Alpha/ Beta Campaigns, What’s the Difference

An Alpha campaign is built to exclusively target users that match a profile of someone most likely to be interested in, and most importantly pay for, the service being advertised.  Alpha campaign profiles are determined through extensive market research, past performance, and proprietary data exclusive to MedStarMedia. The profile will be based on demographics such as age, gender, and income. But it will also take into account behavioral traits, such as someone who frequently visits salons or had a recent relevant life event. Alpha campaigns are a little bit less restrictive with the specificity of the keywords in the campaign. This is because when we know the user is highly valuable, we want to have broader ways to reach them. 

A Beta campaign is built to target users that we may not have a complete profile on. While our profiling tools are quite robust, it is exceptionally difficult to know everything about every user. For instance, we may know their income but not gender.  Even if we know a little bit less about a user, when they are actively searching for the service we want to serve them timely advertising. Beta campaigns are more restrictive on the specificity of the keywords in the campaign. If we don’t know exactly who the user is, we want to know exactly what they’re searching for. 

Leads are amazing! We put tracking measures in place to accurately record as many leads as possible and attribute them back to every penny spent on advertising. However, even the best lead tracking will have gaps. User behavior, especially in an online setting is unpredictable at best. The path a patient will actually take to reach your office and pay for a service may be something that we cannot track. 

We also want to be aware that not all leads are created equal. A user that only makes minimum wage who fills out a lead form has very little value to your business. If we relied on “leads” as the only success event it may lead to poor decision making. At MedStar Media we take a hybrid approach to maximizing your advertising dollars.

The Alpha/Beta structure gives us the best of both worlds. We’re able to target the best possible customers for your business (Alpha) but also able to deploy machine learning bidding strategies to efficiently spend budgets (beta).