Your campaign is really taking off, the budgets are consistently capping, you’re driving conversions, and you’re maintaining high CTRs. Now is the time to push your performance to the next level and tweak each campaign to reach its full potential. Here are a few steps to help you reach your goals even faster.
Increase budgets on successful campaigns
Have a few extra dollars to spend? Instead of creating a new campaign, add the funds to an existing campaign that is already performing well. Increasing your budget will amplify the content for longer throughout the day and boost your exposure with more customers.
Create a new campaign
A/B testing is a great way to discover which tactics and strategies drive the strongest performance while also expanding your reach. Add a new campaign to focus on a new geographical region, a different device, or an alternative piece of content. By testing out a new campaign and reviewing its success, you’ll be able to expand your reach in our network and locate an audience that isn’t currently being targeted by your current campaigns.
Lower your CPCs
If your budget has capped for at least 3 days in a row, we recommend lowering the CPC by a few cents so that you can stretch your budget spend. The higher the CTR, the more you can lower the CPC. Be sure to only lower by $0.02-$0.03 cents at a time to avoid any interruptions in campaign performance.
Set a start time
If you haven’t already, set a start time for your campaign that works best for your goals. While the automatic start time is 12 AM EST, this may not be the sweet spot for when your target audience is consuming content. Test out what time of day works best by changing the start hour in your campaign settings.
Mirror high-performing headlines
Our system will hone in on the creatives that resonate most with our audience. Review your campaign’s content and locate those with high CTRs and conversion rates, then add in a few more variations that resemble these successful pieces in order to keep the engagement level high. For any headlines that aren’t performing well, disable them by clicking the pause button to maximize spend on better performing headlines.
Loosen your targeting restrictions
Amplify offers a wide range of targeting options, which may tempt you to pile on tactics. However, it’s important to remember that Outbrain’s proprietary algorithm continuously works to identify your most relevant audience and you are buying on a CPC model, so you’re only paying for those engaged users. That being said, you really shouldn’t feel the need to go heavy with your targeting, especially if you want to scale up.
Adjust the CPC for high-performing sections
While our algorithms will automatically promote your content on sites where your ideal audience spends time, you have the power to shape the outcome. Select a specific campaign in your dashboard, then head to the “By Section” view in the “By Publisher” drop-down menu. From there, you can adjust the CPC for a certain section in order to optimize where your budget will be spent for each campaign. You’ll even be able to exclude a publisher or section if it’s severely underperforming.
Create a Lookalike Audience
If you’ve set up a Custom Audience segment or have your own first-party data, you can create a Lookalike Audience that models the behavior and traits of your existing customers, enabling you to expand reach without sacrificing quality.
Make sure to read through our setup guide to see if this option is right for you. Once you’re ready, head to the “Audiences” tab in your dashboard to get started. As long as your custom segment is large enough, you’ll be able to create a Lookalike Audience.
Looking to scale your conversions or engagement?
If you’re looking to boost conversions or engagement, our powerful automated bid strategies will do the trick.
Conversions: Conversion Bid Strategy (CBS) Fully Automatic mode will automatically adjust your CPC to maximize conversions, while Target CPA and Target ROAS modes will drive conversions while adhering to your predetermined CPA or ROAS goal.
Engagement: Utilize Engagement Bid Strategy (EBS) to increase clicks, session duration, or pages per session. Leveraging your own first-party website analytics data, our engine auto-optimizes your campaigns toward users that demonstrate significant attention and intent.
Capping your budget is just the beginning of campaign optimization using Outbrain. If you have any questions on the above tips or would like further assistance on your campaigns, don’t hesitate to reach out!