Optimization Center Best Practice

Ok, so you set your campaign and started receiving traffic, now it’s all about performance!

This article will help you learn the best ways to use our Optimization Center to meet your campaign KPI’s.

The first step will be to learn all available functions in the optimization center:

Selection Menu

 Once you enter the optimization center there are 3 mandatory parameters you will have to select:

1. Which campaign do you wish to optimize?
2. What time frame are you optimizing the campaign (Date range)?
3. How do you want to group the data?

When selecting one group you will have a filtering option. This is very useful if you wish to focus your optimization efforts. For example- you can choose to filter applications that spent over $1, or you can choose to see publishers that sent more than 10 clicks.

The filtering option is available for each of the groups and you can add as many filtering options as you want or choose none if you want to view the full data for the campaign (please note we only show the top 1000 results).

Once you finished selecting & filtering- simply click on the “Apply” button and the data will show below.

Counters & Trend Lines

When we gather the campaign data per dimension, we also show campaign cumulative data for Impressions, Clicks, Spend, Conversions & more.

This can assist in monitoring your campaign performance in general, while performing a drilled-down optimization.

Another useful feature is the Graph below the data.

This graph actually shows the trend lines for the selected metrics.

For example, in the picture below you can see the trend line of the campaign spend over the last 7 days:

You can switch between the metrics above, simply by clicking on them and see the trend line for each of them.

CPA Goal Range

If you are sending us your conversions/installs, this tool will be very useful (if you are not sending them, we strongly advise you to read more about conversion tracking here.

As you may know, Start.io has millions of Apps integrated. This means that keeping track of the performance per application can be slightly overwhelming. A practical way to sort between the apps that perform great and the ones that don’t is using the CPA Goal Range filter.

You can choose which color you want to see (based on the default range or based on your customized range) and take action on those apps.

The CPA goal range gives you a more visual view of your campaign performance.

When you set a CPA Goal:

1. for every source converting below the goal, you will see the eCPA in Green.
2. for every source converting between your goal and up to 10% higher, you will see the eCPA in Yellow.
3. for every source converting above 110% of your goal, you will see the eCPA in Red.
4. if a source did not convert at all the color will remain black – this means you have to pay special attention to sources with no color and high spending.

 This range is customizable and you can change the percentages for each color simply by clicking the “Customize range” button.

 

For example – you can filter all green apps and increase their bid:

Another example is to filter all the black apps (“-“) and blocking the top spending apps from the campaign: 

How to use Micro Bidding

Micro-bid is a feature that enables you to set specific bids inside your campaign.
You can micro bid on all available dimensions in the optimization center except for the creative level.
Micro bid value can be as low as 50% from the minimum campaign bid.

We recommend using micro bidding only on 1 dimension in order to avoid cross biddings.

When bidding on multiple dimensions the highest bid wins.

Here’s an example:

Campaigns’ CPC bid is $0.1

1. Micro Bid on App ID 123: $0.08
2. Micro Bid on Banner Ad type: $0.06

If your campaign gets a request from App 456 (that has no micro bid) with Banner ad type, the bid will be $0.06.

But if your campaign gets a request from App 123 with Banner ad type, the bid will be $0.08 as it’s the highest of the 2 micro bids.

How to block sources

Sometimes you will spot sources that do not perform well or at all.

Those sources can be in any of the optimization center dimensions and they can have a large impact on your campaign performance.

While micro bidding allows you to decrease their bid, sometimes it’s just not enough when it comes to meeting your campaigns' KPI’s.

We have 2 ways of blocking sources:

1. From the optimization center

Using the optimization center tools mentioned above such as filters, and CPA goal filter might be the faster way to block sources.

You can easily click on a “green” source and it will become “red” meaning – blocked.

You can take this action on multiple sources by checking the relevant sources and clicking on the block icon or you can mark all selected sources (it will select only the sources on the current page) and block all of them.

2. From the campaign edit page

You can export the campaign data, in any of the dimensions, but for this example let’s use the application data, from the optimization center to an excel file.

Sort and filter all the apps id’s you wish to block, and add them to the app block list in the targeting section under the “sources” tab:

Please use this feature carefully as blocking too many sources can cause a significant traffic decrease.

Micro Bidding by CSV File

Although using micro bidding is one of our most recommended practices for optimization, changing manually the bids for each campaign, especially high-volume campaigns, can be a lot of work. Especially if you use excel to analyze the campaign performance.

That’s why we have added the option to upload bids for a campaign source (can be Publisher, application, country, placement and more).

All you need to do is:

1. download the campaign data to excel (from the optimization center or from the reporting drill-down):
   
   
2. Analyze the data & calculate the bids you wish to set for each source:
   
   
3. Download the template for the CSV:
   
4. Open the CSV file and fill in the source + required bid (in this example it will be Application column & change column).

5. Save the file.

6. Upload it using the “Import Micro Bid” button:
   
   Please note that you should add sources that have the same date range as the optimization center table.