Pricing: Best Practices

General guidelines

Publishers that constantly monitor their performance and make adjustments accordingly are the most successful partners. A simple rule to follow is to increase traffic to best performing intersections where your CPCs are increasing, and decrease traffic to intersections that are not performing well and you're seeing consistent price downs. Publishers should focus on intersections that are performing well, and optimize towards the best performing Placement IDs; Not spending time making adjustments to poor performing placements.

Increases to traffic

When increasing traffic, we recommend doing so slowly. Changes to traffic should roll out in 5-10% increments, once every 2-3 days. Utilize the Merchant Level Quality report available in the Publisher Portal to assess the Retailer’s Cost of Sale performance as you slowly increase traffic, and hold off any subsequent lifts in traffic if performance is not in line with the Retailer’s Cost of Sale goals. 

Our models use a rolling dataset for pricing, and as long as there are no major outliers you shouldn't expect to see much volatility with CPC changes. You may see more aggressive automated pricing change in CPCs when we either see large changes in daily volume and/or Cost of Sale, which deviate from your expected performance. This is why scaling up volume slowly and methodically is important. 

Increases to traffic after a price-up

Similar to general increases in traffic, it’s best to make small changes and boost traffic in 5-10% increments, while assessing the quality day-over-day. If performance moves in a positive direction then continue to roll out additional changes. All of our systems are calibrated to make sure we are delivering at goal with the retailer, so if you start to see COS underperform, it’s best to hold off scaling changes to avoid price-downs. 

The only caveat here is if the scaling changes are limited to merchant budget opportunities. When the Connexity team shares merchants looking for spend, you can move more quickly to scale. Even when lifting based on merchant spend opportunities, make sure you are assessing retailers' Cost of Sale performance as you go.