How do you test and evaluate different RTB strategies and tactics?

1 Define your goals and metrics

Before you start testing and evaluating different RTB strategies and tactics, you need to define your goals and metrics clearly. What are you trying to achieve with your RTB campaign? Is it brand awareness, conversions, engagement, or something else? How will you measure your success? What are the key performance indicators (KPIs) that matter to you? How will you track and report them? Having clear and measurable goals and metrics will help you design your tests, analyze your results, and make data-driven decisions.

2 Choose your testing method

There are different methods of testing and evaluating different RTB strategies and tactics, such as A/B testing, multivariate testing, and lift testing. Each method has its own advantages and disadvantages, depending on your goals, budget, and resources. For example, A/B testing is simple and easy to implement, but it can only compare two variants at a time. Multivariate testing can compare multiple variants simultaneously, but it requires more traffic and time to reach statistical significance. Lift testing can measure the incremental impact of a strategy or tactic, but it requires a control group and a treatment group that are randomly assigned and isolated from each other.

3 Select your variables

Once you have chosen your testing method, you need to select the variables that you want to test and evaluate. These are the factors that can affect your RTB campaign performance, such as bid strategy, creative format, targeting criteria, frequency cap, budget allocation, and so on. You can test and evaluate one variable at a time (single-factor testing) or multiple variables at once (multi-factor testing). The latter can help you identify the interactions and synergies between different variables, but it can also increase the complexity and cost of your test.

4 Run your test

After you have selected your variables, you need to run your test according to your testing method. To ensure the validity, reliability, and ethicality of your test, it is important to adhere to the best practices of RTB testing. This includes using a large and representative sample size that can generate enough data and insights, a random and fair allocation of traffic that can eliminate bias and confounding factors, a consistent and relevant timeframe that can capture the effects of seasonality, trends, and events, a clear and objective hypothesis that can guide your test design and analysis, and a robust and accurate tool that can collect, process, and visualize your data.

5 Analyze your results

Once you have run your test, you need to analyze your results and draw conclusions. You need to use statistical methods and tools that can help you interpret your data and compare your variants. You need to look for patterns, trends, anomalies, and outliers that can reveal the strengths and weaknesses of your RTB strategies and tactics. You need to calculate the significance, confidence, and relevance of your results and determine if they support or reject your hypothesis. You need to communicate your findings clearly and convincingly to your stakeholders and clients.

6 Optimize your campaign

Finally, you need to optimize your RTB campaign based on your test results and analysis. You need to identify the best-performing variants and scale them up. You need to eliminate the worst-performing variants and drop them down. You need to fine-tune the moderate-performing variants and improve them further. You need to monitor your campaign performance and ROI regularly and adjust your bid strategy, creative format, targeting criteria, frequency cap, budget allocation, and so on accordingly. You need to keep testing and evaluating different RTB strategies and tactics to stay ahead of the competition and achieve your goals.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?