I have been working in digital media long enough that I cannot help but roll my eyes when I hear the word ‘algorithm’ in an ad tech pitch. So, I’m going to go ahead and apologize for this blog post in advance, because it’s actually all about algorithms.

Arm Candy has historically preferred Google’s DV360 for performance campaigns because our media intelligence technology, CYRIS, has shown it consistently produces the best results. ‘Best results’ is a combination of how the media is planned and a campaign is set up, but also how well the platform can optimize towards a client’s media goal. 

Typically, programmatic channels optimize media based on a total number of a goal, rather than a value of a goal. This is all well and good for awareness campaigns, where the goal is reach and frequency.  However, in the past year, Google has rolled out the ability to leverage custom bidding algorithms across advertisers. No other DSP has the ability to create and leverage custom algorithms in such an off the shelf manner. 

This is where talking about algorithms goes from eye-roll to excitement. 

Custom bidding means that instead of being limited to a total number of purchases a campaign will optimize towards, we can build a custom algorithm that allows our teams to optimize for specific products that have the largest product margin. This helps conquer a challenge that exists for e-commerce clients with dynamic product margins— ultimately driving higher ROAS.  It has historically been difficult to scale these campaigns and drive incremental growth. That is, until you learn some Python and write a custom bidding script! 

Arm Candy tested a custom bidding algorithm to prioritize high value cart abandoners, with a retargeting strategy that bid more aggressively against them for higher potential campaign revenue. We conducted a six week A/B test of the “off the shelf” algorithm against the one custom built by Arm Candy.  Over the lifetime of the test, we found the custom built solution generated a 30% higher average order value, increasing overall revenue for our client.

It doesn’t stop at performance campaigns

Arm Candy is now branching out into writing bidding scripts for awareness campaigns, because not all impressions are made equal! The possibilities are as limitless as the data layer on a website allows you to be. Some of these customizations include video optimizations for viewability, average player size, and overall time on screen, rather than just video views.   

Want us to help you out and write a custom bidding algorithm to leverage for you or your clients?  Drop us a line!