At the end of last year, PropellerAds announced the launch of a new bidding option: all affiliates who launch Push and Interstitial campaigns on CPC can now choose custom bids for specific ad zones.
Zone — an ad placement on a particular website.
This mechanic will allow affiliates to save lots of time, drop the manual work and cut costs if the auto-optimization option is for some reason unavailable.
What does this mean for affiliates and advertisers?
PropellerAds are the frontrunners of innovation in affiliate marketing. Their R&D team is famous for delivering features that streamline the processes for their clients. The community has been asking for custom bids for a while, and finally that call has been answered.
Custom bids can be applied to a specific zone or a group of zones, manually on the SSP platform or via API if an affiliate has an integration in place.
The feature is available for all formats that work with the CPC bidding model — Push Notifications and Interstitial banners.
Here's how it helps affiliates in their day-to-day job, in detail.
#1 It helps you control and optimize bids based on the CPA level
Previously, if an advertiser wanted to go with a certain CPC bid, it was applied to the campaign in total. The alternative was to use an auto-optimization algorithm, for instance the CPA Goal 2.0 model, which has its own limitations. And even with it, the user had little control over the bids: they were set automatically by the model based on how well the campaign converted.
If the user wanted more control over the bid, they'd have to create a separate campaign for each group of zones.
Custom bids are a true game changer. If the cost per conversion on a particular placement is getting too high, instead of creating another campaign with a lower bid and decreasing the CPA, the user can now just adjust it within the running campaign. So, if quality conversions are coming from particular ad placements – all the advertiser needs to do is increase the bid and start getting more traffic and more conversions from these zones.
#2 It saves advertisers' time on whitelisting zones
Okay, but what if creating a separate campaign is not that complicated? Well, it is.
The process looks like this. First, your campaign goes through the testing period and starts showing stable performance. Not necessarily good, just stable. Once you get the stats, you can sort the zones by conversions. The next step is to whitelist the ones that convert well. Next, you create a separate campaign with a higher CPC bid and launch it on those zones only. As a newly launched campaign, it goes into another testing period during which the model "learns" how the traffic works for your offer. But what if there is more than one group of placements that you want to change the bid for? That means another white list, another campaign and another testing period. The amount of work grows exponentially.
Now that advertisers can change the bid within one campaign they save lots of time, effort and can focus on more urgent matters.
#3 Cut costs without auto-optimization
As we've mentioned several times before, auto-optimization requires a testing period during which the model learns how your campaign performs on certain shares of traffic. That's not ideal if you're certain that a group of placements will convert with a particular CPC bid.
Additionally, for it to work, you need to set the S2S conversion tracking as the model uses information about conversions. If that's not an option, custom CPC bids can help you control traffic quality and still maximize the number of conversions you get from your traffic.
Setting up custom CPC rates
To set custom CPC rates in your campaign at PropellerAds:
Go to the “Campaigns” page.
Click on the name of the campaign you want to optimize.
Find the "Custom rate" column and adjust the rates to your liking.
What can we say? That's a great job once again, go Propeller!
Want more tips on running profitable campaigns with Propeller? Then check out PropellerAds' blog.
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