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Chapter 7: The Optimizer (BYOM)

Audience: media buyers, optimization engineers

The optimizer is Cat-Scan's automated optimization engine. "BYOM" stands for Bring Your Own Model: you register an external scoring endpoint, and Cat-Scan uses it to generate config change proposals.

How it works

  Score          Propose          Review          Apply
────────────> ────────────> ────────────> ────────────>
Your model     Cat-Scan       You (human)    Google AB
evaluates      generates      approve or     config is
segments       config         reject         updated
               changes
  1. Score: Cat-Scan sends segment data to your model endpoint. The model returns a score for each segment (geo, size, publisher).
  2. Propose: Based on scores, Cat-Scan generates specific pretargeting config changes (e.g., "exclude these 5 geos", "add these 3 sizes").
  3. Review: You see the proposal with projected impact. You approve or reject.
  4. Apply: Approved proposals are applied to the pretargeting config on Google's side. The change is recorded in the history.

Model management

Registering a model

Go to /settings/system and find the Optimizer section.

  1. Click Register Model.
  2. Fill in: name, model type, endpoint URL (your scoring service).
  3. The endpoint must accept POST requests with segment data and return scored results.
  4. Save.

Validating the endpoint

Before activating, test your model:

  1. Click Validate endpoint on the model card.
  2. Cat-Scan sends a test payload to your endpoint.
  3. Results show: response time, response format validity, score distribution.
  4. Fix any issues before activating.

Activating and deactivating

  • Activate: the model becomes the active scorer for this seat.
  • Deactivate: the model stops being used, but its configuration is preserved. Only one model can be active per seat at a time.

Workflow presets

When running score-and-propose, you choose a preset:

Preset Behavior When to use
Safe Only proposes changes with high confidence and low risk. Smaller improvements, lower chance of mistakes. First time using the optimizer, or conservative accounts.
Balanced Moderate confidence threshold. Good trade-off between impact and safety. Default for most usage.
Aggressive Proposes larger changes with higher potential impact. More risk of over-optimization. Experienced users who monitor daily and can roll back quickly.

Economics

The optimizer also tracks the economics of optimization:

  • Effective CPM: what you're actually paying per thousand impressions, accounting for waste.
  • Hosting cost baseline: your bidder's infrastructure cost, configured in the optimizer setup. Used to calculate whether savings from QPS reduction offset hosting.
  • Efficiency summary: overall ratio of useful QPS to total QPS.

Configure your hosting cost at /settings/system > Optimizer Setup.

Reviewing proposals

Each proposal shows: - Segment scores that drove the recommendation - Specific changes to pretargeting fields (adds, removes, updates) - Projected impact on QPS, waste ratio, and spend

You can: - Approve: marks the proposal as accepted - Apply: pushes the approved changes to Google - Reject: discards the proposal - Check apply status: verify the changes took effect on Google's side