Search feeds · also called traffic cap, daily cap, volume cap, query cap
Feed cap (traffic cap)
A feed cap is a limit on how much traffic, how many requests or how much revenue a publisher may run through a search feed in a set period.
A feed cap is a ceiling. The engine or feed provider says a partner may send only so many visitors or ad requests, or earn only so much, per day or month. Traffic above the limit may earn nothing or be rejected.
Caps exist to contain risk. A new partner's traffic is unproven, and if it turns out to convert badly or contain invalid traffic, the damage to advertisers, and to the provider's standing with the engine, is limited to the capped amount. Caps are typically raised as quality data comes in and may be lowered again as a penalty. They can apply to an account, a Channel ID, a country or a traffic source.
For a media buyer, a cap sets how far a winning campaign can grow. Overshooting it means paying for visitors who earn nothing, so buyers align ad budgets with caps and monitor volume through the day.
A cap is also a signal. A sudden reduction usually means the feed has seen something it dislikes and is often a step on the road to suspension. The specific terms are set privately and differ from one provider to another.
An example
Say a provider caps a new buyer at 20,000 visits a day. The buyer sends 26,000. The extra 6,000 cost $600 in ads at $0.10 each and bring in nothing.
Related terms
Feed approval
Feed approval is the vetting a publisher must pass before a search engine or feed provider lets it show search ads and earn from them.
Scaling
Scaling is increasing a profitable campaign's ad spend to earn more total profit, ideally without eroding the return that made it worth growing.
Feed provider
A feed provider is a company that holds a search ad contract with Google, Microsoft or Yahoo and lets smaller publishers use it in return for a share of revenue.
Feed suspension (account termination)
A feed suspension is when the search feed owner or feed provider stops serving ads to a publisher, pausing or permanently ending its ability to earn from that feed.
Traffic quality score
A traffic quality score is a rating of how genuine and commercially valuable a publisher's visitors are, used to decide what their clicks are paid, or whether to keep them.
Ad request
An ad request is a single call from a page to the search feed asking for ads to show for a particular keyword and visitor.