Interested in driving the most optimal CPA (cost-per-acquisition) for your conversion-based campaigns? When setting up your Outbrain campaign, select a Campaign Objective of either App Installs or Conversions to get started.
How do I Control My Campaign With Target CPA?
Why is My Campaign’s CPA Not Reaching My Target CPA?
What is Target CPA?
Target Cost-Per-Acquisition is one of four modes that Outbrain offers for auto-optimizing towards conversions within Conversion Bid Strategy. Target CPA is exactly what it sounds like – simply enter your CPA goal and our system will do the rest.
Target CPA works to keep your campaigns profitable by prioritizing cost-per- acquisition over getting the most out of your budget or maximizing conversions.
Who should use Target CPA mode?
Target CPA is the best CBS mode for performance marketers that are held to a strict CPA goal. If you are looking to maximize conversions and are less concerned about CPA, check out this Help Center article about Fully Automatic CBS, which may be a better mode for you.
How do I enable Target CPA mode?
After selecting your Campaign Objective and Creative Format during the campaign setup process, there will be a Budget section.
There, you will see three options from a drop-down menu within the Conversion Bid Strategy: Fully Automatic, Semi Automatic, Target ROAS, and Target CPA. Please note, Conversion Bid Strategy will only appear if you have selected App Installs or Conversions as your Campaign Objective at the start of the setup process.
After selecting Target CPA, use the dropdown menu to specify the conversion that you wish to optimize towards. For more information about the conversion setup process, please visit this Help Center article. If you’re looking for broader information regarding conversions and pixel implementation, please refer here.
How do I control my campaign parameters with Target CPA enabled?
If your CPA remains high for several days in a row and you see that your campaign’s optimized CPC has little to no movement, reduce your budget while still meeting minimum requirements. If your CPA is hitting or exceeding the goal, go ahead and increase your budget to continue earning maximum conversions.
Why is my campaign’s CPA not reaching my CPA goal?
Have you noticed that your campaign’s actual CPA is not reaching your target CPA? This might be because of the lack of data for Outbrain’s algorithm to utilize. If so, you’ll see a notification under the Objective & Optimization section of the campaign screen of either “Learning” or “Low Conversion Data.”
What does “Learning” mean?
- If the system tells you that your campaign is “learning,” no worries – it just means that your campaign was recently launched and the system is still gathering data for optimization.
- Please note that the “learning” phase for Target CPA may last for about a week after launch.
What does “Low Conversion Data” mean?
- If the system tells you that your campaign has “low conversion data,” this means that recently your campaign has slowed to a low number of conversions.
Please check the following campaign details to ensure that we can collect enough data to optimize towards your target CPA:
- Is the pixel implemented correctly? For pixel implementation guidance, please check out this help center article.
- Is the pixel firing correctly on all platforms?
- Is your funnel too long? Try adding more conversion pixels along the conversion journey to shorten the funnel.
Important to Note:
- To bring you to your target CPA while maintaining the highest number of conversions for that CPA, the system will adjust the CPC for each serving based on multiple data points, in addition to adjusting the campaign’s (base) CPC.
- There are cases where the system can get more conversions within your CPA, therefore the system raises the CPC (you’ll see it as “optimized CPC”). When the Optimized CPC reaches the Maximum CPC threshold, the system will no longer be able to raise the CPC. If you want to get more conversions with your target CPA, you will need to raise the Entered CPC (we recommend raising it to be the same as the Optimized CPC) so that the algorithm can continue optimizing and maximizing the number of conversions.
- Still not sure about how to best use Target CPA Conversion Bid Strategy? Check out our suggested best practices here.