Hi Joey,
Now I know, that majority of the placements will be cut off before even spending 1X CPA (due to bot traffic or low lander/image CTR) but still, it seems like you're going to have to burn through a lot of budget unless you have a starting whitelist given to you from an account manager which just isn't going to happen until you start spending quite a bit with them.
While the 2X CPA rule of testing ad placements is a good way to control decision making in any type of traffic source, it is only a very rough guide to create a system if that makes sense.... Sometimes I may spend more, and more often times I spend much less. I would consider maybe a 3rd party software to manage rules if you want to systematize your ad spend. (check out Brax)
My decision is often dependant on a few factors...like if I know for a fact the offer works, the landing page is a high converter, and the ads are good but the placement has low CTR on my lander ill pause.
I recommend a whitelist if possible. About 5 years ago RON made sense but nowadays it seems like native ads is just a massive haystack of shitty placements...so it's much more expensive to find winners unless you have the help of a human ad rep, or a 3rd party tule generating software.
On Revcontent over the years I have built an large account level blacklist. Some ad networks will assign a rep if you have a large budget and they can help you. I typically examine all placements before pausing. I think I mentioned that in this post
https://community.powerhouseaffiliat...ncial-lead-gen and another member theosap also mentioned some tips on how to examine placements before pausing. You might wanna search his posts.
From your experience, if you do decide to start a RON campaign, on average how many placements are you actually going to have where you are letting them spend between 1-2X CPA after you've gotten rid of all the junk traffic in the first few days? Without knowing this, it's kind of hard to know what budget needs to be allocated for the campaign based on your offer payout.
I would spend a lot on a placement if I felt the placement had my audience and was getting good LP CTR. So checking things like the site itself, examine it on similarweb.com and also spy on it seeing if other ads similar are also running there. To say how many placements will be winners is very hard. Some of the changes in Revcontent make it almost impossible to just run a whitelist now unless you have an insider, so its important to build a large blacklist.
I often try to aim for the major news sites or finance sites, as well as some "unknown" sites that are very similar to those that I know are reputable and focus on them. (LaTimes, Washington Post, Forbes, CBS, MSN etc are the major ones)
Finally, what kind of scale/daily revenue can you achieve on just RevContent with a Nutra VSL CPA offer with this payout? For example, can you reach a six-figure per month campaign running on RevContent just upping the budget and scaling through different GEOs without needing to move your offer to every other native network?
Yes you can do 6 figs a month on Revcontent if you are buying on their top placements. They have some very large publishers and many of the publishers are the same ones you will find in taboola, outbrain etc. However with that being said, some networks have different rules and more helpful ad reps. So it doesn't hurt to work in other networks. I would also consider placing your Google pixel, and FB pixel on your website if you plan to ever scale with those channels so you can build similar audiences.