If you are not familiar with the Smart Bid feature for advertisers, we recommend reading this article before reading this Adnation’s Smart Bid advertiser case study. Within it, we will illustrate the progression of an advertising campaign overtime, showcasing how the Smart Bid feature has been used to achieve the target results for this advertiser. Specifically, we will focus on how Smart Bid was used with the Banner ad format for a range of Dating offers, ultimately resulting in the reach of this advertiser’s Target ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) of 120%. Read this Adnation case study to learn why Smart Bid is an ideal solution for automated bidding for Banner ad campaigns, or other campaigns that require fair amounts of testing and optimization.
Campaign Overview
Offers: Dating
Payout model: PPL
Ad format: Banner
Ad network: AdNation
GEO: US
Banner ads: An engaging ad format
The advertiser for this advertiser case study launched a Banner ad campaign in the United States with the primary goal of discovering fresh traffic sources to optimize conversions using the Banner ad format. Before starting to use Adnation’s Smart Bid, the advertiser was rotating several Dating offers with dynamic PPL values, which meant that the conversions also had dynamic values. Considering the dynamic nature of the conversions, the advertiser opted for a Target ROAS bid strategy rather than a Target CPA strategy for his campaigns.
Objective: 120% ROAS
Main constraints: Offers capped at 200 leads per day
Initial Campaign Setup:
Country: US
OS: All
Device Type: Mobile
Traffic Type: All
Zones Targeting: All
Categories: All
Frequency Capping: 1/24
Smart CPM: $0.20
Daily Budget: $800
First results with a regular Smart CPM campaign
After the initial campaign was set up, it was necessary to evaluate its performance one week after launch. The advertiser wasn’t happy with the results and was contemplating stopping the campaign, which according to him required more manual testing and optimization time than he could spare. At that moment, the campaign had a ROAS of 48% (Negative ROI -52%).
His account manager looked at the campaign’s statistics and found several points that contributed to its poor results:
-Lots of manual testing required: Banner ads are a highly visual and engaging format that is great for brand awareness and can achieve high conversions. However, because they need to be designed by specific GEOs and rely on their creatives’ quality and messaging in order to perform, they require a fair amount of testing, which makes campaign management time-consuming and challenging to set an adequate bid on each zone manually.
-Poor distribution of spending between zones: When launching a test campaign targeting several zones, the main objective is to identify high performing ad zones that could generate profit. However, 90% of the campaign’s spending was concentrated on four zones and the campaign reached its daily budget after 10 hours. These high-volume zones were holding back the campaign and the campaign needed to allow for more spending on other low-volume zones that were potential sources of profit.
-Underperforming dimensions: Additionally, some underperforming creatives, browsers and devices were impacting the overall ROAS of the campaign.
In the table below you can see the advertisers results from his initial targeting and bidding strategy:
It was time for a change of strategy… Using Adnation’s Smart Bid!
Smart Bid: Changing the game
The Banner ad format offers high volumes, as well as lots of GEO targeting and creative possibilities, which inevitably requires a large amount of management time: Testing, optimizing, setting appropriate bids per zone, and blocking underperforming creatives, zones and devices require significant time investment. The advertiser’s account manager recommended switching to a Smart Bid payment model to access automating optimization and more. This would fully automate the campaign according to the advertiser’s target ROAS. Considering the dynamic value associated with each conversion, a Target ROAS strategy was recommended over Target CPA.
In order to set up a Smart Bid campaign using Adnation’s Smart Bid, the first step was to advise the advertiser to create two campaigns to better distribute the budget and the offer’s daily cap. The first campaign targeted four zones that reported 90% of the spending from the initial campaign, and the second campaign targeted all zones except those from campaign 1. The objective of this strategy was to ensure that the offer cap remained allocated to the second campaign targeting lower volume zones to ensure proper testing.
This took advantage of the initial campaign’s results to carry out more relevant targeting on campaign 1 by excluding the underperforming devices and browsers. In addition, the advertiser removed the worst-performing creatives and variations from the campaign, which maximized the chances of reaching the target ROAS that the advertiser wanted to reach. Regarding campaign 2, it was suggested not to touch the targeting, because the spending on the initial campaign needed to be more significant in the targeted zones to draw relevant conclusions. For the Smart Bid ROAS setting 100% Target ROAS was selected, which meant that the initial objective was to reach the breakeven.
Please note: It is crucial to set a Target ROAS that is not too ambitious at the launch of a Smart Bid campaign to avoid over-optimizing the campaign to the detriment of volumes. Of course, the Target ROAS can be adjusted as the campaign progresses and according to its initial results.
Campaign 1 setup
Country: US
OS: All
Device Type: All except Huawei, Vivo, and Oppo
Traffic Type: All
Zones Targeting: 4713984, 470346, 4945834, 4461824
Categories: All
Frequency Capping: 1/24
Bid Strategy: Target ROAS: 100%
Bid Optimization: Maximize Volume
Daily Budget: $400
Campaign 2 setup
Country: US
OS: All
Device Type: All Mobile
Traffic Type: All
Zones Targeting: All except 4713984, 470346, 4945834, 4461824
Categories: All
Frequency Capping: 1/24
Initial CPM: $0.20
Bid Strategy: Target ROAS: 100%
Bid Automatic Optimization: Maximize Volume (week 1-2) Maximize Target ROAS (week 3)
Daily Budget: $400
First week results using Adnation’s Smart Bid
After one week, Campaign 1 reached a ROAS well above the target (138%). There was a significant increase of the CPM from $0.20 to $0.32; this means that the Smart Bid identified performing segments on which it positioned itself with an aggressive bid to maximize volumes; on the contrary, we notice segments on which the campaign did not deliver any more traffic after the first day, due to an ROAS well below the target.
Campaign 2 recorded a ROAS of 71%, below the advertiser’s target. However, the results were more than encouraging, as the zones that spent the most and collected significant data, were on target. The overall performance was impacted by the zones that did not have enough data for the Smart Bid to take over, so they were bidding based on the initial CPM configured, equivalent to a regular Smart CPM campaign. This campaign simply needed time to allow the Smart Bid to identify more optimizable segments.
Second week results using Smart Bid
At the end of the second week for the Smart Bid advertiser campaign case study, Campaign 1 recorded a target ROAS that was still above the target and significantly higher than the previous week (149%). The CPM was almost identical, $0.33 vs. $0.32.
Campaign 2 also recorded a target ROAS with a clear progression passing from 71% to 83%. Of course, it would be necessary to let the campaign run for several weeks to make a real profit. Given the significant volumes, it was suggested to the advertiser to switch the bid optimization from “Maximize Volume” to “Maximize target ROAS ” in order to focus on the ROAS and not on delivering conversion volume.
Third week results using Smart Bid
In the third and final week of testing we can see that there was no significant change on Campaign 1’s ROAS, and CPM was stable, so we can assume now that most segments are fully optimized usig Adnation’s Smart Bid.
Concerning Campaign 2, once the Bid Optimization changed to maximize Target ROAS, the ROAS improved from 83% to 120%, which was the advertisers initial objective. We noticed that several segments were no longer receiving traffic due to the change in optimization strategy prioritizing ROAS instead of volume. All zones with an ROAS below target had mostly recorded a significant drop in CPM, leading to a decline in traffic. As can be seen in the graph below, overall, the change in automatic optimization strategy clearly allowed the campaign to focus the budget on segments with an ROAS above the target set at the campaign level.
Conclusions
As you can see this is the perfect solution to automated bidding for Banner advertising. We hope that it has effectively showcased the effectiveness of Adnation’s Smart Bid. Smart Bid stands out as a robust feature enabling advertisers to fine-tune their bids for specific segments, a capability that isn’t possible with other automated bidding models. Smart Bid works very well for campaigns and formats that require a large amount of testing, because it guarantees optimal automatic optimization of your campaign and relieves you of the tedious tasks that managing a complex campaign requires. The success of a Smart Bid campaign will depend on the data collected, so it is essential to leave enough time for the campaign to better calibrate the bids according to the Target ROAS. To learn more about Adnation’s Smart Bid feature read our Documentation or contact your account manager.
