Impressions served: 2867, clicks: 18. Did we get traction on a gay dating app? Which app got the most traction? Have we been arrested?
After days of analyzing and tweaking/adjusting here is what we found:
First of all; analyzing our front door learned us that we haven’t been arrested nor raided by Seal Team Six. We are quite happy and relieved about that.
When launching the campaign we scaled up all adexchanges - which is a normal procedure. As mentioned before we are only serving in apps due to the GPS coordinates that the latter provide in an adrequest. Mobile-Web (still) doesn’t. We implemented a bid CPM of $ 1501. Rather quickly we got traction. Like any expert will tell you; when launching a hyper-locally targeted campaign; the first publishers (in this case; apps) you will get traction in, aren’t the most qualitative. Which was definitely the case. Tagged, 360 Security, Rock My Run, Colorfy - to name just a few - aren’t the apps that the President and his team might be visiting (we hope). Oddly enough Whisper seems to be very popular in The White House. And yes, somebody in The White House is using Grindr (which we don’t have a problem with at all). CTR was average at best (shifting between 0,43 and 0,61%). Rather strangely, we witnessed no visits of apps like; CNN, FOX News, ABC, Huffington Post and Breitbart. These are publishers that you would expect a President and his team might visit. Especially with the apparent obsession of (fake) news of the President himself. Nothing.
Knowing Doubleclick adexchange has pretty much all major news apps/publishers in it’s offering, we set up a subline on this adexchange. We applied a very high bid (which actual bid is not to be disclosed). In a week time we got just 13 impressions on this line. And here it comes; 4 clicks. That’s a CTR of 30,77%. How cool is that?! And yes, Breitbart, FOX News and CNN (!) where publishers in which these 13 impressions occurred.
What can we conclude? The thousands of impressions in ‘shit’ publishers undermines Programmatic Advertising as a product. We can go in technical detail regarding the validity of these impressions, but we won’t. It’s simply not a sign that the technology is working. Again; you would expect impressions coming from major United States news outlets. Not ‘Talking Tom’. There is no way around it.
HOWEVER, when implementing years of experience in the campaign setup, tweaking, we did manage to get 13 impressions and 4 clicks (again; a CTR of % 30,77%) within major US news outlets (apps). Conclusion; when done right, Programmatic (local) Advertising is a heck of a marketingtool.