The Quantcast Platform is built to drive campaign performance with minimal manual optimization. This guide provides best practices to optimize campaigns and achieve full budget delivery.
Monitoring Delivery / Signs of Under Delivery
When viewing the Campaigns table in the Quantcast Platform, the Delivery column shows delivery alerts for active Campaigns and Ad Sets.
Under Delivery occurs when an ad set is unable to consistently meet its daily spend goals. For example, if a daily budget for an ad set is $1,000 per day, but for 3-5 days only $800 is being delivered -- this would be a sign of under delivery. This article looks at how we monitor delivery in the campaigns section of the Quantcast Platform.
First, determine if your ad set or campaign is under-delivering:
Go to the campaign view and hover over the campaign or ad set and click Insights.
In the Performance tab, choose the metrics Budget Planned and Budget Delivered to confirm that we are consistently hitting your spending goal.
Check Key Events to see if there have been any changes that would affect spend, such as budget, pacing schedule, creative, or dates.
Checklist For Understanding Your Ad Set and Best Practices
Now that you have confirmed your ad set consistently underdelivers, follow the checklist to identify adjustments you can make to improve delivery.
Targeting
Are there any recent adjustments to targeting? Does it align with the timeline when you started noticing under delivery? We often see changes being made to ad sets that affect delivery, especially changes to Location; choosing more granular locations will give you higher precision and, accordingly, less reach for that ad set. Broadening your Locations will have the opposite effect - greater reach and lower precision.
Lookalike Event Groups: Ensure the conversion event group is included.
Retargeting Event Groups: We recommend retargeting for "All Site Events" rather than limiting our system to model based on one or two specific pages.
Location (Geo-Targeting): Geo-targeting always limits the cookies we can reach, especially if your selection is limited to specific zip codes. Expand the targeting criteria to a broader level to give our model the best opportunity to deliver.
Demographics: Demographics are a goal constraint that is looser than a filter constraint. Goals allow us to focus on delivering to the audience as specified and— consider other valuable opportunities as they arise, helping us keep our priorities on the overall outcomes you specified for your campaigns while ensuring we deliver against your full budget. With demographics, we’ll go after opportunities that match the demographics specified in your ad set, but we will also consider valuable opportunities that don't exactly match all the demographics entered. This approach favors reach over precision.
Interest-Based Audiences/Keywords: Interests, like demographics, are implemented as goals, so they don’t impact your total addressable audience, but they do impact the choices that the system can consider when figuring out whether to bid on an opportunity. When setting up an audience based on interests, broader interests tend to attract larger audiences than narrower ones, so keep this in mind when choosing your topics.
Budget and Schedule
Have there been any recent adjustments to the overall budget, pacing, or dayparting?
Budget Changes: When you increase the overall budget, the ad set spend for that day and future days will be adjusted accordingly. We sometimes see underdelivery on the first day after the adjustment, while our system recalibrates how much to spend. Best practice would be to monitor delivery on the first full day after the change was made.
Example: If you change the overall budget on Tuesday, check delivery for Wednesday.
Pacing: Are we pacing evenly, or are we using custom pacing? If we are utilizing custom pacing, how is pacing set? Monitor that when the daily spend increases, our system is meeting the daily spend. If not, see how the budget can be reallocated more evenly across other days.
Dayparting: Dayparting prevents our system from delivering at specific hours of the day throughout the week. Do we have any dayparting implemented on the ad set? Is it set not to deliver on hours where there’s an opportunity to bid well? For best practices, remove any dayparting on the ad set, if possible. Our system will automatically optimize and allocate spend hourly depending on forecasted bid opportunities and performance.
Creatives
What creatives are in use? Does the ad set contain all the recommended creative sizes? Are they clicking out to the appropriate landing URL? Is the landing URL leading to the conversion event?
Display: Ad sets running the display creative sizes below historically perform best on the Quantcast Platform. Ensure the correct creative size is selected at the creative level, and the landing URL is correct. Check whether any creative rejections are listed. Creative rejections will appear as an "!" icon next to each rejected creative, with a reason and troubleshooting steps. Finally, make sure that the ad set is running the five recommended display sizes. Here is a link to a help center article on how to Upload and Add Your Creatives.
Video: For best practices, include videos of 6, 15, and 30 seconds.
Advanced Settings
Advanced settings let you customize your ad set and ensure your desired goals are met. However, it also acts as an additional layer/filter that limits the opportunities our model can bid on.
Best Practices:
Viewability: Lowering viewability increases the number of bid opportunities for our model. We recommend setting viewability to 55% for conversion objective campaigns.
Frequency: Limits how often we target and deliver an impression to the same user. Historically, conversion objective campaigns have a higher conversion rate when a user is targeted multiple times. We recommend not setting a frequency cap, especially if the ad set was recently launched.
Devices: Can the ad set deliver across all devices? If not, it will heavily affect inventory and available bid opportunities. We recommend running ad sets on all devices, if possible.
Brand Safety: Brand Safety includes Integral Ad Science (IAS) and DoubleVerify (DV) pre-bid segments and site lists. Adding in pre-bid segments or allow/block lists will limit bid opportunities and could affect delivery, especially the stricter it is. For brand safety, the Quantcast Platform has a global blocklist that prevents delivery on all high-risk sites.
IP Suppression: Prevents delivery to certain IP addresses. However, having a large IP suppression list will suppress cookies you may not intend to.
To better understand audience insights, read the help center article here: Understanding Campaign and Ad Set Audience Insights