Goals, Bidding, CPMs, & Troubleshooting
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      Ad Group Goals & Optimizations

      GUIDE

      Overview 

      Ensuring you have proper goal setting is the most important first step in optimizing your campaign. Without a meaningful goal, you won't have a marker of success to work towards nor an ability to easily translate your media back to what matters: real business results.


      Use this guide to help you identify your goals based on verification metrics or business results. 

      Verification metrics Business results

      Keep a pulse on campaign health and performance to drive users down the marketing funnel.  

      Ad group goals include:

      • Reach
      • Completion rate
      • Cost-per completed view 

      Align digital KPIs with real business results along the customer journey. 

      Ad group goals include:

      • Cost per acquisition (CPA)

      • Click-through rate (CTR) 

      • Cost per click (CPC)

      Below is more detail on each ad group goal and optimization tips on how you can adjust your ad group settings to drive real business results. 

      Reach 

      Reach

      This goal is focused on helping you reach the most unique users. By setting this as your KPI at the ad group level, our system will optimize towards the lowest CPM per user.


      A Reach goal will help your ad group serve more impressions on inventory that achieves the highest amount of viewers seeing your ads.

      Optimization tips

      • To optimize your reach, look to include additional data targeted audience segments for your custom audiences

      • If your campaign is pacing well, you can look to lower your CPM incrementally to garner more impressions

      • If targeting contextually, look to include additional categories or keywords to your targeting parameters

      • Lower your frequency cap from 3 impressions/8 hours to 1 impression/ 4 hours to serve more impressions

      • Enable cross-device targeting to expand your reach to multiple user devices

      Click-through rate 

      Click-through rate (CTR) A CTR goal will help your ad group serve more impressions on inventory that achieves an average click-through rate or greater than the CTR goal you set. The goal would be to win more impressions on inventory that produces more clicks, not necessarily pay more (which may cause you to win fewer impressions). This figure should represent the target percentage of users you hope to click on your ad. 

      Optimization tips

      • Set a CTR goal of 0.1% to 0.15% to start

      • To optimize your CTR, create a whitelist of high-performing sites and/or create a blocklist of low performing sites

      • Optimize toward supply vendors that are garnering your desired CTR

      • Optimize your fold bid adjustments to bid higher on above-the-fold inventory and lower on below-the-fold 

      • Explore how you can better target device types based on your desired outcome. Mobile in-app inventory tends to result in the highest CTR as it is the easiest device to have accidental clicks.

      Cost per click (CPC)

      Cost per click (CPC) A CPC goal will help your ad group serve more impressions on inventory that is garnering an average cost per click equal to or less than the desired CPC. Cost per click will look towards simultaneously increasing the number of impressions won on inventory that's clicked through while simultaneously looking to decrease your CPM.

      Optimization tips

      • To optimize toward CPC, set your desired CPC goal

      • Build a whitelist with sites garnering your desired CPC and/or a blocklist with inventory that’s outside of your desired CPC range

      • Look to target contextually to lower your CPM 

      • Optimize toward supply vendors that are garnering your desired CPC

      • Remove Browsers yielding high CPC

      Cost per acquisition (CPA)

      Cost per acquisition (CPA) A CPA goal will help your ad group to serve more impressions on inventory that is achieving your desired cost-per-acquisition (cost of converting a user once). CPA ad group goals will only work if the Choozle Smart Container Tag is placed on the conversion event’s root URL. 

      If you have multiple conversion events set at the campaign level, the CPA will be aggregated to include all conversion events. Ideally, this metric should closely represent the target you wish to pay in order to attain a conversion. 

      Optimization tips

      • To optimize toward CPA, set your desired cost per acquisition (the cost you wish to pay for a user to convert once)

      • Implement a retargeting ad group to drive lower-funnel conversion actions. Segment your retargeting audiences based on the pages they visited within the site. People who get to a product details page are more valuable than those who only visit the homepage, and people who make it to the bart but leave without finalizing their purchase are likely your most valuable users. 

      • Use recency bid adjustments to bid more aggressively on users that are new to your retargeting audience. Bid less aggressively on users that have entered the retargeting pool over a month ago 

      • Enable cross-device targeting to expand your retargeting reach to multiple user devices

      • Analyze the time of day and day of the week that your customers are most likely to convert and heavy up media delivery to those windows.

      • Consider the average amount of time it takes your customers to go through the purchase-decision cycle. Some products (especially at higher price points) require more research and “shopping around.” Use an attribution window that allows you to track those conversions that could have reasonably been influenced by an impression XX days before the purchase.

      • A “conversion” does not always have to be an actual purchase. It can be almost any measurable event that drives value to your brand. It could be when users visit the “Find a Location” page, fill out a form, click to watch a video on the site, or visit a Product Details Page. 

      Cost-per completed view (CPCV)

      Cost-per completed view (CPCV) This goal focuses on the amount it costs for a unique user to watch your entire video ad (or listen to your audio ad). CPCV or cost-per completed view is calculated by dividing the total spend by the number of completed views. For connected TV placements, you can expect very low targets for cost per completed view—around $0.50 - $1.00 (USD)—for publishers with high CPMs because the video ads cannot be skipped. 

      This is an ideal goal if you are leveraging video, connected TV, or audio ad formats. 

      Optimization tips

      • To optimize toward CPCV, set your desired CPCV budget goal

      • Build a whitelist with sites garnering your desired CPCV and/or a blocklist with inventory that’s outside of your desired CPCV range

      • Remove in-banner video inventory and/or set your video creative as non-skippable to bid exclusively on inventory that has higher viewability  

      • Optimize toward supply vendors that are garnering your desired CPCV

      • Remove Browsers yielding high CPCV

      Completion rate

      Completion rate This goal allows the ad group to optimize towards inventory where ads are viewed or heard to completion. The completion rate can be calculated by taking the number of completions and dividing it by the number of starts. 

      This figure should represent the target percentage of how much of your video or audio ad is completed. Completion rates for connected TV are extremely high (in the range of 80% to 97%), as the environment doesn't allow for skipping the videos. This metric is useful for branding-based campaigns where you want to optimize to users viewing your ad all the way through. 

      Optimization tips

      • Build a whitelist with sites with high completion rate or select specific private marketplace deals that indicate high completion rate or viewability 

      • Remove in-banner video inventory and/or set your video creative as non-skippable to bid exclusively on inventory that has a higher completion rate   

      • Implement creative event retargeting ad group to drive lower-funnel conversion actions. Segment your creative event retargeting audiences based on how much of the video they have watched with other creative formats like display.