As a StackAdapt Account Executive, Share Ryan has experience in programmatic trading. With a strong passion for data analytics and consumer behaviour, Share loves using data to generate predictive patterns.
For a long time, there has been a perception that optimization in any vertical is seen only as a means of acceleration and scale. The thing about optimization, especially in programmatic, is that often it is viewed in a binary way; wherein optimization is simply seen as turning things off that aren’t working, and leaving things turned on that are.
It’s this race-to-the-bottom approach that can often leave out valuable reach and insights, to be later used to help you perform even better with future campaigns. The way I see it, programmatic is so much richer than simply just meeting your KPIs. This brings us to Bid Factoring, and why it’s my favourite feature on our platform.
What is Bid Factoring?
Bid Factoring is a tool that gives advertisers control to optimize precisely targeted campaigns, and it does this by providing a means of manually defining multiple bidding tactics. What’s great about this feature is that you no longer have to spend unnecessary time creating multiple campaigns to execute multiple tactics. You’re also able to individually name your bid factors so you can easily identify them in your reporting—allowing you to optimize more efficiently.
Leveraging bid factors makes your campaign more powerful, by helping you accelerate and scale valuable insights that you’re gaining for your campaign. Moreover, this means allocating more budget in the right place, by bidding more aggressively towards strategies that are working; all-the-while taking an extremely granular approach.
When would you use Bid Factoring?
Before applying a bid factor to your campaign, you should know who your audience is and how they behave. Once you know this, you can factor up or down on your bids—based on variables such as geo, device, time-of-day or day-of-week—to optimize your campaigns.
An example I like to use is the Quick Service Restaurants (QSR) vertical—think drive-thru and fast food options.
In this particular case, time-of-day and day-of-week are significantly important. The goal with these campaigns is often to not only boost outreach but to win a greater number of impressions leading up to key mealtimes on days of the week when takeout is most popular—for example Friday evening after a long work week when parents are looking for a quick dinner option.
By understanding your target audience, you may learn that while on Sunday evenings customers might be less likely to purchase food from QSRs, this doesn’t mean that you have to completely stop running your campaigns. Instead, this is a time where you can concentrate on a top-funnel approach, and focus on tactics that will increase awareness, leading to further conversions at peak times later in the week.
Why is this beneficial?
Bid factoring allows you to take a holistic approach to your campaigns. By optimizing towards the top and bottom of your funnel at the right times, you can allocate budget in the most strategic way possible.
What I love about Bid Factoring is that it ties very closely with our pivotable Insights tab, allowing you to see winning combinations of audiences, creatives, devices, and domains that are performing best. By bidding on what you know is performing well, you’re taking your programmatic efforts to the next level. You no longer need to put a binary lens on programmatic—where campaigns have tended to be operated with an ON/OFF switch. Instead, you can use a tool that allows you to focus more on the audience, and serve brands more effectively with creative reach.
How do you get started?
Programmatic is a linear approach to your final KPIs. It serves as a strong testing ground to gauge what your upper funnel truly looks like, and based on the metrics and data that you’re collecting, you can understand your lower funnel at a very granular level.
If you have data from a previous campaign, you can get started with Bid Factoring through the Strategy tab in StackAdapt. From there, it’s easy to build a campaign based on past learnings and further refine a winning recipe.
Want to get started with bid factoring? Request a demo to learn more about StackAdapt.
