Imagine a situation when you’re completely satisfied with current CR and traffic’s quality, and you’re ready to increase the budget (basically, the open cap is around the corner). The only thing you can’t do is raise your payout/bid, but you definitely need more volumes. We’ve all been there! Luckily, there are plenty of ways to get out of this situation, and we’re ready to reveal our tips and tricks for growing traffic volumes 🙂
Hint 1: Frequency
How many ads do you see each day if you browse actively? A brief search gave me a diffuse answer — A LOT. If your ad is catchy, seeing it once is enough, but keep in mind that your lander isn’t the only lander in the world, and there are plenty of other look-alike brands aiming at the same audience you do.
Concluding mentioned above: sometimes, you need to show the ad twice in order to convince the user to interact with your lander or creative. Experimenting with your frequency capping settings allows you to gain larger volumes without bid changes.
If you’d like to play safe, start from switching the default 1 impression per 24 hours to 1/18. With that type of frequency, only the most active users will see your ad twice. Keep in mind that the more active users are, the higher is their ad blindness.
Another helpful and safe combination is 1 ad per 12 hours. With this setting, you show your ad during the user’s morning and evening routine. It’s one of the most effective ways to convince your user that he/she truly needs to interact with your product.
How frequency capping helps Sweepstakes and Dating campaigns gain conversions
Let’s take the Sweepstakes vertical as an example. When you see an ad saying that you’ve won something for the first time, you might not believe that it’s real. But when you see that ad for the second time on the exact same day, it’ll be more likely to convince you to take the chance of getting that awesome new iPhone.
The same goes for Dating campaigns. In the nighttime, the feeling of loneliness becomes a real struggle. And suddenly you see a familiar face of so-called Emma who is ready to chat with you. You see her message for the second time. What if this Emma is your “destiny” you were waiting for so long? You register.
0/24 frequency: pros and cons
If you’re 100% sure of your ROI and aim for getting as much traffic as possible, try 0/24 frequency capping. This setting is mostly used for Smartlinks or Direct Links as these ad formats imply creatives and landers rotation. When you change your freq to 0/24, it means you remove your capping with that setting. Once you do it, we start showing your ad to a unique user as many times as possible.
This option is dangerous when you run a campaign with one creative / lander. Obviously, you don’t want to show the same ad 10 times to the same user. But if you have multiple creatives to expose, you definitely need to try the 0/24 capping.
Remember that experimenting with frequency capping is an option only suitable when your campaign is well-optimized and aims for larger traffic volumes. Otherwise, you might waste your budget.
Hint 2. Creatives
Once your core campaign is optimized, and you need larger traffic volumes, new tests are your next option. And new tests require new creatives.
Don’t forget to keep in mind the competition which means that you will need to update your landers and banners from time to time to be one-two steps ahead of your competitors who aim at the same audience with the same methods as yours.
Adding new creatives allows you to receive larger volumes and leads to CR growth as well. How come? Let’s take Social Bar campaigns with the CPC model as an example.
Example: getting more traffic by adding several creatives
Imagine running a Social Bar campaign with CPC payment model.
If you’ve got one creative only, you won’t be able to scale your volumes cause you receive as much traffic as this particular creative’s CPM allows. But once you add 3 or 4 new creatives, you’ll have a re-test possibility. Then, if your new creatives show higher CTR compared to the previous one, your re-calculated CPM will be higher. Therefore, you’ll receive larger volumes.
The same goes for popunder ads. Once the “core” lander is optimized, try adding a new one. If CR is higher, you’ll get larger volumes without the payouts changes.
Summing up all mentioned above, keep on testing and adding new creatives each time you feel you’ve reached your limit, but you need more traffic. Don’t forget to check out our hints and tricks for creatives 😉
Hint 3. Set a wider target to drive more traffic without raising bids
Add new audiences
After your campaign is optimized — widen your targeting options. It’s reasonable to run a test on a small piece, and once the testing level is complete, re-check your settings and go to another level.
For example, you run a binary option campaign. In your experience, Safari users convert way better than any other ones. But why not try converting Chrome? Simply create a new campaign with a lower bid for the very beginning and connect fresh audiences to your campaign.
Re-check and update targeting
Re-checking your targeting is always helpful. There is still a chance that you’ve set your targeting way too tight. Language targeting might be useful at the very beginning, but once your campaign has grown — remove it 🙂
New OS and browsers versions appear from time to time. If you’re running a mobile campaign, and your app is already optimized for an update — re-check your settings and add new versions.
Use custom bid instead of blacklists
Re-test sources you’ve blacklisted before. Do they still have volumes? If yes, you can use their traffic instead of excluding it. With custom bid settings, you can give some publishers a second chance by lowering a bid and checking how their traffic will perform for your optimized campaign.
Try other types of traffic
Check out if you’ve tested all traffic types of ours — you might have noticed that we have mainstream and non-mainstream types on the Self-Service Platform (SSP).
To use another type of traffic, clone your campaign and choose “non-mainstream” sources if you haven’t done that before, and your rules don’t forbid this type of traffic. You’ll unlock plenty of new sources full of converting potential. If you run a non-mainstream campaign — do the opposite thing and check mainstream volumes we’re able to offer you.
Concluding this part — never stop re-testing even though your campaign seems fully optimized. The wider your target is, the more volumes you’ll receive.
Hint 4. Reach out to your AM
For a final conclusion, I’d like to reveal the shortest and easiest way to get larger volumes to you — the communicative way.
When you need to know a route from point A to point B you definitely can define a path by yourself, but in order to save time, you can request a guide’s assistance. The same logic could be applied to running your campaign and receiving higher volumes — simply contact your AM / our support team and let them assist you. They’ve got a lot of insider information about user activity on different markets and within different GEOs. It’ll be much easier to keep up with the latest trends 🙂
As you may have discovered, there are several feasible ways to get more traffic without increasing your bids. You can now experiment with frequency cappings, additional creatives, and new traffic types.
Please use these hints when you’ve already optimized your campaign. Rushing into tweaking settings before making sure you get the right converting traffic is not a good idea. And one more thing is to follow Dasha’s tip of making changes one by one and take notes of how they work. Otherwise, it will be almost impossible to detect what works good and what doesn’t perform.
Adsterra always puts you first. So don’t hesitate to ask our managers for help 
