Optimization of Mobile Advertising Campaigns: Why is It Necessary? (And How It Happens on the BYYD Platform)

Purchasing ad inventory in mobile applications is a way to reach your target audience among a wide range of mobile users. Programmatic technologies allow you to simplify the process, make purchases fast, and make advertising relevant to the user. But this process requires control. This article will tell you what optimization of mobile advertising campaigns is from the BYYD point of view (and how we do it).

Why do we need optimization, even if everything is automated?

The ad buying process is genuinely automated, as the essence of programmatic technologies. In a real-time auction, ads run on the publisher’s platform. Shortly, on the supply side (SSP), an auction is held among DSPs for the right to buy ad inventory. The advertiser with the highest bid wins. Before sending the request, DSP pre-sets the campaign, selects bids, and targets the relevant audience. It allows choosing the publisher’s app suitable to the advertiser’s target audience.

But, despite the purchasing process automation itself, optimization is still necessary to achieve the best display and behavioral indicators on the advertiser’s website to reach and exceed the set KPIs. Thanks to optimization, you can turn off apps that show less efficiency. However, there will still be such apps because the audience can react differently to ad formats and presentations, even in one niche.

How do we optimize ad campaigns?

Before starting an advertising campaign, we set the necessary KPIs that we plan to achieve, including both media and behavioral indicators. We focus on the statistics of our platform. To measure the behavioral indicators on the site, we request guest access to the client’s analytics.

So, among the media indicators, we measure impressions, reach, and clicks. We carry out optimization by the click-through rate (CTR); we select only those apps that show a high CTR. We have a predicted CTR for each ad format, focusing on that.

We measure time spent on site, bounce rate, and click-through rate among the behavioral ones.

What KPIs do we set?

• Session duration is the time spent on the site from 40 seconds. The average time for mobile ads is 30 seconds, but we can increase this indicator due to optimization.
• The bounce rate — 40-50% we focus on the analytical services data of Google Analytics and Yandex.Metric (80-90% without GTM setting). GTM setup is needed for mobile traffic to be counted by Google Analytics.
• Passing index — 70% (average for mobile advertising — 60%).

Daily manual optimization allows us to achieve these KPIs because we select apps where the audience responds positively to advertising and demonstrates high efficiency.

How do we select apps?

We add a dynamic macro and a UTM tag (utm_term = {APP_ID}) to the advertising link, where App ID is the unique identifier of the application. This way, we understand from which application the traffic came and its results.

Our channel mainly aims the image advertising, increasing awareness and traffic to the client’s website. But if necessary, there is the possibility of optimization by conversion goals if they are set on the website and we have access to analytics.

Examples of advertising campaigns of BYYD

As part of our Philips advertising campaign, we launched the announcement of a new shaver model ahead of last New Year’s Eve. We used FullScreen banners as an advertising creative, and the average CTR for this type of banner is 1.5%. Due to optimization based on our internal statistics and the client’s Google Analytics, we exceeded the planned indicators for impressions by 5% and for clicks by 17% (CTR was 1.69%). The bounce rate was 24%, and the time spent on site was 1 minute 40 seconds.

In an advertising campaign to promote Pit Product goods, our goal was to increase brand and product awareness with an interactive Rich Media banner and attract an interested audience to a specially-designed landing page. We had 24/7 access to Yandex.Metric, allowing us to optimize all parameters. As a result of optimization, we exceeded the impressions plan by 6%, the reach by 8%. The CTR was 2.02%, the bounce rate was 39%, and the average time spent on the site reached 1 minute 33 seconds.

You can check out more campaigns on our website and ensure that the optimization is working. Contact us to reach a mobile audience and get a quality promotion.