A cross-dimensional read of the media buy across Germany and Switzerland, from the start of April through May MTD. The patterns connecting placements, audiences and dayparts, and the plan we're executing for the next cycle.
From the start of April through May MTD, the campaign delivered 575 conversions at a blended €45.44 CPA on €26.1K spend. May MTD is pacing better than April (€43.11 vs €46.54 CPA), and CH efficiency improved sharply versus Q1, coming down from €85.93 to €43.09. Performance is concentrated. The top 10 sites take 54% of spend, and a single placement holds nearly 15% on its own.
Sunday delivers €35.51 CPA on 16% of spend, returning 21% of conversions. Android 16 holds €40.59 CPA on €9.7K. FUNKE properties take 22.6% of budget and blend to €34.97 CPA. The strongest stack in the buy, and the one we're leaning into.
Stroeer t-online currently absorbs 14.9% of total budget (€3,895) at €61.83 CPA, 77% higher than the FUNKE blended CPA. Capping this single placement is our highest-leverage move and should shift the period CPA by around €2 on its own.
We're capping Stroeer t-online, pruning the zero-conversion placements, and excluding Edge and legacy OS. Same budget, plus 70 to 85 conversions.
Layering daypart shifts (Sun, Wed, Sat evenings) and bid-ups on the Samsung, Cooking and Hobbies contextual cluster on top of the easy wins. Modeled lift on flat €26K budget.
391 conv · CPA: €46.54
4.98M imp · CVR 1.20%
184 conv · CPA: €43.11
2.02M imp · CVR 1.38%, trending below April.
CH dropped from €85.93 in Q1 to €43.09, now beating DE.
Most days came in below €0.60. Apr 02 and Apr 09 are the outliers, see the Trend slide.
13 conv, 1.53% CVR, €349 spend. Sunday plus low-cost evening hours.
5 conv on €692 spend. Friday with a sharp CVR drop. Worth a look at the placement mix.
33 conv on €1.3K (May MTD partial week). The May trend continues to hold.
97 conv on €5.3K. Clusters with the Apr 24 anomaly. Single-week event, not a trend.
Sunday wins everywhere. €35.51 CPA, 1.57% CVR. 16% of spend returns 21% of conversions.
Wednesday is the volume engine, taking 20% of spend and returning 21% of conversions at €43.63 CPA.
Tue, Thu and Fri all cluster at €52 to €54 CPA on flat conversion volume. The slowest part of the week.
Zurich (€646, €64.67 CPA) and Bern (€364, €60.65 CPA) drive CH volume. We're consolidating away from the 8 cantons that took €230 in spend with zero conversions.
€5,909 spend (22.6%), 169 conv, blended €34.97 CPA. Leckerschmecker.me, abendblatt.de and wp.de all under €35. This is the publisher group we're leaning into.
€5,635 spend (21.6%), 97 conv, blended €58.09 CPA. One placement (t-online) alone takes €3,895 at €61.83. That's where we're capping.
€4,109 of spend (15.7% of total) went to sites that didn't convert this period. We're blocking them in Q2. The single biggest reallocation lever in the deck.
| # | Site | Spend | Conv | CPA | CTR |
|---|
| Audience | Conv | CTR | CPA |
|---|---|---|---|
| Other Travel | 352 | 0.66% | €43.41 |
| Holidays / Celebrations | 331 | 0.63% | €42.72 |
| Gardening | 327 | 0.66% | €42.39 |
| Smart Home | 326 | 0.69% | €42.04 |
| Consumer Electronics | 320 | 0.66% | €42.74 |
| Running & Jogging | 318 | 0.66% | €42.07 |
| Dining Out | 318 | 0.66% | €41.66 |
| Weight Loss | 317 | 0.66% | €42.05 |
| Theater | 317 | 0.66% | €42.22 |
| English (intent) | 317 | 0.64% | €42.15 |
26 audience segments each register 50M+ impressions but at 0.03 to 0.04% CTR, orders of magnitude below the 0.65% blended baseline. These are large lookalike pools where impressions are inflated by the DSP's bundling logic.
How we're treating it: reading these audiences only by conversion volume and CPA, where they perform in line with everything else (around €42 CPA). They aren't the winning audiences, they're shared scale, and we're sizing our bids accordingly.
Our Q2 Audience WhitelistOther Travel, Holidays, Dining Out, Theater, Weight Loss and Smart Home. Consistent 0.65%+ CTR, sub-€43 CPA. Bidding into.
The "English" intent audience converts at €42.15, under-weighted given the offer. We're increasing share.
Long-tail audiences with less than 0.05% CTR and fewer than 200 conv. Spend dilution rather than signal. We're capping these.
| Context | Conv | CTR | CPA |
|---|---|---|---|
| Samsung device users | 311 | 0.69% | €41.60 |
| News | 153 | 0.34% | €50.92 |
| Arts & Entertainment | 89 | 0.52% | €38.36 |
| Cooking & Recipes | 67 | 0.83% | €34.24 |
| Food (sub) | 62 | 0.84% | €36.64 |
| News > Local News | 58 | 0.74% | €40.64 |
| Sports Package | 47 | 0.58% | €43.98 |
| Travel & Transportation | 37 | 0.82% | €46.03 |
| Desserts | 26 | 0.78% | €31.86 |
| Hobbies & Leisure | 19 | 0.80% | €29.87 |
A cluster of contexts deliver 0.78 to 0.89% CTR at €28 to €34 CPA, well above the blended 0.65% and €45 baseline. Most are small today, all are scaleable.
0.89% CTR, 10 conv. Tiny volume, scale headroom.
0.79% CTR, 12 conv. Cheapest large-volume context with conviction.
0.87% CTR, 15 conv. Seasonal and celebratory framing aligns with Babbel gift-giving angles.
49 to 29M impressions at 0.01% CTR, the same DSP-scale artifact we see in the audiences. The subcategories (Cooking, Food, Desserts) are where the real signal lives.
Sunday (€35.51), evening hours 19:00 to 22:00 (€37.45 cluster), Android 16 (€40.59), FUNKE properties (€34.97 blended) and Rheinland-Pfalz, Berlin and Sachsen (€35 to €40). Every layer is a top quartile by itself. Where they overlap, blended CPA should sit around €30 to €33. This is where we're concentrating Q2.
One placement, Stroeer t-online, takes 14.9% of total budget at €61.83 CPA, 77% above the FUNKE blend. The same Samsung-device contextual that performs at €41.60 system-wide runs €60+ here. We're capping this placement first.
Across 500 sites, 385 took spend but delivered zero conversions, totalling €4,109 (15.7% of total). Most are sub-€20 individually, so they slip past per-line review. In aggregate, this is the single largest source of inefficiency and the simplest lever we're pulling.
Tue and Thu, 12:00 to 17:00, CPA averages €52 to €62. Coincides with the weakest DOW performance. Spend share is disproportionately high (around 24% of budget in those windows) for the conversion output (around 17%). We're pulling bids here and lifting them on Sun, Wed and Sat evenings.
Samsung Browser (€44.98, 9% of spend), Samsung-device contextual (€41.60, 311 conv) and Samsung News placement (€59.71) form a coherent audience already converting. The contextual lens is the most efficient entry, so we're bidding into "Samsung device users" before the placement.
Highest CTR (0.83%) and low CPA (€34.24). The rare context where engagement and efficiency move together. We're pairing it with Leckerschmecker.me (FUNKE recipe property, already top-5 at €32.64 CPA). This is our Q2 build-out lane.
We're blocking every placement that took more than €10 in spend and zero conversions this period, and shifting that budget to the top 30 sites, currently blending to €32 CPA.
Reducing Stroeer t-online from €3,895 (14.9%) to around €1,300 (5%) and reallocating €2.6K to FUNKE (€34.97), MHS (€33.21) and Dumont (€32.43) at their proven CPAs.
Lifting bids 25% on Sun, Wed and Sat 19:00 to 22:00, and pulling them 30% on Tue and Thu 12:00 to 17:00. Modeled on the evening-cluster €37 vs midday-cluster €56 spread.
Layering 20% bid lifts on Cooking & Recipes, Desserts, Hobbies › Special Occasions, Science and Humor, all delivering 0.78%+ CTR at €28 to €34 CPA.
Excluding Edge (€172 CPA), Other (€178), iOS 16 and 17 (0 conv) and Android 1 and 11 (€75+ CPA). Frees roughly €1K we're redeploying, with negligible conversion loss.
Pausing the 8 CH cantons that took less than €200 with zero conversions (€231 total), and concentrating on Zurich, Bern, Aargau, Luzern and Basel-Stadt.
Actions 1 through 6 are not fully additive. Actions 1 and 2 share inventory, and 3 and 4 share impressions. The projection on the next slide applies a 30% overlap discount so we're not over-promising.
CPA on €26,130 with 575 conversions and 1.26% CVR. We're re-running the same budget through a better media mix.
Budget held flat at €26K to isolate the optimization effect. The lift comes from mix shift, not new spend.
+70 to +85 conversions over the period (645 to 660 total).
Just the easy wins: pruning the zero-conv placements, capping Stroeer t-online, and excluding legacy device and OS. No creative or bid-strategy change required.
Confidence: High, based on directly observed segment CPAs.
+100 to +130 conversions over the period (675 to 705 total).
Adds the daypart shifts, contextual bid-ups on the Cooking, Science and Hobbies cluster, and the Swiss consolidation. Requires bid-strategy tuning and a 2-week observation window.
Confidence: Medium, modeled with a 30% overlap discount across actions.
Week 1. Shipping Actions 1, 2 and 5 (zero-conv prune, Stroeer cap, OS exclusions). Week 2. Observing, then shipping Action 3 (daypart) and Action 6 (CH consolidation). Week 3. Layering Action 4 (contextual bid-ups). Weeks 4 to 6. Measurement window, then we re-baseline together.
Creative-level breakdown (not in this period's export), an Hour by Day-of-Week cross-tab to validate the Sunday-evening stack, and post-click LTV and activation data so we can confirm the FUNKE vs Stroeer cost difference holds downstream of the conversion event.
Around 2x current monthly run-rate (€17.1K). The FUNKE, MHS and Dumont stack has shown clear inventory depth at sub-€35 CPA, so there's room to scale into the proven mix without saturating.
At the post-optimization €38 to €40 CPA, €34K delivers around 870 conversions per month in Germany alone.
Around 4.5x current monthly run-rate (€2.2K). Switzerland has earned the scale-up. CPA came down from €85.93 in Q1 to €43.09 this period, but we've only proven Zurich and Bern, so there's runway across the German-speaking cantons.
At €40 to €43 CPA, €10K delivers around 240 conversions per month in Switzerland.
at €39.50 blended CPA on €44K per month total investment.
Today's monthly equivalent is around 426 conv. The optimum budget delivers 2.6x the conversion volume at a lower CPA.
Germany at €34K is the level our top-publisher inventory can absorb without forcing us back onto the high-CPA tail. FUNKE alone has around €6K per month of headroom at sub-€35 CPA before we'd start seeing diminishing returns. Switzerland at €10K is the threshold where the Swiss build-out (Zurich, Bern, Aargau, Luzern and Basel-Stadt, plus the Samsung and Cooking contextual layers) has enough budget to compound. Below it, the optimization plan stays sub-scale in CH.
At €44K per month, the daypart shifts, contextual layering and audience whitelisting from the Action Plan have more impressions to work with. The same optimization tactics produce larger absolute lifts at scale. This is the operating point where strategy and budget reinforce each other instead of competing for inventory.