Before enabling Marin Bidding, we recommend that you ensure that no campaigns in a Strategy are losing impression share due to campaign budgets.
Our bidding solution is budget-unaware, with the assumption that increasing a bid on a keyword will realize an increase in clicks (provided the keyword is not already in top slot). For budget capped campaigns, this is incorrect. In fact, increasing bids may improve position, but result in a drop in clicks as the publishers throttle delivery more.
We recommend that before bidding is enabled, campaigns losing impressions to budget reduce bids until they are no longer losing impressions. This process can take up to a few weeks, but will usually create an immediate improvement in performance, as campaigns increase their click volume without increasing spend. Once campaigns are no longer budget-capped, bidding can be enabled without the same risks of increased bids causing a decline in volume.
How To Transition Away From Campaign Budgets
- Lower the CPCs in any campaign you plan to bid on that is currently losing impression share due to budget. Note: Marin does not currently pull in lost impression share data, so this will have to be checked in the publisher.
We recommend the below as a guide:- If Lost IS (budget) is less than 10%, then reduce bids by 10%
- If Lost IS (budget) between 10% - 30% then reduce bids by 15%
- If Lost IS (budget) between 30% - 50% then reduce bids by 30%
- If Lost IS (budget) is greater than 50% then reduce bids by 50%
Continue to monitor the Lost IS metric and lower bids until there is no impression share lost due to budget.
- At this stage the campaign budget caps should be doubled and no longer be used to control the budget targets.
- Configure the Strategy settings and put the Strategy on Preview. Going forward, spend can be managed using Strategy settings instead of campaign budgets.
Benefits Of Using Strategy Settings
Below are 3 scenarios with different budget management strategies: Budget Capped with Accelerated Delivery, Budget Capped with Standard Delivery, and Spend Managed at Strategy Level.
Campaign, Accelerated Delivery
By hitting budget caps a lot of potential traffic is missed which can have a heavy impact on potential conversion volume. This potentially causes a campaign budget to be spent early in the day and missing a lot of the traffic.
Campaign, Standard Delivery
By allowing the publisher to throttle the delivery, the amount of spend can be capped missing out on the opportunity to maximize conversions.
Spend Managed At Strategy Level
The best way to control spend is to use bid management to ensure that the full impression share is optimized.
Other Advantages To Managing Spend At Strategy Level
- The algorithm can make trade-offs, allocating resources from a low-performing campaign to a high-performing campaign.
- Boost can be used to raise and lower spend across the board in one step.
