Win Rate: The PropellerAds Tool Every Advertiser Needs to Use
When you’re working in the affiliate marketing industry, you learn to appreciate the power of an effective bid. Knowing when and how much you can bid, helps you optimize your campaigns. When you identify good performing zones you can adjust your bid to attract more traffic from them, while working more on the other slices.
Whether you’re in the process of finding the perfect bid to beat your competitors, get the right placement, or just score that ROI you’re hoping for, bids are meant to bring you action.
And between clicks, impressions, leads, installs and so on, at the end of the day they all translate into money.
The better you bid the more you win
So, what if instead of wasting your time trying to understand which auctions you’re winning and which you’re not you could have an indicator pointing to it? It could potentially help improve your performance, right?
And if you‘d also have the chance to narrow it down to the specific zones within the campaign, that would be of even greater help.
Lucky for you, that’s exactly what the Win Rate does. In case you’re still wondering what we’re talking about, it’s that significant (yet often overlooked indicator) which you can find within your Statistic page in the PropellerAds Self-Serve Ad Platform (SSP).
Once you set up your campaign’s parameters (language, platform, os, etc.) and the ad frequency to match those of the traffic your ads are being shown to, you automatically qualify for the auction. And when that happens, we start measuring your Win Rate by zones and overall campaign.
What exactly is the Win Rate?
This important indicator shows the percentage of auctions you’re winning from the ones that you’re taking part in. This way you can know whether your bid is good or if it needs more attention:
- Win Rate < 20% – chances are you can work on your bid to increase your chances of getting more traffic from this slice.
- Win Rate > 20% – you’re doing a good job. However, until 100% you still can work on your bid to get even more of that traffic.
When your Win Rate is high it means that you are getting a lot of traffic. And the alternative also goes. The good news is that you can influence your Win Rate (and win more traffic) by increasing your bid.
For example: if you check your Win Rate and notice that not a lot of traffic is coming on a specific slice, you can bid higher to get more of it. Improving your creatives can also help.
In addition, in order to keep your campaigns more organized and ready for better optimization, you can always use our Custom Zone Bidding.
Read all about the PropellerAds CPC Custom Zone Bidding: Case Study
Keep in mind that in performance-based pricing models (like the CPA Goal) the Conversion Rate (CR) also influences the traffic volumes that you are getting. So if you have a high CR and high Win Rate your chances of getting larger volumes of traffic are better.
How can you use the Win Rate?
In order to better illustrate the importance of the Win Rate and its application, we asked our affiliates to tell us why they like it and to recommend the best ways to use it. Here is what they have to say:
• The Win Rate can help you check if you can get more traffic
“I use the Win Rate to check the % of traffic my campaign is receiving. This way I can know if I still have space to increase numbers and volumes, by increasing the rate or rotating more creatives. I’d totally recommend checking it periodically so you have full knowledge of where your offers are in Propeller’s traffic share for the GEO.”
Andre – Mobipium
The Win Rate can help you identify which are the zones on which you’re winning, or from where you’re not getting enough traffic. When you know that, you can work on improving your performance by optimizing your campaign.
• It shows how you stand against your competitors
“I think the most useful tool in PropellerAds stats is the win rate option, this is one of the most important parameters for me as a Marketer and it allows me to understand the campaign potential and where I stand compared to others.
I highly recommend using it and keeping a close eye (on it) since it keeps changing all the time.”
Nir from Housetechads
In case you were wondering what tools you can use to spy on your competitors, here’s our list.
Knowing where you stand against your competitors in the market or what you’re doing better than the rest is extremely useful. It allows you to decide how to better spend your budget to get more traffic. Clearly, If you win a lot of auctions, it means that you’re ahead of competitors – and if not, you know where you need to get better.
• You can use it to verify how well you set up your campaign
“I definitely recommend (i.e. the Win Rate) – every webmaster wants to receive information about how successfully he has set up his campaign, and this indicator very accurately demonstrates how successfully the settings were selected for their campaign.”
TonyM
If you’re getting a lot of traffic it shows that you set up everything just great. The more traffic you get, the better your Win Rate. Just make sure to understand what you did great to replicate your success with similar campaigns.
• You can measure your position in the auction with the Win Rate
“It is very simple, for me this is a very specific indicator of how successfully I am entrenched in the positions of the auction. If the indicator is good, then I will receive a lot of traffic, and can easily manage my bid based on this indicator.”
TonyM
A very important factor when participating in an auction is understanding how well you’ve entered the auction and in claiming the traffic. If your bid is good, you’ll get more traffic, obviously. But you still need to continue checking this to avoid a competitor overthrowing you.
• It allows you to save money by not increasing your bids unnecessarily
“It will help you beat other competitors in bids and save money when you see you’re having 100% win rate.”
Nir from Housetechads
You can use the Win Rate to know how much more traffic there is. It can come extremely handy when there is a very high demand for a specific kind of traffic. This way you can react a lot faster and optimize your campaign to get more of it.
The real struggle is understanding when there’s no need to increase bids. Luckily, this indicator tells you exactly whether you can squeeze anything other than what you’re already getting from a campaign.
What is a good Win Rate?
Win Rates are as subjective as Conversion Rates can get. In fact, anything between 20 and 100% can pass as a good Win Rate. However, as a rule of thumb, if you see that your Win Rate is at 2-3% of traffic, this is a signal that there is much more traffic you could get. Act fast and stay ahead of your competitors.
Still wondering what is a good CR? Read all about it in our article
Increase your bids, change your creatives or increase your CR. All these can help improve your Win Rate and position yourself ahead of your competitors. In other words, getting more traffic. And that’s really what affiliate marketing is all about. Getting the bigger slice of cake. Or, in other words, traffic and cash.
Pro Tip: The narrower the target (and lower the volumes), the higher the Win Rate you need to aim for.
When you are creating a narrow-targeted campaign (especially a White List campaign), the traffic is limited, which is why you need the high Win Rate. Otherwise, you’ll hardly get any traffic to make it worth the effort.
Do you have any other ideas on how you could start taking advantage of the Win Rate? Come join the talk in our Telegram Chat right now.
