We all have struggled with creating the first successful and profitable campaigns as advertisers, getting over many obstacles before reaching a successful and profitable one. With years in the industry and a lot of trial and error in campaign creation, we have eventually collected a long list of good practices. Dive into this article to learn about them, so you can successfully create your first winning campaign.
First of all, let’s start by explaining some basic terms.
What is a Demand-Side Platform?
A demand-side platform is a programmatic advertising platform where ad buyers can purchase and manage ad inventories from different sources.
Demand-side platform (DSP) is an advertising platform where ad buyers can buy and manage ads from different sources. The whole process is done through a real-time bidding system. Real-time bidding refers to competing for particular ad space at the same time to buy, and the winning bid is the highest bid of the marketer, which will display his ad on the publisher’s website, which he competed.
The main advantage of the DSP is that you do it through an automated process, and there is no manual work, which saves a lot of time.
The whole process is done through programmatic advertising, which consists of buying and selling digital ad space in a way that advertisers can purchase ad space on the website to promote their offers.
The easiest way to buy that ad space – to buy traffic is through the DSP platform.
How Does a DSP Work?
The process is pretty simple.
The first step is to choose the audience that you want to reach. Following that, campaigns are set on the DSP. After that, ads are available on DSP, with the support of SSP (Self Service Platform) and ad exchange. Then, the marketer targets the criteria through DSP and, with the help of the two platforms, sends bids to purchase ad space through DSP. Finally, the real-time bidding process generates the winning bid for the specific ad space, and the highest bid wins and gets its ad displayed on the publisher’s website.
The process lasts a few milliseconds.
Create your campaign through DSP
In our DSP platform, you can create push and contextual campaigns. Push notification is the most popular campaign format. It is a message sent to the device after users subscribe to receive notifications from a publisher’s website.
The contextual campaign format scans the page for keywords and presents users with the most-fitting ads on the website.
When you choose the adequate ad format for your campaign, you must move to the next level: find the right audience to whom the ads will display.
The „only“ problem is that you are never sure who is the right audience for your ad. That is why we always encourage our advertisers to test.
Your target audience will mostly depend on the type of offer you are promoting. So you will need to go through the targeting process, which will give the best results for your ads.
Targeting users by OS and device type
The offer type you want to promote will be crucial for you as an advertiser to choose the operating system and the device type. One type of offer will convert better on mobile or desktop traffic, but there may be offers that will work equally well on both.
Once you have decided which device type you will target, you can choose operating systems.
Browsers Targeting
Targeting browsers is one of the essential things to target when creating the campaign on DSP. That is because users will not behave the same in the different browsers.
For example, some subscribed users to push notifications will convert better in a specific browser type.
The same applies to contextual campaigns.
User freshness – applicable for push campaigns
User freshness refers to the period since the user subscribed to receive push notifications.
So, if the user is subscribed in the last seven days, he will be in the 0-10 days user freshness group.
How to decide whom to target? We are always advising to target fresher user groups. But, if you are unsure which targeted users will convert better for your campaign, we suggest you test. Create two or more campaigns and see what freshness group is ideal for your campaign.
As you can see, there is an option to target users by hours. It is highly recommended to do it, but only once you get to know a real audience. Once you know which device type of targeting, which is, and which geo, you can start “playing” with different user freshness groups.
Day & Time Targeting Options
It depends on the offer type you are promoting and when it is the best time to target your campaign. If you are, for example, testing some entertainment offers, maybe it would be the best time to promote them during the weekend.
The same goes for the other type of offers. So, again, you need to think about when it will be the best time to run those offers, during a particular day in the week and the specific time during the day.
Making a whitelist and blacklist
If you have an account manager, he will probably give you the blacklist to exclude the wrong traffic sources. That is always a helpful thing to do. On the other hand, whitelists can be useful, but sometimes you can limit yourself to potentially good sources that you did not whitelist.
As we mentioned, making those lists is pretty easy when you have an account manager. On the other hand, if you do it yourself, you will need a couple of tips.
It is easier to make a blacklist because you know that sources that are not profitable for you and spending more than you set your budget for, are no good sources for you. But making a whitelist can be tricky because you will need more sources to make a successful campaign.
Budget and Bids
The bid is mostly going to depend on the targeting you have chosen. Browser, OS, device type, and user freshness will affect your bids and budget settings.
When you have determined a bid for the campaign, be sure to put a daily cap on your campaign so that it doesn’t go overspending.
A daily cap is highly recommended, especially if you cannot monitor the campaign the whole day.
Always start with a small amount and then scale.
Let’s make some creatives!
The last step in creating the campaign is to make the creatives.
They are the most critical part of the campaign you plan to run. It is because the first thing the user will see when interacting with your campaign and what will interest them in clicking on your ad.
Many platforms have regulations regarding creatives, but Coinis DSP allows you to create up to 15 different creatives. The great thing about that is that you can set up 15 creatives in no time, thanks to our creatives generator, which mixes headlines with images.
Campaign Optimization
When you start testing your campaign, and when the time passes, like seven days of the trial period, you can see what can be improved to improve the campaign’s performance.
Track campaigns CTR (click-through rate), conversion rate, spent, and other essential parameters.
Source and Creatives optimization
The first thing you should check for optimization is the traffic source. For this particular campaign, you will have many different sources from where your traffic is coming from.
You will have some top spending sources, which you should optimize.
The sources that spend more money than you get from one conversion should be excluded from your campaign.
Upon that, you will need to take a look at your creatives. You should see which of the creatives had the best CTR, and you should stick to the winning one and others to pause or delete.
Also, based on the impressions, you should adjust your bids. For example, if the bids are high enough but the impressions are low, then you should think about optimizing your creatives.
Day and Time
It is pretty simple optimization: if you see that your campaign is getting more clicks on a particular day in the week and the hours during the day, you should run your campaign only during those periods.
Browser and Operating System
The same is applicable: check the results per browser and OS to check which browser or OS converts better and to stop the ones not converting well.
Why Should You Use a DSP?
The most significant advantage of the DSP is that you have control over your campaign: how it will be targeted, how creatives will look, the budget that you will spend, and above all, the traffic sources that you will use.
As an advertiser, you will do everything to prevent fraud traffic from negatively affecting your campaign and spending money unplanned.
It saves you time
DSP will help you save the time your time when creating your campaign, as you do not have to spend time on the tasks, which will be resolved automatically.
Easy to track
Coinis DSP allows you to track the campaign’s performances in real-time for all the campaigns you run on our platform.
Wider audience
With the DSP, you can advertise your product on many networks
You are advertising your product on several networks simultaneously, which means more profit for you, better expansion of your ads, and better response from the audience! That means reaching out is better!
User targeting
On DSP, many targeting options are available geo-targeting, contextual targeting, behavioral targeting, device targeting, operating system, browser, IP, day/time, retargeting, etc. They can all help you get information about user behavior, which will help you serve your ads to the right audience.
Planning the budget
You will manage the spending of your budget and can choose how to spend your budget on optimizing your campaign. But, of course, no marketer wants to spend money on unprofitable campaigns.
The safety of tour brand
To save your brand reputation, it is recommended to blacklist fraud sources that can affect your reputation. Also, as we mentioned, there is an option to make a whitelist as you want to make an effort to make your campaign profitable.
Try the Coinis DSP platform
To make the most of your product and use its full potential by choosing the right traffic, budget, sources, browsers, audiences, creatives, end so on, you suggest you try the Coinis DSP platform.
Our platform can help advertisers grow their campaigns to be profitable and effective. But not just advertisers but also the users who receive ads served through the DSP system.
Campaigns made through DSP automate all your business efforts and future steps and boost the sales of your product at the same time.
We would love to see the potential of your campaigns on our DSP, and for any assistance, you can contact the Coinis team. Just sign up/login into our DSP and start your campaign.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Benjamin Dobardzic, Advertiser Manager, Coinis
Benjamin Dobardzic is an Advertiser manager at Coinis and an all-around player ready to tackle every challenge he faces. A big digital marketing enthusiast who enjoys meeting new people and communicating