Buying-side thread. Every so often a geo that used to print just quietly stops being worth the spend, whether it’s fill drying up, CPMs collapsing, or the audience getting saturated. Which tier2/tier3 markets have gone dead for you lately, and was it the network’s fill or the actual market?
Trying to work out what to cut versus what’s just a temporary dip before I keep pouring budget in.
right question and it’s harder to answer than people admit, because a network cutting your fill in a geo looks exactly like the geo dying. the way i tell them apart is run the same geo on a second network as a small test. if it converts there, your first network pulled back or shaved you. if it’s dead everywhere, the market cooled. i’ve killed geos that were actually fine and just needed a different source, so now i test before i cut.
half the dead geo posts are just someone’s one network having a bad quarter and them blaming the whole market. before you call a geo dead, check whether competitors walked away too or whether you simply got outbid and stopped seeing the good inventory. sometimes the geo’s fine and you’re the one who got priced out. less dramatic than the market died, usually truer.
half the dead-geo posts are one network having a bad quarter and somebody calling it for the whole geo. test it yourself before you cut anything.
before i call a geo dead i check if the competitor also leave, or maybe i just got outbid. usually is the second one.
a dead geo on one network is usually just that network’s fill drying up, not the market going away. i’ve brought back plenty of dead geos just by changing who monetizes them.
seasonality and one bad month get read as structural decline all the time. if you cut a geo off a two week trend you’ll keep abandoning markets right before they come back.
i always run a suspected dead geo on a second source before i cut it. most of the time it’s the source and not the geo. cheap to test and it stops you killing a market that was fine.
the geos that actually die tend to go slowly and for a reason you can point at, a reg change, a payment issue, a big competitor moving in. if you can’t name the why, it’s probably a dip or a fill problem.
cut a geo way too fast once and it turned out my one network had just stopped buying there. moved it and it was fine. now i test before i bury anything.
my rule is nothing gets cut on less than a month of data. seasonality on its own will hand you a dozen fake dead geos a year if you panic at two weeks.
the one-month minimum holds from the network side too. we watch advertisers cut a geo on one bad week and then miss the rebound all the time. a full month of data irons out the seasonality that trips everyone up.
a second-source test is the only honest way to call a geo dead. dead on both, fine, bury it. but if it comes back to life on another source, your first network just lost fill and you nearly cut a live geo while blaming the market.
the name-a-reason test is a good filter. if you can’t point at why a geo died, a regulation, a payment rail going away, a big new competitor, then it probably isn’t dead, it just dipped. real deaths always have a cause you can name.
mine didn’t actually stop, the fill did. i swapped SSP and half of my supposedly dead tier3 came straight back. the geo was fine the whole time, my supply path was the problem. check that before you write the obituary.
A lot of the time it isn’t the market at all, it’s just that your one network had a bad month. I always confirm against a second source before I cut anything, or you end up throwing away a perfectly good geo for no reason.
this rule stopped me cutting a geo that just always dips over summer. on less than a month of data i’d have killed a seasonal winner outright. being patient is a lot cheaper than winning that geo back later.
i do that before i call a geo dead, always. nine times out of ten the geo is fine and my source went soft. i keep a cheap backup source running just to sanity-check before i cut spend on a geo that’s actually still good.
this hit me hard because i almost cut one tier3 that was fine. was not the geo, was my creative, totally wrong angle for that market. i change the angle and it come back alive. so now before i kill any geo i change the offer first and test new creative. most time is the fit that slip, not the market that die.
only honest way, cosign. a geo that dies on one network but prints on another wasn’t dead - that network’s fill or attribution went bad. i keep a cheap second source in my rotation exactly for this sanity check. otherwise you’re cutting geos based on one network’s bad month and leaving money on the table. never trust one source to declare a geo dead.
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