BEST PRACTICES FOR GETTING STARTED
Campaign Setup & Creative Assets
Launch Checklist
Funding & Payment
Account Management
Revcontent API - Advanced/Technical Users
Additional Help
BEST PRACTICES FOR GETTING STARTED
Campaign Setup & Creative Assets
Your first campaign should generally be based on a funnel you have seen success with before.
If not, the following still applies.
1. STARTING: You will want to run separate campaigns for Desktop and Mobile as bid
ranges between the two can vary dramatically. It is also best practice to break out
different campaigns per geo and traffic type (Native/Push/Adblock).
● To easily distinguish between campaigns, I suggest you use a naming
convention like this:
<Campaign> - <Geo> - <Device>
Example: Auto Insurance - US - Mobile
2. CREATIVES: 3-5 creatives per campaign MINIMUM. Your original campaign should
have creatives that are very different from one another; you can then take your “winners”
and create new variations with similar images to test. The idea is to play with the image
variable to build a mix of creatives and maximize CTRs. Spend time developing
campaigns around winning ideas and you will be rewarded with long term volume.
● Creative Specs & Guidelines
3. DEFAULT BID: Start with a competitive CPC at launch. Starting with a low default CPC
will make it impossible for you to get traffic from our network of premium publishers. As
your content generates clicks, you can adjust your CPC up or down on the placement
level which will override your initial CPC.
NOTE: Making a bid adjustment on the placement level pulls your campaign
out of testing on that widget and signals the system that you want more of that
traffic. During testing, you are only exposed to a small portion of our available
inventory to give you time to evaluate and adjust your default CPC.
Recommended bids to get started and begin data collection (these are estimates):
● Editorial/Content Marketing Campaigns
○ Desktop: $0.12 - $0.18
○ Mobile: $0.08 - $0.15
● Direct Response Campaigns
○ Desktop: $0.52 - $0.59
○ Mobile: $0.27 - $0.35
● Search Campaigns
○ Desktop: $0.28 - $0.32
○ Mobile: $0.25 - $0.30
4. CTR/BID STRATEGY: If you are launching your very first campaign, you will need to bid
in the higher range of the recommended bids above. This is because you have not yet
established a CTR. You effectively need to force the marketplace to serve your content
based on a favorable bid, so that you can build CTR history in a position you actually
want to optimize with. If your bid is too low to start, you won’t see a lot of traffic, and
performance will be poor since you are not able to compete with advertisers who have
already developed a higher CTR. Once your campaign has delivered on a widget, you
will serve based on your real-time CTR.
The following are CTR ranges you should be aiming for:
● Editorial/Content Marketing CTR:
○ Mobile: 0.4% - 0.6%
○ Desktop: 0.2% - 0.4%
● Direct Response CTR:
○ Mobile: 0.2% - 0.5%
○ Desktop: 0.1% - 0.3%
● Search CTR:
○ Mobile: 0.2% - 0.4%
○ Desktop: 0.1% - 0.3%
5. BUDGET: Should be a minimum of $500/day for 3-5 full days of testing. It’s really not
worth testing if you can’t commit to a steady flow of traffic and volume as you won’t be
getting enough data to make decisions on performance and optimizations.
6. TRACKING: Depending on your offer type, goals, and technical sophistication, we offer
a variety of options for tracking your campaigns. Setting up proper tracking is
IMPERATIVE for success.
● Image Pixel
○ For advertisers optimizing towards a conversion
● UTM
○ For editorial/content marketers tracking using Google Analytics
● Page View TrackingGuide for Advertisers Using Google Analytics
○ For editorial/content marketers optimizing towards PVs/Session
● S2S
○ For advanced/more technical users
7. OPTIMIZING
● Bid-by-Widget: This is your primary optimization area. While you start bidding
on traffic using your default CPC, you can adjust your CPC up or down on the
placement level once you’ve had time to evaluate your test traffic and determine
the appropriate bid. This allows you to assign different bids per placement and
publisher (typically a below article warrants a higher CPC than a right rail, for
example, even when on the same site).
○ NOTE: Making a bid adjustment on the placement level pulls your
campaign out of testing on that widget and signals the system that you
want more of that traffic.
● Account Level Blacklisting: Rather than playing whack-a-mole blacklisting
widgets you don’t want traffic from campaign-by-campaign, you can choose to
blacklist a widget on an individual campaign or across your entire account.
● Domain Transparency: Each of our widget ids is mapped to a domain so you
know exactly where your traffic is coming from, in real-time.
● Fractional Bidding: Especially useful for mobile campaigns, you can bid down
to $0.001 vs. $0.01.
● Pacing: This option is only available for campaigns with a daily budget. Pacing is
designed to give you control over how your campaigns’ daily budget is spent.
○ On - Budget will be evenly distributed throughout the day.
○ Off - Budget will spend as quickly as possible.
○ NOTE: If you want to see more traffic, turn pacing off or increase your
budget
● Frequency: Once you hit your benchmark CTR’s, try not to reduce your bids by
more than 1 cent every 24 hours. That’ll give you plenty of time to evaluate
performance and see how your CTR is staying. Do this consistently until you
reach your desired CPC range.
Example Creative Testing Strategy:
TEST #1:
All initial Images and headlines are unique or have been successful on other platforms.
Image 1 - Headline 1
Image 2 - Headline 2
Image 3 - Headline 3
Image 4 - Headline 4
Image 5 - Headline 5
TEST #2
Highest CTR Came from Image/Headline 2
Image 2 - Headline 1
Image 2 - Headline 2
Image 2 - Headline 3
Image 2 - Headline 4
Image 2 - Headline 5
TEST #3
Highest CTR came from Image/headline 2 again
*All following images are now similar to winning #2 but different enough to not be recognized by
our system (and thus are tested as new creatives)
For example, if your winning image was a person walking a dog, all images below would be
dog-related. The new headlines (6-9) follow a similar concept but you should focus more on the
tone (Exciting? Mysterious? Urgent?)
Image 2 - Headline 2
Image 6 - Headline 6
Image 7 - Headline 7
Image 8 - Headline 8
Image 9 - Headline 9
At this point, Test #3 becomes a group of ads that are all similar, so you can continue adding
new versions of the ad concept within it. You'll effectively get as much out of that ad concept as
possible while maintaining a high CTR.
Your next test should be another set of brand new images and headlines, where you can repeat
the above process over again. The goal is to build a library of active campaigns featuring unique
concepts for the same or multiple URLs.
Launch Checklist
● Campaigns by Device
○ Make sure campaigns are broken out by device.
● Campaigns by Country
○ Make sure campaigns are broken out by country.
● Competitive Default Bid
○ Default CPC should be high at launch or you’ll never get a chance to optimize the
highest-performance traffic.
● $500/Day Budget
○ Anything less, and you’re just wasting time. If this is too high, wait until you have
enough budget to accommodate this daily spend for at least 5 days.
● Tracking
○ Confirm tracking is reporting correctly by running a short test. Most importantly,
you need to see performance down to the widget level.
Funding & Payment
● Credit Card: Fastest method, but a 2.9% processing fee applies.
● Wire
Bank Name: HSBC Bank USA, N.A.
Swift Code for International Wires: MRMDUS33
ACH Routing Number: 022000020
Domestic Wire Routing Number: 021001088
Bank Address:1000 S. Pine Island Rd., Suite 444 Plantation, FL 33324
Name on Account: Revcontent, LLC
Company Address: 1689 Second St, Sarasota, FL 34236
Account Number: 879004754
Account Management
● Your Rep: Your day-to-day contact at Revcontent to answer questions and provide
general information related to your account.
● Account Management: Available to help with in-depth insight and optimization
strategies for your account. A dedicated account manager is available to advertisers with
high, consistent daily spend. They will help us optimize and tweak widget targeting; plus,
they provide us with detailed insight into campaign behavior within the context of the
whole network.
○ This should be a major goal of yours since it gives you the best chance of
scaling quickly with Revcontent.
Revcontent API - Advanced/Technical Users
Revcontent offers a robust stats API for our more technologically advanced users.
Access API Documentation here: http://api.revcontent.io/docs/stats
Additional Help
support@revcontent.com
