One of the most important aspects of your marketing strategy and the success of your retargeting campaigns is how much budget to apply. This article contains information about how Retargeting campaigns spend budget, how exposure settings work, and how to choose a budget in Feathr in order to help meet your goals.
How Campaign Budget is Spent
The general goal of a Retargeting campaign is to show your ads to your target audience as many times as possible throughout the duration of the campaign. This is done with a programmatic technology called real-time bidding or RTB. As members of your target audience browse the internet, your Feathr campaign programmatically bids in micro auctions that occur in the milliseconds it takes to load the page. If your campaign wins the bid, your ad will be placed on that page to be seen by that person. This occurs thousands or tens of thousands of times throughout your campaign. Because the transaction is an auction, there is no fixed price, but instead a bid range. This media cost is expressed as cost per mille or CPM.
Optimization and Recommended Budget
The Optimization step of Feathr's campaign wizard uses up-to-date aggregated data analyzed from thousands of Feathr campaigns to calculate a recommended budget for your campaign to optimize its exposure. This budget recommendation is the most your campaign would need to spend to maximize the number of ad impressions shown to every member of your target audience over the entire duration of your campaign.
Feathr's recommended budget for your campaign is a calculation of the function of:
- the number of reachable people in your target audience
- the estimated cost per impression
- the auto-optimized campaign frequency settings
- the duration of your campaign.
If you have the budget to spend, Feathr's recommended budget will buy you the most effective campaign. However, if the recommended campaign budget is too high for your marketing budget, Feathr recommends leaving your campaign on auto-optimize and simply entering an amount that fits your budget in the budget step. This will still allow Feathr to select the best frequency settings for your budget.
You also have the option to manually choose your campaign's frequency settings, but this is recommended for advanced users only.
Frequency Settings
- Frequency Cap is the maximum number of ad impressions the campaign will show any given individual within the chosen frequency period.
- Base Bid is the lowest Feathr will bid on the campaign's behalf, per 1000 impressions. Whatever the base bid is, Feathr will bid up to double that much. Your campaign's bid range is base bid to 3x base bid. Your average CPM for any campaign will be within that range.
- Frequency period is the length of time that will elapse before the frequency cap is reset. In the example above, an individual in the target audience would see at most 9 impressions per 8 hours.
- Omni targeting allows you to choose whether you want the campaign to serve ads to every device it can find among the target audience. Read more here.
How Frequency Settings Affect Recommended Budget
With the understanding that selecting auto-optimize in your campaign will provide the best results, but also suggest the highest recommended budget, here is how choosing to customize your campaign optimization may affect the recommended budget.
The lower the frequency cap, the lower the recommended budget will be. This is because frequency cap is directly proportional to the number of ads your campaign will bid to show. Lowering the frequency cap will also prevent you from reaching your audience as often.
Lowering your base bid will also lower your bid range (see above). This will instruct Feathr to bid less for ad placement. This will reduce your recommended budget, but may affect the percentage of the target audience being reached, because fewer micro auctions will be won.
The higher you set your frequency period, the lower your recommended budget will be. This is because the number of ads chosen in the frequency cap will be stretched out over more time the higher the frequency period is set. Setting the frequency period to lifetime will show only the number of ads in the frequency cap to each target audience member the campaign can reach over the entire duration of the campaign.
Omni targeting will not affect the recommended budget because the campaign will still attempt to serve the same number of impressions per individual whether it's on their primary reachable device or multiple devices. Turning off omni targeting may, however, reduce the number of chances the campaign has to reach a given individual.
Estimating Monetization Campaign Budget
Monetization campaign budgets are set in number of impressions, rather than dollar amounts. Monetization retargeting campaigns will evenly distribute the set number of impressions over the set duration of the campaign, with the campaign cost in dollars being less important. This is because most monetization campaigns spend orders of magnitude less than they are sold for, and the promise made to partners when a campaign is sold is a number of impressions over a period of time.
As a Feathr user, however, you still may wish to estimate the actual cost of the campaign even if you are earning a high ROI on it. To do this, in the optimization step of your campaign, choose customize, and look at the base bid. Because the bid range is from the base bid to 3x the base bid (see above), the most your campaign will cost is 3x your base bid times the number of impressions divided by one thousand. An example would be a campaign with a $5 base bid and an impression cap of 100,000 would cost between $500-1500.