zones. So I thought I could achieve maximum volume by running the whitelist and bidding high on the best zones. I will give the WL on fixed CPM a try

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I even go further and make WL not only by number of conversions but also by ROI.

So are you running a WL campaign on SmartCPM where you set individual bids for the zones?

Then you should be able to get more volume because the SmartCPM bid is only the general bid for the campaign.

When you set individual bids for specific zones then these individual bids will be fixed CPM.

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Yep this was exactly what I was trying to do. Here's a side by side where I was manually bidding on high converting zones using the fixed cpm model VS a CPA goal campaign with the same targeting. I killed it pretty quickly.

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Sorry for being stupid, but which one is the fixed CPM campaign and which one the CPA Goal?

Did you run the same lander?

It´s strange that the fail campaign has 0% LP CTR whereas the other campaign has 71% CTR.

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Thanks @lilgator for bringing up this topic. I came across the exact situation in which I have a good CPA campaign but don't know how to scale to CPM campaign. Below is my CPA (the top row) vs SmartCPM (RON with bid starting at low) performance . I don't use WL here because I think to scale well you need to start from RON campaign.



Can you give any tips how to scale a good CPA campaign to a CPM campaign ? I think in this case my starting bid is not good. Should I jump straight to the high bid

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Strange indeed! It wasn't actually a lander it was a blank redirect page that redirects in 300 Milliseconds. An old bot trap method that was recommended here but I later found out it's basically moot at this point so I did not bother adding it to the CPM. The CPA Goal campaign is the green one.

We are both asking the same question my friend

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