Bidding, Targeting, and Optimizations

Bidding Guidelines

What should I bid?
Sharethrough’s platform allows publishers to dynamically set price floors for their placements, which means that the spread of price floors tend to vary by season, month and week. Sharethrough recommends starting bids in the $4-$6 CPM range and optimizing from that point. Clearing prices on some placements can sit as low as $3-$4 as high as $12-$14

Targeting Guidelines

What’s the best way to reach my target?
Sharethrough recommends a mix of placement-based and user-based targeting. Native in-feed ads are predominately mobile (still a challenging environment for dropping cookies on users) so it can be challenging to scale purely user-targeted campaigns on native suppliers. Sharethrough offers a line of curated placement-based segments to supplement user-targeted strategies. Reach out to your Sharethrough rep for more detail on those segments.

Performance and Optimizations 

What are your KPIs and performance benchmarks?
Native ads have proven to be adept at a range of marketing objectives, so Sharethrough recommends looking at metrics based on objectives. In terms of raw performance, Sharethrough tends to see strong brand lift results (vary by brand metric: awareness, intent, etc) and CTRs around 1%. Please reach out to your Sharethrough rep if you would like more detail on benchmarks for specific objectives. 

What are recommended optimization strategies?
There are two fundamental topics about which there is much confusion in the industry: performance optimization and viewability optimization. Both tactics focus on cost and rate. Cost is a more fundamental driver of your success, whereas rates are usually used as proxies for success. Additional details can be found here: A Guide To Optimizing Native Ad Campaigns. This article may also be referenced for further clarity on how to optimize for viewability specifically: How To Optimize For Viewability In Native.