Native vCPM Best Practices

While the majority of our clients run on our CPC model, we also offer a vCPM model.

For those new to this model, vCPM is Viewable Cost Per Mille or Cost Per Thousand Views. With a vCPM model, your bids should be determined by the price you’d want to pay per thousand views.

While a lot of the best practices for Native vCPM are the same as Native CPC, there are some major differences. We’ve gone ahead and made a guide for our Advertisers of vCPM best practices.

For an overview of CPC Best Practices, click here

To start, when creating a new campaign you will now see a drop down in campaign settings. This drop down allows you to select either a CPC or vCPM campaign. At the top of this page, there is a drop down menu allowing you to choose either CPC or vCPM.

We suggest uploading 3-5 pieces of content into your boost at a time. You only want to run 2-3 at a time for testing, then switch out with the other creatives to see which performs best for you. It’s important to try out new, unique creatives while keeping an eye on your vCTR. This is key as our algorithm will prioritize which creatives to serve based on which generates the highest vCTR.

With this new option, advertisers are able to bid per thousand views (vCPM) on well-established, highly visible placements across Revcontent’s highest-performing publishers. Because of this, not every CPC widget will also be available to vCPM campaigns.

We’re aware many of our Advertisers like to keep track of widgets that perform for them and add them to new campaigns as they are testing, this will still be possible. However, there will be a notification that will appear if there is an attempt to add a non vCPM widget to a campaign.

One of the largest difference with vCPM campaigns are the starting bids. If you're running vCPM campaigns with other network those should be transferable to your performance with Revcontent. However, if you are new we suggest using a bid in the follow starting ranges:

Mobile: $1.68 - $2.02

Desktop: $2.37 - $2.66

While these are great starting ranges for bids overall, make sure not to forget to adjust your individual widgets bids, doing so will allow you to yield the greatest ROI with your campaign.  

To help with this, we've implemented a Top Spot Calculator Tool in the Widget Targeting tab.

This tool will allow you to plug in key information about your targeting preferences and a widget id to see where your bid falls in comparison to the current winning bid range for that widget.

Overall, you want to allow your creatives to run for a week, or until you’ve hit at least $300-$500 spend, to have the optimal amount of data available to you to begin working on optimizing your campaign.  

Another unique feature to our vCPM campaigns is second price auction bids, a previously sought after feature. For those unfamiliar with second price auction bids, this model allows for our clients to bid more aggressively while also keeping them from overpaying for a spot. This is done by allowing Advertisers to pay the market value for a placement instead of their bid when the market price is lower.