Task 5: Campaign set up on Outbrain November 25, 2020 6 WILLIAM SOUZA Native Advertising In this video you’ll learn the steps to set up a campaign on Outbrain’s platform It’s time for action! Follow the steps in the video below and set up your very first native ad campaign on Outbrain!
Hi William,
Thanks again for the training on Native Ads. I am hooked and going deeply in this direction. I wanted to ask you about typical conversion rates for CPA offers.
In your videos you mention that approximately we should expect a conversion for a free lead gen offer to be about every 10-15 clicks. I know all of these are just rough guesses and not exacts but if the payout figure might be say $5 for a simple cpa lead gen offer, we should expect say 10 conversions (roughly) per 100 clicks. Revenue in say $50.
Outbrain costs per click at say 0.25 cents would mean 100 clicks costs – $25
So in profit and doubling our money, in this example.
I am trying to understand typical conversion rates.
Have you found a free lead gen offer like above – does convert roughly every 10-15 clicks generally speaking?
If so, it would probably not make sense to try out free lead generation offers that only pay out $1-2, would you agree? They would need to be say $4 dollars and upwards to get a typical ROI.
What about for health free trial offer paying out say $40-50 CPA?
Per 100 clicks in Outbrain would we expect perhaps every 30-50 clicks to get a customer purchase?
What about for a popular CPS sale offer with a VSL like on Clickbank which pays out say 75% commission? Typically what have you found is the conversion for say 100 clicks sent to the offer?
I know these are just rough estimates and all the factors of angles, landing page, the traffic source need to be considered. But it helps drive direction on which way to go with native traffic and the offers to test out.
Thanks for your help as always…
Brian
Hi Brian,
As you said, trying to create a general math for campaigns that have very different numbers isn’t so simple… perhaps not even viable.
But let’s see if I can help you with this logic…
* Offer’s payout – Promoting offers that pay less than $2 for the US (other countries may have cheaper traffic, so it’s different) is indeed not ideal. Most networks are willing to give payout bumps for affiliates dirving consistent traffic, so a little below $2 should be ok for this reason. But, in general, $2+ is the best (you’ll find plenty of lead gen offers with a $2+ payout).
* CPC – Where exactly have you gotten $0.25 from? That’s not an average CPC for Outbrain (nor for most native ad platforms). Outbrain will always try to make as much money as they can with their impressions. So, even though they charge you per click, they try to maximize their impression value, because this is how they make more money. For example, an ad that pays $0.25 per click and gets 1 click for 1,000 impressions is less profitable than an ad with a $0.15 CPC that gets 2 clicks per 1,000 impressions. In the beginning, you should bid high to get them to run your ad. However, once you find ads with a good CTR, you can start to lower your CPC gradually. Good ads often times achieve $0.15, $0.10 or an even lower CPC.
* Conversion rate – Yes, 1 email submit, for example, for every 10 – 15 clicks is realistic for a good campaign. If you have a $2.50 payout, a 10% conversion rate and a $0.10 CPC, that’s 150% ROI.
I’ve run campaigns there with all kinds of ROI, from negative to 300%, so it varies a lot from one campaign to another. Some offers will pay you $3 after a payout bump and you’ll run them with a CPC below $0.10, so the ROI will be amazing.
But your way of thinking is correct, I just think that $5 per conversion is too optimistic and $0.25 per click is too pessimist (considering the average of good and optimized campaigns).
When you talk about promoting Clickbank offers, for example, then it’s a totally different game. Can they be profitable? Absolutely. But then estimating numbers like this becomes way more difficult.
For example, if you just drive traffic from Outbrain to a Clickbank offer like you’d do for a free lead gen offer, getting a conversion would be incredible… getting one conversion for every 100 clicks would be genius.
It just doesn’t work like that. When you want people to buy a product the process is different. No one will be on a ran dom site, see a nice looking ad, click it and put in their credit card info on a website they have never seen before.
For this type of promo, you usually need a solid follow up strategy with emails or remarketing.
It’s 100% possible to make it work and use Outbrain for promoting CPS offers, but the process would be different and it wouldn’t simply be based on a plain conversion rate, but on a customer value metric (e.g. subscriber value in 3 months).
I hope this helps clarify your doubts, but don’t hesitate to get in touch again if you have other questions! 😉
William
Thank you for a fantastic explanation Willilam. It’s very helpful. Regards Brian
Hi William,
When launching an Outbrain campaign and setting up your targeting, how large should your ideal potential reach be?
And, how many ad headlines and images should you start with?
Thanks…
@Mitchell – There’s not a rule for the size of the audience. It shouldn’t be too small for you to have enough volume, though. I’d say at least 500K or even 1M. About headlines and ads, start with many, at least 3 headlines and 10 – 15 images. The goal of a new native campaign is to allow you to find some nice ads, landers and also widgets/publishers, so you can start braod with your first test and then optimize and narrow according to your data.
Great lesson & comments.. Thank you