Filtering and Expansion: How to play the digital advertising game in 2023

There are essentially two flavors of bidding strategy in 2023. 

Filtering, and expansion. 

Manual, tCPA, tROAS, Max Conversion Value, etc. - these are all different angles to either expand or filter the reach of an account. The best-performing ad managers are those that are permitted to do one and then the other in concert and ongoing to the goal of finding profits, and pulling back where the economics don’t match the objectives of the account.

To do this, it makes sense that we first want to ramp the account and scale to as many different ways to sell a product as possible, while ideally keeping the ROI to break even through this phase. The point initially is NOT to be profitable, because that profit can in the very short term be reinvested into visibility for various other campaigns, keywords, etc. and the real goal initially is to get performance data on all the different ways things can work. We want to expand the breadth of the account first, and then- only then, will filtering be informed to the extent that we can pull back on the underperforming efforts, and maximize the parts of the account that justify all the work. 

This awareness comes from first expanding to any corner of an account that we can afford to test, then making informed decisions to filter to predictable profitability. ‍

This is another key point and benefit to running phased management, and account planning this way… The performance of the account after a cycle or two of expansion and filtering is more predictable. The ROAS becomes more predictable, and your projections are much more informed. This becomes critical when you need to increase your budget because you will know exactly the areas of your efforts that can use more money first.  ‍

This idea of expansion and filtering doesn’t get sold very effectively in most agencies. Clients oftentimes get the sense they are just being sold to - but when broken down strategically, I think the lightbulb goes off and people better understand what the goal truly is. The goal we set for ROAS, or CPA is about the extent we want to measure every corner of what we will later be funding on purpose and for a known reason: predictable revenue against budgeted investment.