Effective campaign optimization starts before your campaign goes live. Choosing the right goal, setting an appropriate budget and bidding strategy, providing enough delivery opportunities, and using strong creative all contribute to campaign performance. Once your campaign is running, focus on whether it is achieving the outcome you selected rather than reacting to every short-term change in individual metrics.

Here are a few best practices to keep in mind.

Your campaign goal should reflect the business outcome you actually want to achieve.

For Web campaigns, AI DASH supports:

For Mobile campaigns, AI DASH supports:

For example, if your main objective is acquiring new app users, App installs is a better fit than Awareness. If purchases or subscriptions matter most, App engagement lets you optimize toward that specific action. The same applies to Web campaigns: if deep conversions are the goal, evaluate the campaign based on those conversions rather than reach or CPM alone.

For deeper-funnel goals such as Website conversions and App engagement, make sure AI DASH is receiving the corresponding conversion or in-app event signals before selecting the goal. These goals optimize toward more specific user actions and may require a longer learning period as the system gathers enough signals to optimize effectively.

Best practice: Start with the outcome you want, make sure the required event signals are available, and allow sufficient time for the campaign to learn and optimize.

Your daily budget gives the campaign room to participate in auctions, deliver impressions, and generate results. A budget that is too limited may make it difficult to collect enough data to understand performance. Consider your campaign duration, market, and expected outcome when deciding how much budget to allocate.

AI DASH also supports Automatic bidding and Maximum CPM bidding where applicable.

Whichever approach you use, avoid judging performance by CPM alone. Cheaper impressions are not necessarily better if they contribute less to your campaign goal.

Best practice: Give the campaign enough budget to perform and evaluate bidding based on overall results, not simply the lowest media cost.

For CTV campaigns, restricting Apps and channels too heavily can reduce the number of opportunities available for delivery.

Within your brand safety standards and business requirements, keep eligible inventory as flexible as possible. Unless you have a clear reason to limit specific inventory, a broader eligible inventory pool gives the campaign more opportunities to find suitable placements.

Once the campaign is running, use the Inventory reporting view to understand where delivery is happening and how different sources contribute to results. Keep performance in context. A lower CPM does not automatically mean better inventory, and a higher-cost source may still generate stronger results.

Best practice: Avoid unnecessary inventory restrictions and judge inventory by its contribution to the campaign, not by cost alone.

Creative quality can have a significant impact on campaign performance.

Use high-quality assets that communicate your message clearly, establish your brand quickly, and support the action you want viewers to take.

When multiple creatives are running, use the Creative reporting view to compare their performance. Look beyond impression volume and consider how each creative contributes to Results and Cost per Result. Campaign performance can also help guide future creative development. If certain messages, hooks, offers, or calls to action consistently perform well, use those insights when developing your next round of creatives.

Best practice: Treat creative performance as useful feedback for what to test and build next.

For more guidance, see Video Creative Best Practices.

Campaign performance can fluctuate after launch, especially while the campaign is still collecting data.

Before launch, verify that your apps/websites or tracking links are working correctly and that the required conversion data can be recorded as expected. Once delivery begins, avoid drawing conclusions from the first few hours or reacting to isolated day-to-day changes. A small amount of delivery may not yet provide a reliable picture of longer-term performance. Allow enough time for meaningful trends to develop before evaluating the campaign as a whole.

For more information, see Understanding the Campaign Learning Phase.

Best practice: Look for patterns supported by enough data rather than reacting to short-term movement.

Once your campaign is live, evaluate performance against the goal you originally selected. An Awareness campaign and an App installs campaign, for example, should not be judged in the same way.

Supporting metrics such as Spend, Impressions, and CPM can help explain how the campaign is delivering, but the campaign goal should remain the main reference point. For performance-focused campaigns, Results and Cost per Result are especially useful for understanding efficiency. A lower CPM may look positive, but it is not necessarily an improvement if it does not lead to better results.

Best practice: Focus on the outcome the campaign was designed to achieve, not the metric that simply looks cheapest or largest.

Optimization does not mean constantly changing an active campaign.

Each campaign gives you information that can help improve the next one. Over time, you may learn which goals, budget levels, bidding approaches, inventory sources, and creative concepts work best for different objectives. Use those insights when planning future campaigns.

Because campaigns cannot be edited while they are in review or active, review your setup carefully before submitting. If a change is needed later, you can duplicate the campaign and edit the copy.

The goal is simple: make each campaign more informed than the one before it.

Before launch:

After launch:

Strong campaign optimization starts with the right setup, continues with goal-based evaluation, and improves as you apply what you learn.