Achieving good CTR, conversion rates and ROI is just the beginning of any campaign optimization. Ultimately, you would want to get up to the next level and boost the total profits.
One of the major challenges faced by performance marketers is bringing marketing campaigns to a massive scale and making sure that the achieved progress is sustainable. The most common scenario is when you’ve been stuck with low profits for some time, but each time you try to widen the targeting settings or add new traffic sources, CPA skyrockets out of control.
In this article, we will guide you through the best way of scaling on the MGID platform. By applying these proven methods, you will be able to very naturally increase the campaign volume without losing out on costs per results.
Traffic and conversion campaigns
When scaling and optimizing, you should always keep in mind the end goal you want to achieve. There are two types of campaigns, namely traffic and conversion campaigns. The key purpose of traffic campaigns is to bring users to the website, whereas conversion campaigns are aimed to drive traffic and onsite actions, such as registrations, purchases, forms submissions, etc.
Regardless of the campaign type, you will always want to drive traffic to your website or app. The bottom of the marketing funnel is similar for both traffic and conversion campaigns, so you have to check for KPIs such as impressions, clicks, CTR, and bounce rate.
However, as you aim for specific actions at the users’ side rather than views, the marketing funnel becomes further multi-layered and complicated. You can use several landing pages with different creative approaches and measure each step a user takes along the customer journey. Thus, for conversion campaigns, you would also be interested to control KPIs like conversions, CVR and ultimately CPA rate.
Once again on the importance of a testing period
Any paid advertising should always start with testing; this initial step is key for further optimization and scaling. When testing, you should allocate the separate budget, which our account managers can advise on for each geo.
At this stage, you should also test different marketing approaches, landing pages and creatives. For conversion campaigns, we advise starting with no more than three landing pages with different creative approaches. For both traffic and conversion campaigns, it is recommended to test as many creatives as you can during the testing phase, for example, ten different creatives or more. All creative approaches should be tested in separate campaigns to find and compare the most relevant traffic sources for each of them.
Once your creatives have passed the moderation process, adjust the targeting settings for these initial tests. It is always better to start with the most basic settings, medium CPC and to only adjust geo for the test. These tests are likely to produce negative ROI, but they will provide valuable insights for further optimization.
Step-by-step scaling
Once you gathered statistics during tests, you can choose the best performing landing page and a few creatives. Also, you may want to adjust bids for high- and low-converting creatives.
Attention should be paid to setting coefficients on different widgets because the widgets with high CTR may pull your advertising budget. The testing phase will give you the opportunity to balance out the costs per conversion by adjusting coefficients for widgets IDs and blacklisting zero-performing traffic sources.
From then on, you can launch several campaigns with the most promising targeting settings and increased CPC rates. For example, depending on the test outcomes, you may target users on desktop devices and create several different campaigns for different OS or browsers. This way, you will be able to analyze these targeting approaches separately.
Note that as you dive deeper into targeting, whitelisting and blacklisting, you should increase your CPC; usually, it is enough to raise your bids by a factor of 1.5. Do not hesitate to consult with your account manager on this matter as you are to implement significant changes in your targeting settings. Also, if you achieved outstanding performance with specific targeting settings, you can gradually increase CPC by 10% for further scale.
To scale and increase efficiency at the same time, we recommend adding campaigns with new targeting and keeping the working campaigns in rotation while their ROI is positive. One common tactic is creating two sets of campaigns for different OS, browsers, or other settings — with low and high CPC rates.
Last but not least, you should continuously monitor the performance of chosen creatives, add new ones, and exclude underperformers. Remember that fresh and unusual creatives are the source of your competitive advantage. It can be recommended to split the budget 80/20: 80% allocated to proven creative strategies and 20% to experiments.
Conclusion
The key difference between a professional performance marketer and beginner is the ability to scale and maintain profitability at the same time. Take into account all necessary KPIs and metrics along the marketing funnel because they will be able to signal problems at the specific stage. In addition to this, it is extremely important to get the right insights during the testing phase and later on. Finally, at MGID we recommend a controllable, differentiated approach when adding new campaigns with adjusted targeting settings, rather than changing the initial approach that brings consistent results.
