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Super Early Warning Rules
Super early warning rules have a name that, let's face it, tells us all we need to know. It's about cutting down the ad sets / squads or ads that are performing badly as quickly as possible, to prevent damage to your overall campaign profits.
Detect and kill your bad ads quickly to protect the profit from your good ads.
The Problem
It doesn’t matter how well your best ads or ad sets / squads are performing. If you don’t spot and kill the ads that aren’t bringing in results, these poor performing ads can undermine your better ones. Ultimately, this can lead to a loss of overall profit in your campaign.
Let's take a look at a basic example below:
Ad 1
Spend: £100
Earned: £200
Profit = £100
Ad 2
Spend: £100
Earned: £50
Loss = £50
Ad 3
Spend: £100
Earned: £0
Loss = £100
Total loss = £50
In this scenario, we haven’t kept tabs on Ad 2 and Ad 3, meaning that they haven’t been cut by the time our £300 budget is spent. Left unattended, they’ve completely undone the strong performance of Ad 1, leaving us out of pocket overall.
The Solution
Quickly identifying poor performing ad sets / squads or ads (like 2 and 3 in our example above) is crucial. If you can do this within the early stages of spend, you can prevent a loss of profit. Not only this, you free your remaining budget to focus on the ads and ad sets / squads that are performing well, to maximise your overall return!
Early warning rules are designed to do just that. They use tell tale signs, based on your chosen metrics, that an ad set / squad isn’t performing in the way you’d expect. They will then pause it before it does any damage to your campaign.
In order to create early warning rules, we need to know what makes an ad good or bad...
The Experiment
We looked at our historical campaigns and this is what we found:
Non-profitable campaigns:
- CPM = 9
- Cost per any = 0.28
- CTR (all) = 2.14
- CPC (all) = 0.5
- Cost per website view = 1.48
- Cost Per Purchase = 29.5
- Cost per ATC = 8.9
Profitable campaigns:
- CPM = 8.84
- Cost per any = 0.17
- CTR (all) = 2.5
- CPC (all) = 0.48
- Cost per website view = 0.73
- Cost Per Purchase = 15.8
- Cost per ATC = 4.9
By comparing our profitable campaigns with non-profitable ones, we were able to produce benchmark figures such as those in the example above. We could then use these benchmarks in our rules to serve both as warnings for poor performance and indications of opportunities to scale.
In our early warning rules therefore, we have a number of options to use for differing objectives, even in this small example.
Early warning rule examples for Traffic Objectives
If your goal is to drive traffic to your website, you might set up your early warning rules based on Click Through Rate (CTR) or Cost Per Website View, e.g.:
Pause ad if spent > £5 and CTR < 2.5
Pause ad if spent > £5 and Cost Per Website View > £0.73
Early warning rule examples for Conversion Objectives
If your goal is to drive conversions, you might set up your early warning rules based on Cost Per Purchase or Add to Cart:
Pause ad if spent > £5 and Cost Per Purchase > £15.80
Pause ad if spent > £5 and Cost Per Add to Cart > £4.90
The Result
By looking at our historical data to identify ‘average' results for our profitable and non-profitable campaigns, we were able to set up Early Warning Rules to capture and kill ad sets / squads that didn’t meet average expectations within the first £5 of spend.
This not only enabled us to protect our profitable ad sets / squads, but left our budget safe to spend on the ads that were bringing in the results we wanted.
Protect Your Campaign Profits
Kill the bad, save the good
