Buyer Strategies
Campaign optimization and traffic arbitrage tactics for buyers
4 articles
Everything I Learned About CPM Bidding After Burning $2,000
My first campaign on any pop network, I set my CPM bid to whatever the platform "recommended" and walked away. Two weeks and about $2k later I had 47 conversions. Sounds okay until you realize the same traffic with a smarter bidding approach could have gotten me 80+ for the same money. I didnt understand how CPM auctions actually work. Turns out most people dont. So heres everything I wish Id known before I burned through that budget. How the Auction Works When someone visits a publishers ...
Bot Traffic Is Eating Your Budget and You Probably Don't Know It
Heres a fun number. I ran an analysis on my first month of campaigns and roughly 15-20% of my impressions were flagged as suspicious or fraudulent. Somewhere around one in six. Bots, datacenter proxies, automated scripts, whatever. None of it was ever going to convert and I was paying for all of it. Bot traffic is one of those things everyone in ad tech knows about but most people dont actively fight. They figure the network handles it, or they just eat the cost. Both of those approaches are...
Smart Rules — How I Stopped Wasting 40% of My Budget
I ran my first PopLayer campaign for about three weeks before I looked at the geo breakdown. When I did I wanted to throw my laptop out the window. Forty percent of my budget was going to countries where my offer didnt even convert. I was buying Indian mobile traffic at $0.30 CPM for an offer that only paid out on US and UK installs. The traffic was real, the ads were showing, the money was leaving my account. Just... to the wrong people. Smart Rules fixed this. Heres how they work and how ...
Understanding Your Campaign Statistics
Your campaign is live — now what? This guide explains every chart, table, and modal you'll encounter in the statistics section so you can spot winners, cut losers, and get the most out of your budget. The Performance Chart The top of the statistics page shows a time-series chart of your key metrics: impressions, clicks, spend, CTR, and CPM over time. Use the date picker to zoom into specific periods and the metric toggles to layer or isolate metrics. The performance chart — hover over any ...