Drop Off Funnel: The Key to Success When a Campaign Underperforms

Programmatic campaigns have a lot of moving parts—from strategic planning and campaign execution to post-campaign analysis. To be successful and ensure effective ad spend, it is important to determine what is going on behind the scenes and how that information can be leveraged. In turn, having this knowledge will empower you to make key optimization decisions in real-time and allow the campaign to use the best ad formats and targeting strategies.

But what happens when things don’t go according to plan where the campaign underperforms and does not pace properly? 

This is why accessing quality-of-life data on campaigns to understand how to make changes in the right place, at the right time is a key factor in running successful campaigns.

In this post, we’ll look at the Drop Off Funnel feature in the StackAdapt platform, how it works, what type of real-time information it can provide, and how it can help you gain the best understanding of what optimizations to make to better pace campaigns.

What Is the Drop Off Funnel Feature and How It Works

The Drop Off Funnel is a powerful tool that helps you understand whether your campaign has a large enough scope to spend your intended budget. It can show you exactly where your campaign is losing bids and offer optimization suggestions on how to remedy any underpacing issues that might arise.

The Drop Off Funnel uses an algorithm to determine how many bids have dropped off, by analyzing what is happening at each campaign stage. As a campaign-specific feature, it continually analyzes millions of data points to present real-time data on your campaign at a minimum frequency of 15 minutes.

The Drop Off Funnel will show the reason for bid drop offs, as well as the remaining number of bids in a campaign. You can also compare between 2 different dates within the campaign lifetime, helping paint a clear picture of the drop offs from different sources within the specified time range.

Understanding Your Campaigns With Drop Off Funnel

Two main areas are important for advertisers to consider when evaluating campaign performance. First, how effective the targeting methods are, and secondly, how efficient the campaign is at winning bid requests.

Targeting Settings

How can you understand how campaign targeting parameters, such as audience, device settings and geo are affecting performance? The Drop Off Funnel will identify what targeting selections are limiting the campaign from scaling. For example, if a campaign has an inclusion or exclusion list for domains, you can see the brief explanation of the drop off reason and as well as a tip on how to minimize this drop off—which in this case could be targeting more sites to run by adjusting your exclusion list.

Bidding and Competition

The Drop Off Funnel will also identify the total number of valid bid requests, how your Custom Segments are performing and data regarding the campaign’s frequency cap. So, if your campaign is targeting a Custom Segment that is not performing, the Drop Off Funnel will recommend whether you need to increase or decrease your targeting scope.

Imagine a campaign as a puzzle with a number of moving pieces; for a campaign to be successful, all the pieces need to come together and form one big shape. The Drop Off Funnel is a tool that lets you know which piece of the puzzle to adjust for your campaign to achieve its goal. Advertisers can get an inside look at their campaign’s overall health, while gaining valuable insights on how to treat problems that can affect scale.

Want to run exceptional programmatic campaigns? Request a demo to learn more about StackAdapt.