Campaign Performance, Optimization & Delivery Best Practices

This article outlines some of the key best practices for optimizing your campaigns to increase performance and delivery of your campaigns on the Amobee Platform.

Overview

Amobee recommends allowing three to five days for data collection and one to two weeks to begin optimizations. For shorter campaign flights, allow three to five days or as soon as possible to begin optimizing.

Setting up Your Campaign

You can setup a campaign in a two-level or a three level hierarchy.

Here are some setup recommendations:

• IO: For campaign initiative
• Package: For channel + tactic(s)
  • Even spend or Daily at package level
• Line Item: For subtactic(s)
  • Auto-allocate at line item level if monthly budgets and/or a lot of line items

Note: If you have budget restrictions, then, set budget at the IO or package levels.

The way you assign and/or shift budgets between packages can be amongst the most effective optimization strategies. Setting the packages correctly in the beginning is crucial.

• Ease optimizations by providing the cleanest separations by historical performance and CPM.
• Setup and reporting should mirror each other as best as possible.

Evaluating Line Item Performance and Delivery

Like an IO, a line item uses the same tools to evaluate performance and delivery. While these metrics are specific to each line item, each line item's performance impacts the overall performance of the IO. Use line item level metrics to determine what optimizations can be done to improve delivery or performance.

General Best Practices

Budget Allocation

Shift budget towards tactics that perform best.

• Review campaign performance by line item to manually increase or decrease budgets.

• Set line item budgets to auto-allocate.

Budget Pacing

Set Packages to Even Spend or Daily (manual) at the start of your campaign.

• Towards the end of your campaign, you can use Auto-allocate on one or more packages.
• Even Spend will calculate your “daily needed” budget and automatically set daily caps.
• Package dates should mirror campaign flight dates and budgets add up to IO budget.

Line Items should always be set to Auto-allocate or Daily.

• Do not set Even spend at the line item level.
• Auto-allocate saves time making pacing adjustments, but can result in a few line items getting more scale than others.
• Daily pacing makes day-to-day line item shifts easier.
• Starting on Auto-allocate, then applying Daily caps to line items that you want to push spend to is a good strategy.

Note: At the package and line item levels, if you mix Auto-allocate and Daily pacing, then, you can select Designated Budget to ensure no other packages/line items that are set to Auto-allocate can steal budget from this package/line item, i.e, if you have a specific budget that you need to fulfill and your campaign has other packages/line items that are also set to auto-allocate.

If delivering budgets in full is your primary goal, then you can use flight lengths to determine Budget Pacing:

1. Annually: More flexibility to use Daily pacing in your campaign.
2. Quarterly: Needs more pacing guardrails, so that you might consider Even pacing at the package level and Daily pacing at the line item level.
3. Monthly: Even Spend at the package level and auto-allocate at the line item level might be necessary to ensure delivering budgets in full.
1. You can also apply Daily budget pacing on best performing line items to push spend on those.

Inclusion lists

Allocate budget towards sites that perform best.

• Evaluate site list to determine sites with high impression volume and strong performance

Create your inclusion list with top performing sites, create new line items, and target that list.

Exclusion lists

Remove sites that are spending but not performing. Use exclusion lists to avoid limiting scale where inclusion lists can limit scale by serving only to the designated sites.

• Evaluate site list to determine sites with high impression volume and low/poor performance
• Aggregate the list with poor performing sites and apply that blacklist to line items

Note: Advertiser-level exclusion lists apply to campaigns on a move-forward basis (implying that the lists will be applied to any new line items under an advertiser created from that point on and existing line items would need to have the list manually applied.) Exclusion- and Inclusion lists can be applied at the advertiser, package, or line item level.

Daypart Targeting

Understand the times of the day that perform best and allocate budget towards those times. Reduce spend on low performing times of the day.

Review the Daypart report to identify performance.

Contextual Targeting

Reach consumers that view content that is relevant to your business or discover audiences you may be missing.

• Review performance by contextual category
• Create new line items with top performing Precision Target categories or add to existing line items

Geographic Targeting

Identify the geographic locations, (i.e., zip code, state, country, etc.), that are performing well and shift budget towards those locations.

Review geo performance for both high and low performing locations and increase or decrease spend accordingly.

Audience Extension

Improve scale by expanding an audience that is performing well.

Review the Custom Audience report to determine overlap.

Note: Amobee recommends BlueKai, Datalogic, eXelate, and Crosswise as third-party providers for evaluation.

Re Targeting

Retarget consumers that have engaged with your ads and/or website in a timely manner to get them to complete an action or purchase.

• Setup line items with recency tactics by minutes, hours, days, or weeks
• Bid higher on any existing top performing recency tactics

Frequency

Retarget consumers that have engaged with your ads and/or website while avoiding over-saturation.

Compare performance at different frequency levels to identify the ideal number to serve to your customers.

Best Practices for Increasing Delivery

Amobee recommends the following guidelines when attempting to increase delivery:

• View the Automated Bidding feature to determine if your bid is adequate enough to win desired impressions. For example, if the eCPM is $3.00 and the line item eCPM is $3.56, it may be necessary to increase your targeted average bid to increase volume.
• Ensure targeting exclusions are not causing the lack of delivery. Verify if exclusions are necessary and/or client mandated.
• If there is a line item level frequency cap that is too restrictive, consider opening up the frequency cap.
• Ensure that the line item is using all available inventory sources.

Best Practices for Improving Performance

Amobee recommends the following guidelines when attempting to improve performance:

• Run a top-level domain (TLD) report to determine line item performance on a site level
  • Create an exclusion list of poor performing sites to target away from.
  • Create an inclusion list of top 100 performing sites to target in a new line item.

Best Practices for Optimization Tactics

Amobee recommends adding the following additional optimization tactics after a campaign has run for three days:

• Low-bid (to supplement a prospecting tactic) - Take 10% of the prospecting budget to launch this tactic and run it at a bid of $0.50.
• Velocity retargeting (to supplement a retargeting tactic) - Take 10% of the retargeting budget to launch this tactic. Start with a velocity of 12% and increase to 15%-20% after two weeks.

After a campaign has been running for about two weeks, add the following tactics if needed:

• Top Level Domain(TLD) and retargeting (to supplement a retargeting tactic) - This behavior is similar to velocity retargeting. It also targets the retargeting beacon and the top 100-200 TLDs. Take 10% of the retargeting budget to launch this tactic.
• Inclusion list (to supplement a prospecting tactic) - After the campaign has run for two weeks, see what the top 100 TLDs are for the campaign, then create an optimization line item targeting those sites. 10% of the prospecting budget should be used to launch this tactic.

Best Practices Based on KPIs

To set up a campaign for success, it’s important to understand the optimizations needed to hit your goal(s).

• Inventory metrics -  viewability, completion, clicks
• Audience metrics - conversions, reach, on-target demo

KPI	Best Practices
Inventory Metrics - CTR	Focus on app and mobile web. Separate desktop display line items by ad size and create domain inventory lists accordingly. Create “Prospecting” (exclusion inventory lists applied) and “Performance” (inclusion inventory lists applied) line items.
Inventory Metrics - Completion	Some VCR tips: Separate Desktop and Mobile channels into different line items. Separate FEP and CTV devices into different packages. For short flights, you can separate by video durations too.
Inventory Metrics - Viewability	Some viewability tips: Focus on viewability algorithm. Block below the fold. Create “Prospecting” (exclusion inventory lists applied) and “Performance” (inclusion inventory lists applied) line items.
Audience Metrics - Conversions	For conversion goals, use the following setup hierarchy: Insertion Order = Campaign initiative Package = Channel + Tactic  Line Item = Subtactic You can also set this up to match reporting, but this setup will allow you to better control spend across differently performing tactics.
Audience Metrics - Conversion (Retargeting)	To maximize spend on retargeting while still hitting your CPM and conversion goals, it’s best to use a variety of different retargeting recencies. 30 day 7 day 1 day 6 hour 1 hour If you are optimizing by recency, try Flat Bidding and Bid Shading for increased efficiency.