Optimization is one of the most important steps in running a successful push ad campaign and really any digital marketing campaign. It is the process of analyzing your campaign results, refining your campaign in order to maximize your ROI.

Optimization is simply just the process of improving and can be applied to everything from bidding and campaign targeting to landing pages and ad creatives

Luckily for you, nowadays you can automate much of the optimization process but everyone should still know the basics.

When to optimize your campaign

One very important question that everyone has is when is the right time to start optimizing.  If you optimize too soon you could missout on potential opportunities just because you didn’t see them in time. On the other hand, if you take too long in optimizing your campaigns you could be unnecessarily burning some of your profits.

As a general rule of thumb, you want to wait until you have an ad spend equal to your payout before you start messing with anything. You can use the following as a guide

• Start your bid optimization at 1x payout
• Start your ad creative optimization at 1-2x payout
• Start your laundering page optimization when conversion > 10
• Start narrowing your targeting and blacklists when ad spend (per target or feed) >3x payout

Please keep in mind that this is meant as a guide and not a perfect formula. There is no golden ratio that works for a sweepstake campaign with a $2 payout and also a crypto campaign that has a payout of $500.

Now, when do you know you have finished optimization? Ideally, you should never stop optimizing your campaigns because there will always be room for improvement.

Steps to optimizing your campaign

1. Plan

Although this article is mainly focused on post-campaign optimization, we don’t want you to forget to plan your campaigns in an intelligent way. by properly setting up your campaigns you can create a clear path for optimization along with preventing pointless mistakes. You should always start your campaigns with a little research into the offer, and what the competition is doing.

2. Gather data

Before you can do any optimizing, you need to have sufficient data from a campaign. So let your campaign run and keep an eye on the data you are collecting. As we mentioned, it is dangerous to optimize too soon because you could miss out on good traffic sources.

3. Check your bid

Your overall win rate is a great indication of how much you should be bidding. Ideally, you want a win rate of around 30-40%. If you are below, consider raising your bid to reach a wider audience. If you are above this, you should lower to avoid overspending.

For the best results, adjust your bid for each supply ID. Move over to your Campaign Stats Page and select your campaign and then set the dimension as “Supply ID”. This will show how your campaign does across all our supplies. Now you can repeat the aforementioned strategy with each individual supplier.

Tip: Check this often because the prices of push traffic can be very volatile.

4. Check the performance of your creatives

We always recommend creating at least 3 different creatives in order to run A/B tests on them. To measure the effectiveness of your ad creative, the key metric is the CTR. Head to the Campaign Stats Page and set the dimension to “Creativities” and access the CTR of each creative (Ideally, you want a CTR of at least 2-3%).

To optimize, change the least effective creatives to varients of the more successful ones. You shouldn’t simply remove the least effective creativities so you are left with only one because this will prevent you from any future optimization.

At pushground, you can use our auto-optimization by creativity to automatically give more traffic to your better performing creatives. This allows you to take your time knowing that some bad creative won’t end up eating up all your budget.

Tip: This process does not end. We recommend that you constantly create new variations of your ads because they have a tendency to burn out over time. Even slight variations can have a big impact on your results and returns.

5. Check the performance of your landing page

There are a ton of ways you can optimize your landing pages, so many that we will probably end up writing an article about that later on.

Most people use 3rd party trackers to evaluate their landing pages. The CR (conversion rate, conversions/clicks) is the main measure of the effectiveness of your landing page. Ideal CRs vary across verticals and payouts. Two other important stats for measuring landing pages are the bounce rate and the time on page.

Landing page builders

To properly optimize your landing page, you will need to be constantly testing new things, and making quick changes. Having the right landing page builder can really help a lot.  They can save you ultimately a lot of time in addition to helping you get more conversions.

Take a look at some of our favorite landing page builders.

• Instapage
• Unbounce
• Landingi
• Leadpages
• Thrive

AB Testing

Similarly to creativities, you can (and should) run A/B tests on your landing pages. You can run different campaigns at the same time with just different landing pages.  Another way is to use a tracker or landing page platform to distribute traffic to various landing pages based on their performance (similar to what we do to ad creatives).

In-depth analysis Tools

You can also you tools like crazy egg and smartlook to gain valuable insights into the performance of your landing pages with easy to use heatmaps and funnels.

Speed

If you don’t know by now the speed of your landing page has a huge impact on CR. Walmart found that for every 1-second increase in page load times, conversion increased by 2%.  This is even more true for mobile sites.

To test your lander’s speed and to find out how to improve it check out these two tools.

Gtmetrix

Google page speed insights

Pre-landers

The last thing we want to mention about landing pages is the effect of pre-landers on conversions rates.  If you not, you should be using a pre-lander.  They will help you optimize and find problem areas faster as well as giving a large boost to your CR.

There are a ton of other ways you can make your landing pages more effective. Some include making your call to action bigger and more obvious or adding testimonials. Check out this more comprehensive list of landing page optimization tips.

6. Create a blacklist or whitelist

Once you have enough data you can start blacklisting sources and building data for whitelists. If you need a refresher, check out our article on blacklists or whitelists.

Blacklists and whitelists are used to either exclude or include specific traffic supplies. They can be helpful if you find that some traffic supplies consistently under or outperform others. We recommend that you always start with a blacklist before you move to a whitelist to avoid missing out on profitable suppliers.

You should start blacklisting sources until you have spent around 3x payout for that supply.

As we mentioned earlier, this will help you avoid over-optimization and missing out on potential opportunities.

You can easily find under or outperforming traffic supplies in your Campaign Stats Page by setting the dimensions to either supply ID or site id.

7. Optimize your settings

After that, you can continue to refine your campaign by tweaking the targeting options.

On the campaign stats page, you analyze the differences in device types, operating systems (OS), network types, carriers, user freshness through their respective dimensions. When you find trends in your CTR and conversions, go to the Campaigns Page to edit and refine your campaign to reflect the trends that you found.

For example, if you found that you got better results from mobile rather than WIFI, edit your campaign to target only mobile.

Tip: Remember that not all traffic is the same price, the better converting traffic could have a higher average CPC. We recommend that you have duplicate campaigns focusing on different dimensions to see how the cost change and to better calculate your ROI. This especially works well for user freshness.

Dayparting

You will quickly find that some days and hours work much better for you than others. Dayparting (breaking the campaigns into different times of the) can help you buy more of the traffic that converts best you while saving you money on the traffic that doesn’t.  

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