Case #013: Below the floor

Case #013: Below the floor

A push-notification dating offer, $1,500 budget, $1.40 per lead. The source's recommended bid was $0.012 CPM and every guide said bidding under it meant zero delivery. I'd been bidding right at the recommended floor like everyone else and fighting for the same crowded inventory at the same crowded price.

Days 1 to 3 at the recommended bid: $620 spent, $590 back. Break-even, in a knife fight with every other buyer at that price point.

Out of stubbornness I cloned the campaign and set the bid at $0.004 — a third of the floor, expecting nothing. It delivered. Slowly, but it delivered. The inventory it reached was the stuff nobody else wanted: older subscriber lists, off-peak hours, lower-tier publishers. Lower CTR, sure. But the leads converted at nearly the same back-end rate, and I was paying a third the price for them.

The low-bid clone ran a $0.78 effective cost per lead against a $1.40 payout while the at-floor campaign limped along near break-even.

I didn't kill the floor campaign — I just shifted 70% of budget to the underbid clone and let volume build slowly from the cheap seats.

Full arc, 16 days: $1,500 spent, $2,620 back. 75% ROI — earned in the inventory everyone else's bid strategy told them to skip.

The lesson: a recommended bid floor is a recommendation for the crowd — there's converting inventory below it that nobody's fighting you for.