Using Automatic Rules to Detect Performance Dips and Take Action

You can pour your heart and soul into crafting the perfect ad campaign, but the truth is that not every campaign is destined to succeed. From the campaign start date to the day it breaks even, there are so many variables involved that sometimes it feels like a guessing game when it comes to finding winners. Remember, each campaign you launch gets served to a different audience, who reacts differently to your creatives, angles, offers, etc. So, instead of throwing good money after bad campaigns, there’s a smarter way for you to handle these situations. Frequent Use Cases Campaign Start Date in Campaign Mass Launching If you’re launching multiple campaigns on a daily basis you may already know that most of these campaigns will end up getting stopped if they don’t reach specific KPIs within a given time. Challenge: For instance, if you’re mass-launching campaigns on Meta you know that it might take 2-3 days of running before a campaign starts showing promising results. So you have to consider that and carefully monitor your campaigns daily to make sure that you’re stopping bad campaigns on time. If not, you can easily waste hundreds of $$ on bad campaigns. The Solution: Instead of handling this process manually, you simply create an automatic rule that stops all bad-performing campaigns automatically. Campaign Start Date for Controlling Bids One of the best practices for running native advertising campaigns is that of starting a campaign with a high bid, then after a while dropping it to a more conservative level. Doing so helps you get over the initial learning phase quicker as well as test your ads against the top publisher sites where the competition is higher and you generally need a higher bid. The Challenge: While resetting bids to a more conservative level manually, can be an easy task if you’re only launching 2-3 campaigns a week. It becomes pretty challenging when you launch tens of campaigns each day. You have to remember when you launched the campaign, analyze each campaign’s data, and then lower your bid at the right time. The Solution: Create an automatic rule that resets your campaign bid to a specific level based on your campaign’s actual performance. Campaign Start Date for Scaling Winners Every traffic source has its own campaign learning phase and optimization cycles. So before you start scaling a potential campaign, you have to make sure you’re following these cycles and systematically adopting your scaling strategy according to each traffic source. The Challenge: Tracking the launch date of multiple campaigns, and analyzing each campaign and ad group results manually is pretty challenging even for the most organized media buyers. Most buyers scale their campaigns quite randomly ending up doing quite the opposite of what the traffic source algorithm needs. As a result, turning a potentially profitable campaign in a looser. The Solution: Create automatic rules to increase your campaign or ad group budgets automatically in steps after X days if the campaigns or ad groups are showing potential results. Obviously, there are way more situations worth looking at or that need to be addressed using automation, but that would make this post extremely long and hard to follow. Let’s move on to the good stuff and learn how to set up these automatic rules.   How to Add Campaign Start Date in Rules With the help of automatic optimization rules on TheOptimizer platform, you can automatically pause campaigns or ad groups, change bids and budgets, or run other important optimization actions based on the start date of your campaign. To use the campaign start date in rules, create an automatic rule of your choice and add any prequalifying conditions like ROI, spend, etc. Then add “Campaign Start Date” as a condition. Choose from “Greater Than”, “Greater Than or Equal To”, “Less Than”, or “Less Than or Equal To” in the list of logical operators. Then, select the option for using the current date or a specific date. When using the current date, you can use the logic of “current date minus X days” to look back in the past, or “current date plus X days” to look forward into the future days. When using a specific date, you are simply executing actions based on a specific date. For example, if “If campaign start date is greater than March 28, 2024” To put it simply, use “current date” minus or plus a specific number of days when you want to run an action relative to the start date of a campaign. Alternatively, use a specific date if you want to run an action before or after a specific event, such as the end of a promotional campaign or the start of another one. Log in to your account, or sign up for a free trial today and experience the power of automated campaign management.

If you’ve been struggling with optimizing your Google Display Ads Placements recently, rest assured – you’re not alone!  As the Google Display Network continues to expand, navigating through the ocean of potential ad placements has become increasingly difficult. And if you’ve done this for a while, you probably know that not all these placements are good.  In this article, we’ll explore some general optimization tips, and share a new feature that will put an end to your struggles and allow you to fully automate placement exclusion.  First, let’s start with the basics. What Are Google Display Ads Placements? Essentially, Google Display Ads Placements refer to the specific locations where your ads are shown within the Google Display Network.  These placements can be a variety of partner websites, mobile sites & apps, or even Google-owned properties such as Gmail or YouTube. Why Are Google Ads Placements so Important? Google Display Network includes millions of different websites or apps where your ads can be shown.  While gaining more exposure may seem beneficial, irrelevant or low-quality sites can damage your campaign performance.  Being able to show your ads in the right places can significantly improve your click-through rates and safeguard your budget from low-quality sites that do not align with your objectives. All these factors contribute to getting higher quality clicks, significantly boosting your ROI (return on investment) for your Google display campaigns.  How to Optimize Placements Directly on Google Ads 1. Optimize your Targeting Google has gone a long way in helping advertisers optimize their display campaigns, especially with their advanced targeting options.  When creating a new display campaign, you can now specify: Audience segments: who should see your ads based on demographics (age, gender, income), interests & habits (sports & fitness), etc.  Keywords: terms related to your advertised offer, based on which Google will target relevant websites.  Topics: select subjects, and Google will look for websites or apps centered around these subjects (e.g., computers & electronics).  Placements: you can even select specific websites or pages of a site where your ad will be displayed.  You can add all these options under Targeting when creating a Google Display campaign.  You can also apply Optimized Targeting, an option that uses Google AI to analyze your creatives/landing pages, and automatically find the appropriate audiences to show your ads to.  2. Optimize with Exclusion Lists While optimizing your targeting is crucial, it still does not address the issue of your ads being displayed on low-quality junk sites.  This is why some advertisers use Exclusion Lists. An Exclusion List is exactly what it sounds like – a list of placements that will be excluded from your campaigns. You can create one through your Google Manager Account. You can exclude placements based on your own experience (junk sites you’ve dealt with in your past), exclude certain topics or categories, or use ready-made exclusion lists created by other advertisers.  Optimized targeting and exclusion lists are a great way to improve your campaign performance, but there are no guarantees that you will be profitable with these options. While a placement may be relevant to your targeting and is outside your exclusion list, it does not necessarily mean it will perform well. Also, Google continuously adds new placements to their network, so exclusion lists can only go so far.  You will still need to review your performance reports daily, detect underperforming placements, and manually pause these placements on Google Ads. This is especially important if you are advertising with large budgets, and it can be extremely time-consuming. How to Exclude Low Quality Google Display Ads Placements Automatically There is an easier way to optimize placements, and it can be entirely automated!  TheOptimizer has just launched a new, unique feature that automatically syncs your Google Ads (and third-party tracker) data, and it excludes placements that are not profitable through a simple automation rule.   In the example below, we are creating a rule that will automatically exclude placements that are receiving bot clicks. Given the average click-through-rate (CTR) of 0.2% – 1.5% on Google Display campaigns, we can confidently assume that a CTR of 20% is most likely fraudulent.  You can fully customize these conditions (choose over 50 available metrics) to reflect your own optimization strategy, select specific campaigns, and let the rule run as often as every 10 minutes up to weekly.  This feature will be a game-changer for performance marketers running Google Display campaigns, and TheOptimizer is one of the only tools that is offering this at the moment. Use Case: Automatically Optimizing Google Ads Placements for Content Arbitrage Content arbitrage is one industry that will highly benefit from this new feature.  When you are operating with such large budgets and testing so many different sites, you need to optimize aggressively on placements.  Often times, media buyers running content arbitrage campaigns also utilize third-party trackers, such as AssertiveYield, for more granular data. In this case, to be able to properly optimize Google Ads placements, you would need to review your performance data on AssertiveYield, pinpoint all underperforming placements, and manually pause them on Google Ads. This makes the optimization process even more complex and time-consuming.  With TheOptimizer’s new placement exclusion feature, and the platform’s direct integration with top industry trackers (including AssertiveYield and Google Analytics), you can fully automate this process with 100% accuracy. In a single report, you will be able to see placement data from both Google Ads and AssertiveYield, and you can set up automation rules that will automatically exclude unprofitable placements (like in the rule example we showed earlier).  Other Google Ads Optimization Strategies with TheOptimizer Apart from excluding placements, TheOptimizer also allows you to automate other parts of your Google Ads campaign optimization processes.  Similarly to pausing underperforming placements, you can also pause campaigns, ad groups, or ads through automation rules.  You can adjust campaign bids and budgets based on performance, as well as optimize on keyword level for your Google Search campaigns.  Finally, you can use TheOptimizer to automatically clone top-performing Google ad groups, and apply dayparting to all your campaigns.  For more general Google Ads tips, read our deep dive article here. Conclusion If you are running Google Display campaigns, you need to ensure that you are properly optimizing your ad placements for better results.  You can optimize your placements directly on Google Ads – by refining your targeting and leveraging exclusion lists – or you can fully automate this process with TheOptimizer’s new placement exclusion feature, which will save you an immense amount of time and effort on a daily basis. 

If you’re currently trying to scale your TikTok campaigns, you’re probably already familiar with the process of duplicating. It’s a quick and effective strategy, but it’s also time-consuming.   We have a way to automatically duplicate TikTok campaigns and set a custom budget, and it’s very simple to follow. In this article, we will show you how to successfully do this with examples. When to Duplicate TikTok Campaigns When scaling profitable TikTok campaigns, you generally have two options – scale vertically by increasing campaign budgets, or scale horizontally by duplicating top campaigns.   Increasing campaign budgets is often a solid strategy, but it comes with limitations. TikTok does not recommend increasing budgets by more than 20% at a time, making it difficult to scale effectively.  There is also no certainty that increasing the budget will boost your returns – sometimes it can lead to ad oversaturation, increased competition, and higher CPCs (cost per click). This is why advertisers often prefer duplicating top campaigns instead. Why Set a Custom Budget for Duplicated TikTok Campaigns? Until now, duplicating campaigns on TikTok only allowed you to make changes after the new campaign was live. With TheOptimizer, you can now manually or automatically duplicate TikTok campaigns with your desired new budgets.  If you are aiming to scale faster, you can create duplicate campaigns with a budget higher than 20% of the original, without hindering the success of your initial campaign. You can also test different budget allocations and review their impact on performance.   There are two ways you can do this with TheOptimizer. How to Duplicate TikTok Campaigns Manually with TheOptimizer Under Campaign view, you can see performance metrics on all your TikTok campaigns. Select the campaign you wish to duplicate and click on the Clone icon:  Here, you will need to specify how many copies of the campaign to set live, and select the new budget. You can choose a fixed value or increase/decrease the existing budget by a certain percentage, like in the example below:  How to Duplicate TikTok Campaigns Automatically with TheOptimizer To save more time and speed up the scaling process, you can also leverage TheOptimizer’s cloning automation rule.  Let’s say we want to clone campaigns that have already spent over $100 in the past 3 days and resulted in an ROI greater than 20%. You can select these conditions under Rules. To increase the chance of success for the newly cloned campaigns, you can also pre-determine a moment when they should go live. Generally, you can do this at the start of the day to ensure the budget is spread out evenly throughout the day. You can change the timezone to match your TikTok account timezone.  Finally, you can specify the new budget and budget caps. Apply this rule to any selected campaigns, schedule it to run as often as needed, and get notified whenever an action is triggered.  Duplicating TikTok Campaigns with New Budgets: Conclusion Duplicating profitable TikTok campaigns is an effective way to scale faster while avoiding the risks and limitations of budget increases.  TheOptimizer offers a unique feature that allows you to clone TikTok campaigns with custom budgets, either manually or automatically through rules.  If you are also looking for an efficient way to duplicate TikTok and Facebook ads, here is our guide on how to manage this with TheOptimizer.