After weeks of optimizations, tests, creative variations, price adjustments, negotiations, and lots of coffee - You got everything to work consistently like a swiss clock. You even calculated sales lift and saw that the activity was incremental.

Some call this “Nirvana”. The ultimate serenity.

Until something, somewhere, goes wrong. Your campaigns on IronSource stopped performing. You didn’t change anything! Why did this happen?!?!?!?!

Now you go into an endless search to figure out WHAT HAPPENED.

The Five Stages of Grief: Denial, Denial, Denial, Denial, Denial

This scenario is not rare. Unfortunately it happens regularly. Often it goes the other direction as well (performance is suddenly much better for a period of time), and some of the time - this scenario gets “fixed” by its own.

The most commonly used plausible explanation is “It’s seasonality”

But wouldn’t seasonality affect the campaigns on other vendors as well ?

“It’s Competition” is the second most common excuse. While Competition seems to not affect performance with any other vendor.

Maybe you did make changes in your campaign targeting / budget / goal / price while you were sleeping. Sleepworking is real.

If you don’t move away from denial - you risk the scenario happening again and again without learning why it happened.

The WTF Happened Checklist

We consulted with over 20 leading performance marketers and came up with these two things you should check before slamming your head on your keyboard:

1. DID Anything Change !?

Not everyone knows, but IronSource has a change log, showing you any changes you or anyone with access to your account made.

2. Did the IronSource Algorithm make a wrong decision ?

IronSource recommends Advertisers set a limited number of campaigns, allowing the IronSource optimization algorithm to some of the optimization work automatically. 

This means that anything from device, demographics, GEO, City, time of day, day of week, price, position, placement, creative may have been changed by the IronSource Algorithm.

Marketers shared stories with us where IronSource’s algorithm “decided” to shift traffic from New York to Wyoming, from an extremely successful ad creative to one that generated no traction, from iPhone 12 to iPod touch.

As campaigns target a cohort of users and not only one - media vendors platforms can make their own optimization decisions, thus changing the audience the campaign reaches, causing a change in performance even if performance was stable previously.

Searching for what happens can sometimes feel like a “spot the difference, level 1000” game. There are so many variables that could change that it does sometimes feel like finding a needle in a haystack 🤦

INCRMNTAL is a platform that uses changes to measure value. When campaigns performance changes for better or worse - the platform provides alerts and actionable insights about “what happened” so that you don’t waste time searching for it.

If you want to learn more, visit INCRMNTAL or book a demo today!