Best Practices

Naming convention

It is recommended to enforce a naming convention to keep campaigns easy to find. For example "Media Agency" / "Advertiser" / "Campaign name" / "YYMMDD - YYMMDD"

Make it a habit to name retargeting pixels with the advertiser name. It makes it easier to refer to them.

Effective CPM will be lower than than set Max CPM  

In the auctions won, usually the second highest bid is paid by the winner. This will make effective CPM lower than the max CPM, usually by at least 15-20%.

Have some margin in your set Max CPM

BidTheatre's platform fee and any audience buying costs, will be deducted from your bid. Because of this, you should allow some room between a known seller price and the set max CPM. Also, currency conversions between systems may introduce small pricing differences that you should account for.

 

Make separate adgroups and bid strategies for premium formats

Sometimes it is useful to bundle and buy the premium formats of a campaign separately, since these usually command higher prices.

Validate that everything is OK

Make it a habit to always go through a checklist procedure for each campaign:

• Verify that ads are seen under the "ads" tab. It takes up to 15 minutes for newly added ads to be visible.
• Verify that ads click through properly by clicking them.
• Verify that all RTB inventory markets have validation "OK" and status "Active"
• Verify that the campaign is active by looking in the Campaign Status tab

During the campaign

Especially during the initial stages of a campaign, it's valuable to verify that everything proceeds as expected. If a campaign is delivering too slowly, verify that all markets are active, and that targeting settings does not limit the available audience too much. If necessary, add sites to the media plan, or widen audience.

If clicks is an objective, optimize the campaign by removing sites that deliver poorly in terms of clicks. If a Max CPC setting is set, the system will adjust bids to reflect this.

Working with exclusion lists

One approach to running campaigns is to target a rather vast amount of inventory through the pre packaged site lists and custom site lists. Often however, not all sites turn out to be suited for the particular campaign, and should be excluded from buying. One practical way of doing is this is to inspect site delivery statistics through the Campaign Setup - RTB Sites tab, and add poorly performing sites to the campaign's exclusion list to prevent further buying. The campaign specific exclusion list is created with new campaigns. 

Adding additional ad formats to running campaign

When adding additional ad formats a campaign, don't forget to ad the new ads to existing adgroups. If the adgroup has automatic audit checked, they will be audited automatically. Otherwise, you need to order adgroup audit on the RTB adgroup settings for RTB Inventory.

Change creatives

Engagement with creatives decrease over time, as the message wears out with the receiver. Therefore, we recommend that you switch creative materials at least once per month for always-on campaigns.

 

Consider Reach

The impact of your message will be proportional to the number of unique people exposed to it. In the age of data driven advertising, niche targeting certainly is powerful and should be used. For prospect, keep track on the unique users that you target and find.

 

Avoiding multiple bids for the same campaign on the same site

BidTheatre ASX will refrain from bidding to buy more than one placement for any given campaign on a specific known RTB site during a time of 2 seconds. This will eliminate that a single campaign is shown multiple times on a given page view for a single user, which is often desirable to avoid.

There is a change however, that a publisher is using multiple selling platforms simultaneously. In these cases, ASX cannot differentiate and understand that two bid requests received are actually for the same site.