Every advertiser wants to increase conversions without violating its ROI goals. While this case study examines one campaign in particular, the story is universal across Right Media clients: moving from a static CPM to a dynamic pricing model removes typical inventory constraints and allows campaigns to deliver more efficiently.

Dynamic Pricing allows each individual impression to be priced flexibly, on every ad call, based on its true value to the advertiser. Instead of being optimized out of lower quality inventory, the advertiser can simply bid less for it. Instead of being outbid on higher quality inventory, the advertiser can offer to pay more for higher value impressions. Whatever the case, the system monitors ROI targets every time it sets a bid for an advertiser.

Goals and Method

• Goals of the two-phase test were to acquire new customers, and
• control CPA while maximizing conversions and scale.

The test looked at the performance of two ad units (300×250, pops) across two time periods of equal length (18-19 days) and scale (10-11mm impressions). The campaign was priced on a flat CPM in phase I, and a dynamic CPM in phase II.

Phase I

Not yet optimized, the campaign started at a high CPA and delivered broadly. CPA dropped progressively as the system learned and became more selective about when to serve. The campaign averaged around 9 conversions a day, and it hovered around this level as long as its static price restricted it from higher and lower priced inventory.

Phase II

Upon the switch to dynamic pricing, conversions skyrocketed. Instead of ruling out impressions of different value, the advertiser could now bid on them relative to that value, as long as its campaign targets were not violated.

Delivery increased, and the campaign garnered nearly 5x more daily signups, on average, than it did when it was priced statically. At the same time, CPA continued to trend downward as the system predicted response more accurately and got smarter about how to spend the campaign’s budget.

Summary

Once the client could pay according to value, instead of paying the same, flat price for every impression, the advertiser opened itself up to much more inventory and won considerably more new signups. Cost per user was controlled, and ROI was maximized on the campaign. While nearly every network started on the buy, only Right Media remained at the end.

A few members of the Right Media publisher business development team will be at Webmaster World’s Pubcon 10 in Las Vegas from November 15-17.

We’d love to meet any RM Network or Yield Manager publishers or advertisers, as well as any potential publishers or advertisers at the show.  It’s always good to put a face with a name.

If you’d like to meet and discuss Yield Manager or the RM Network, or just want to say hello, e-mail me at pmccarthy@rightmedia.com before or during the event and we’ll see if we can get together.

Prior to joining Right Media, I held a position where one of my roles was to purchase online advertising. Our goal was to reach an online representation of the US population by placing banner ads.   

Working with an array of ad networks was at first fun and easy; we would deliver outstanding click rates and acquisition costs. However, none of these partnerships could meet my volume goals. Each network would meet a budget ceiling, and when pushed beyond that ceiling we would observe inflation in cost per action. The result would be to add additional network partners to the mix, and manage many relationships with finite deliverables. Having to manage multiple insertion orders and reporting tools, and reformat all of the networks data into one concise data sheet, became time consuming. 

Over time this exercise also impacted the overall cost per acquisition negatively. 

Yield Manager became a great resource. I was now able to access a marketplace of inventory, previously unavailable to me. I could increase my budget 100% without compromising my CPA. In addition to gaining momentum, I had a flexible reporting tool that I was able to manipulate to evaluate the metrics I valued most. 

Yield Manager was an effective way for me to manage my time, my campaigns and my focus to reach a diverse sample of the online population.

PIxel Manager lets advertisers manage publisher pixels without any help from their IT staff. In addition, it helps minimize discrepancies with publishers, protects the privacy of the advertiser’s data, and provides ROI analysis by publisher and by product/offer.

Pixel Manager provides “gateway” pixels and the tools to manage them. A gateway pixel is a little piece of Javascript code that is invisible to a web site visitor. However, it embeds multiple third-party pixels dynamically. This means that an advertiser can add or remove third-party pixels without changing the code on the page.

Pixel Privacy

While publishers need access to conversion information, it can be both a business and technical liability. With pixel privacy, pixels can be restricted so that they only show up when the visitor comes from a particular publisher. This minimizes attribution conflicts (when multiple publishers take credit for the same conversion) and makes sure that no publisher has total visibility into the advertiser’s business.

No IT Resources Needed

One of the challenges for marketing staff is that implementing new pixels usually requires an IT project. With Pixel Manager, pixels can go live without any IT staff involvement.

Pixel Preview

One of the challenges of implementing third-party pixels is that there are often discrepancies or other technical problems. Pixel Manager provides a preview function that makes it easy to see which pixels are showing up for a visitor, making it easy to work through technical issues.

Detailed Reporting

Pixel Manager tracks each pixel that is shown and figures out which publisher should get credit. Using its built-in reporting, advertisers can check and download statistics which can then be used to analyze the effectiveness of their registration path on a per-publisher basis.

Integration with Yield Manager

Pixel Manager is an integral part of the Yield Manager system. Any media buy done through Yield Manager can be supported by Pixel Manager, and reporting will show detailed ROI information for each media buy. Pixel Manager will also manage Lifetime Value pixels for more detailed analysis.

Implementing Pixel Manager is easy.

First, log into Pixel Manager and create a number of gateway pixels. These should be given descriptive names like “Registration path - shipping information” or “Product 2 Thank you page.”

Next, click “Get Gateway Pixel Tag.” This will generate a small chunk of Javascript code. Place this code on the appropriate page, preferably at the top. (This step may require help from an IT resource)

The pixels are now live! You will see pixel “loads” appear in Pixel Manager reporting.

Now it’s time to add publisher pixels. To do so, click on a pixel and the click “Add piggyback pixel.” Then paste in the third party pixel. To preview the pixel, click “Preview gateway pixel” and you should see the publisher’s pixel.

Pixel Privacy (Optional)

If you want to enable Pixel Privacy, make sure you have created a publisher in the “Media Buys” tab for each publisher you work with. If you want to track pricing, add a line item for each pricing model you use with each publisher.

Then, assign each piggyback pixel to a publisher and media buy. If you don’t care about pricing, just choose the default media buy for each publisher.

Finally, you’ll need integrate Pixel Manager click tracking. There are two ways to do this. Your IT staff can do an integration on your landing pages, or you can have your publishers wrap their click URLs with Pixel Manager code. To do the latter, just take the Pixel Manager click wrapper (from the media buy page) and have the publisher prepend it to their click URL.