Sample Size

Updated by Michael

What is Sample Size?

Sample Size is the minimum number of clicks a campaign needs to have in the Look Back Days window in order to run some Fire & Forget® optimizations.


How Does Sample Size Work?

For Acceptable Profit, Site Acceptable Profit, Ad Stop CTR, and Desired Click Pacing, Maximus looks over the Look Back Days window for your campaign to determine if the Sample Size has been met. Sample Size is designed so that you can manually adjust the minimum number of clicks to be confident you are gathering the data you find most relevant to allow optimizations to start for your campaign.

There are 2 different Sample Sizes, one at the campaign level and one at the site level. Click here to view the Fire & Forget Flowchart to see how they work together. Site Sample Size is used for site optimizations, and campaign Sample Size is used on the campaign level.

Fire & Forget uses look back days to determine how far back you will look for the Sample Size. Click here to read more about the Look Back Days.
All of the data over the Look Back Days is used for optimizations, not just the data from the Sample Size.

How To

Set Sample Size

Set the Sample Size by entering the number of clicks you want to use for the Sample Size.


Example

Your campaign has a Sample Size of 100 clicks for your Site Sample Size, with a Look Back Days window of 7 days. This has lead to some Site Acceptable Profit optimizations on sites which may not have the best data for this particular campaign. To better optimize the campaign, you want to increase the Site Sample Size to 200.

  1. Open the Fire & Forget Settings drawer on the Campaign Details page side menu.
  2. Click on the Sites tab to display site level Fire & Forget settings.
  3. Update the Sample Size to 200, and then click Submit to save those changes.


Common Uses

Sample Size is a requirement for three important scaling and automatic optimization features of Maximus - Acceptable Profit, Site Acceptable Profit, and Desired Click Pacing. In order to properly utilize them you must take into account the Look Back Days period as well, so that you are ensuring the Sample Size can be found in that time period.

Sample Size is very effective for Desired Click Pacing bid increases, as you set a restriction on the minimum number of clicks before looking to drive more traffic for your campaign.

When used with Acceptable Profit and Site Acceptable Profit, Sample Size sets the minimum number of clicks before performing these optimizations. If you feel a campaign has not been running long enough to begin optimizations, you can set a higher Sample Size in relation to the Look Back Days to allow for more traffic before Fire & Forget begins altering bid amounts.


How did we do?