Yea, for mice I've heard the bucket traps work very well. What we're dealing with here has been rats though. I had to go through several iterations of snap trap strategies/layouts before I was actually catching these things consistently. The ones I dealt with at the last place were on the larger side so the Victor snap traps weren't cutting it - I think the rats were just too big/strong for the jaw to even clamp them and if they did get caught they could just force their way out of it. The plastic Tomcat traps were far more effective, especially when used in series. Basically I had it down to where I was leveraging the narrow passageway they were already traveling and setting the traps, in series, along that path. I would "funnel" them into the traps by forcing them to try to squeeze by an even narrower area (which is where the traps were, facing the wall, and blocking the back of the traps off so they couldn't go around or behind the trap. Almost all of the time they would set one or both traps off (they were spaced about 4-5" apart from one another):
Hard to tell but there's another trap on the other side of that wood block. The wood block is there to prevent them from jumping over the back of the traps. This is the "funnel" scenario I'm referring to.
If you give them any space they'll just jump over or go around the traps in most cases. Forcing them to jump over one trap, with another trap on the other side, is normally what did the trick. Adding peanut butter with goodies (seeds, bacon, cheese, etc) buried inside was also key - this forced them to really go at it and spend more time "indulging" which increases the likelihood of getting a good clamp on them.
The only downside to this was that I'd get woken up usually sometime between midnight and 4am any given night to the sound of the trap thrashing around... kind of like an alarm clock but a lot more disturbing hahaha. This was right outside the sliding glass door of our master bedroom, so it couldn't have been any more than 10-15' away