Native ad campaign optimization is a crucial element of achieving maximum performance for your advertising efforts. It can be overwhelming to determine where to start when it comes to optimizing your campaigns. But fear not, as there are simple recommendations that can help you navigate through the optimization process. With seven easy optimizations broken down by their “performance impact,” you can prioritize where to focus your attention first. 

To simplify the process further, a native ad campaign optimization checklist can guide you on what to focus on and why certain optimizations are essential for achieving maximum performance.

Ready to start optimizing? Let’s go!!!!!

Native Ad Campaign Optimization Checklist

Maximizing the performance of your native ad campaign requires efficient use of your time and resources. To avoid wasting effort on low-impact optimizations, we’ve created a checklist that highlights key areas to focus on first and explains why they are essential to the success of your campaign. Let’s refer to it!

Publishers (placements, sites)

• Priority Grade: 1
• Performance Impact: High

Optimizing by publisher level is crucial for the success of a native ad campaign. Publishers, including placements and sites, are the backbone of native advertising. They have a significant impact on the quality and effectiveness of a campaign. Therefore, it’s essential to prioritize the optimization of publishers to achieve high performance.

Creatives (images, videos, copy)

• Priority Grade: 2
• Performance Impact: High

Ad creative is a crucial factor in the success of a native ad campaign. It is the visual and messaging representation of the brand or product that catches the audience’s attention and encourages engagement. The creative should be eye-catching, visually appealing, and relevant to the target audience to increase the chances of a click-through. A well-designed ad creative can help boost the performance of a native ad campaign and generate better results.

Bidding (CPC adjustment, budget, bid strategy)

• Priority Grade: 3
• Performance Impact: Medium

The right bidding is crucial to get in front of high-quality audiences efficiently and scale up your campaign. 

Devices (platforms, OS, browsers)

• Priority Grade: 4
• Performance Impact: Medium

Devices are also important in the success of your ad campaign because people consume content differently on various devices.

Locations (countries, regions)

• Priority Grade: 5
• Performance Impact: Low

Location is typically the least of your worries since it´s best practice to run single-location campaigns on native

For how long should I optimize my campaign based on data?

This is a common question because determining the appropriate time frame to analyze ad campaign performance is crucial for making informed decisions. For most businesses, looking at the last 30 days of data is recommended as it provides sufficient data for analysis and decision-making. However, with a solid amount of data gathered, you can make smarter optimizations and adjust your campaign accordingly.

7 Optimize Ways To Boost Your Campaigns Performance

Before diving into our tips and ways to optimize your campaign, we need to make it clear that these optimizations are not exhaustive, but rather the most straightforward ones to yield quick results. Furthermore, these optimizations rely on data, so it’s important to make rational decisions instead of letting emotions guide your strategy. Emotional decision-making is a major pitfall for many advertisers when optimizing campaigns, and can lead to disastrous outcomes.

In addition, to accurately measure the success of a native advertising campaign, advertisers should use tracking tools from third-party providers on their landing pages. These tools enable them to track essential statistics such as click-through rates, conversion rates, and bounce rates. By analyzing this data alongside PubPower data, advertisers can make informed decisions regarding their campaigns. This approach allows advertisers to gain a more comprehensive understanding of their campaigns’ performance and take actions that drive better results. Utilizing third-party tracking tools also provides a level of objectivity to the evaluation process and allows for a more informed and data-driven optimization strategy. You also can refer to this article to understand more about how to use third parties tracking tools on PubPower platform. And if you would like to know about popular and effective tracking tools, please refer to this article. 

Exclude Placements With Zero Conversions

Checking your campaign’s performance, you might notice that there are lots of publishers (placements or websites) that your campaign spends lots of budget on but receive back even 0 conversions. The things we should do at this time are to find and block all placements that you spent 2-3X your CPA without any conversions. 

The easiest way is to sort placements by spend and check the conversion rate of your top placements. With low conversion rate placements, block them up. By doing this, you can focus your ad spend on placements that are more likely to drive conversions, thus increasing your return on investment (ROI). 

Block Placements With Zero Content View Rate

Consider blocking placements with no visits is another way to optimize your ad campaign. One way to do this is by setting up a conversion event to track and record landing page views. By analyzing this data, you can identify placements with more than 10 clicks but a view content rate of 0. These are placements where users are not engaging with your landing page content, and you can block them to save on ad spend. Instead, focus on the placements that are generating engagement and conversions. Don’t waste any more time and money on ineffective ad placements. 

Pause Creatives Above CPA

One of the most important aspects of optimizing your native ad campaign is monitoring the performance of your creatives. Pausing creatives that are above your desired CPA is a simple and effective way to improve your campaign’s performance. By identifying which creatives are consistently underperforming and are costing you more money than they’re bringing in, you can make data-driven decisions to pause those creatives and focus on the ones that are generating the most conversions.

We recommend you pause creatives that spent a budget of X2 or X3 of your campaigns average CPA to save your budget, increase your overall campaign ROI, and ensure that your advertising budget is being used effectively.

Increase CPC if CPA is good and Decrease CPC if CPA is too high

As mentioned in the checklist above, bidding adjustment is very important in optimizing your ad campaign. If your CPA is good and you’re not hitting your daily budget, try increasing your CPC to potentially reach more high-quality traffic. This can help improve your overall campaign performance and increase your chances of generating more conversions. Keep an eye on your CPA and adjust your CPC accordingly to ensure you’re not overspending on clicks.

On the other hand, if you notice that your CPA is higher than you’d like, consider decreasing your CPC to help lower your overall cost per conversion. This can help you stretch your ad spend further and maximize your ROI. It’s important to strike a balance between your CPC and CPA to ensure that you’re not overspending on clicks or sacrificing conversions due to a low CPC. Keep an eye on your metrics and make adjustments as needed to achieve your campaign goals. Remember, optimizing your CPC and CPA is an ongoing process and requires constant monitoring and adjustments.

Bid more on high-converting placement

One effective way to optimize your native ad campaigns is to bid more on high-converting placements. By doing this, you increase the likelihood of your ad being shown to users who are more likely to engage with your content and convert. To identify high-converting placements, you can use conversion tracking and analytics tools to measure the performance of your campaigns. Once you have identified the top-performing placements, you can adjust your bids to increase your chances of winning ad auctions and showing your ads to the right audience. 

Tips for you is that you shouldn’t increase your bid by more than 50% of the current bid. And you should continue to follow the report to monitor the impact of the bid increase. Once you have evaluated the impact of the increased bid, you can decide whether to increase it further or not. By gradually increasing your bid, you can avoid overspending and optimize your campaign effectively. Keep in mind that bidding too aggressively may not always yield the best results, so it’s important to constantly monitor your campaign’s performance and adjust your bids accordingly.

Focus on high-converting devices

Identifying the devices that are driving the most conversions and allocating more of your budget toward them is a great way to maximize your ROI and improve your campaign performance.

When optimizing your ad campaign, it’s important to pay attention to the devices that are driving the most conversions. Increase your bids and budget on high-converting devices to get more traffic from those sources. Be careful not to overbid and always monitor your performance data to make informed decisions.

Exclude high CPA locations

One effective way to optimize your native ad campaign is to exclude high CPA locations. By doing this, you can avoid wasting ad spending on locations that are not performing well and focus on more effective ones. 

To identify high CPA locations, you can use data from PubPower platform’s reporting features and your tracking tools. Once you have identified these locations, you can exclude them from your campaign or adjust your bid to decrease the likelihood of your ads being served in those locations. This approach can help you improve the overall performance of your campaign and achieve better ROI.

In conclusion, the above checklist and 7 optimization methods are simple but effective ways to improve your ad campaign’s performance. However, each business and industry may require specific customization to achieve optimal results. That’s why it’s always a good idea to seek advice from experts in the field. At Pubpower, our team of experts is available to provide customized advice to help you maximize the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns. Don’t hesitate to contact us for help in achieving your advertising goals.