Media buying?

Guessing you saw the Saj video..? I think it's a lot harder than it seems... you have to get targeted traffic from what I understand and make sure it converts.. I'm going to try it soon

Adbrite and Myspace are good places to get started if you don't have a big budget or are new. You can make good money off those platforms and then move on to the big leagues. Start small, build your budget, and before you know it you'll be balling...

Brandon Adcock | In-House SEM Turned Affiliate Marketer is pretty boss with media buys

The biggest thing about media buying is it often takes a fair bit of money to make money, takes a fair bit of optimizing, and if your account manager at the company isn't good - then you will most likely keep losing money :|

good post thank you for that.

From what I have read on BrandonAdcock's page, also test on facebook prior to going ahead.

Some suggestions on what needs to be an I/O before you sign:
1. The most important one is an out clause, meaning you can cancell the campaign with a 24/48 hours notice.
2. After that one check where you are placed - are you the banner deep down where no one sees you?
3. Make sure your impressions are evenly distributed - meaning you don't spend half of your budget in the first weekend, but spend equal amounts every day.

There's more, but if you have #1, than you can re-negotiate all the rest.

Good heads up.
Even distribution sounds good, but in reality is all too often flawed and overlooked by most networks... without much that can be done about it.

Also, make sure to include to track off your numbers, not the networks. ALWAYS use a third-party ad server to serve your ads, and have networks rotate these ad tags. Never just go off network numbers.

they still your money...my 2cents

Media buys are definitely up there in the budget arena. If you're really set on checking this stuff out on a low budget look into buysellads.com. I haven't had success but some people I've talked to have. Also if you can put a CPC campaign together with a high CTR on facebook, you could switch it over to CPM. Be careful though cause that can run through your budget really fast (again don't know where you're at budget wise). As for ad brite, I head to just make sure to double check your clicks that you get. Hope this helped a bit, good luck

Hey guys, I've got a question regarding media buys:

When you start your campaign on a network do you start bidding high or low? So for example when I'm bidding on all sites of an category like health/fitness I sort the crappy sites out (also the ones where the banner would be placed far away from the main content and of course also the untargeted ones) but have also a big bunch of sites with an CPM between 1 and 10 $ left.

If I start my campaign with i.e. 2 or 3 $ CPM I probably miss out the high quality traffic sources. But if I start bidding high I do probably run out of money even before I gathered really enough data to optimize the campaign completely.

So what do you do in this case? Bid only on a fistful of site but with high CPM bidding or start bidding low, sort the site with low CTR/conversion-rate out and then slowly raise the bid?

Lots of good info in this thread, but don't be afraid to think outside the box too...

There's more to media buys then just using cpm networks like adbrite or buysellads or any of the big ones. They can be used but you will most likely need to be very specific with where you are placing your ads, (never do RON with them).

Is anyone having any luck with adbrite? im kinda still a newbie but been trying media buys with adbrite and havnt had 1 conversion yet. Now i had a good bit of clicks on a couple different offers i was running but no conversions. Guess im still to much of a newbie to try media buys? guess i was looking for a couple hints or suggestions

Media buying for me is scary, because you don't see the same ROI that you see with other marketing tactics. I think it is good if you are trying to build a brand, but to spend a lot for impressions, you might be disappointed with the lack of conversions.

@tas36: same problem here. I'm using not AdBrite but a german advertising network instead (but it's rawly the same like AdBrite). I'm trying now to get conversions by advertising on a CPC basis through these networks. If I get some offers which convert and websites where I get high a high CTR I'm going to try CPM advertising. But for the moment I'm still searching for an offer which sticks...

There was a study recently MediaPost Publications Study: Half Of Ad Impressions, 95 Percent Of Clicks Fraudulent 09/18/2009 which showed that a lot of media buy traffic is fraud, at least in the RON and unoptimized stage.

So has anyone had any success with Myspace cpc campaigns, because I'm thinking of venturing into that for some cpa offers?

Wow, talk about timing!
Just this morning, I had two recommended to me from a very trusted source.

They are: clicksor and mediatraffic (from memory I think clicksor is offering 1000 impressions for $7)

all-the-best,
James Pateman

I wouldn't use Adbrite for anything personally. Their traffic quality is terrible. When your doing large scale CPM media buys - make sure you get your IO perfectly the way you want it. You want a 24 hour out clause, and even distribution amongst other things.

I've started looking into doing a larger media buy. It's pretty expensive to get into. Tribal Fusion sent some info over last week, they want a $10k/month minimum purchase. I think that's asking a lot to start out with before a campaign is tested.

I contacted another smaller firm and they are asking $5k/month.

It seems that they would allow companies to do some testing before spending those amounts. But neither company offered it.

Seems like targeted rates are around $10CPM when buying in a low volume like this.

Daniel

Hi Manny, thx for your answer. Do you test the offers via AdWords or Facebook Ads before you concerning media buys? Or do you rotate offers on the publishing website?

i tried media buying as stated in the ZFM course..i am sstill yet to make a profit though..conversion rates have not been too great!

The $5,000 or $10,000 minimum is for one very specific type of media buying. You can do it for far less then that. There's several ways to do it. Think of what you read daily and think outside the typical cpm network approach.

I recommend using adsonar. They have a huge network of the best placements for media buys. I also recommend adblade. They are two good media buying sites. Good luck

buysellads seem pretty good, although im yet to also try them

You can actually do a media buy for less than 200 bucks per day.

Ask for:
1. 24 hour out clause - which means that you can stop the advertising in 24 hours.
2. Impressions Spreaded Evenly Over 30 days so you don't get all impressions in 1 hour and blow up your budget.

So if you campaign is not going well the first few days, you can stop and save yourself 80%-90% of budget.

But it probably is a good idea to test out your MARKETING FUNNEL through PPC, Zedo and adbrite before you get into serious media buys.

I have not ha dmuch look with Adbrite. Very low conversions, and they will not approve many common ad types.

Demographics question and media buys.

I used quantcast.com and put in the cpa url for a gift card. I then put in the retailers site for the offer into quantcast and came up with a different set of demographics. I know testing would be the correct answer but has anyone already tested?

def is alot harder than it seems. Be prepared to lose a good chunk of money until you can optimize your campaigns. Huge risk but huge reward.

can you set your budget each day with media buys like PPC?

**lol, I just realized the initial post was from 2009... ah well what I talk about is still relevant**


If you guys are just starting out with media buys I would highly suggest avoiding the networks and instead going direct to site.

Yes, the networks (self serve or otherwise) have an abundance of traffic, more than you could ever really buy, but unless you have tons of money to burn through their RON inventory, which I don't advise, then it's best to create a proof of concept by going direct to site, then taking proven demographics and offers to networks to buy targeted traffic. InternetDollars is right in that when you go to the networks they will need a good amount of money to test... But you can make a killing just going direct to site.

Direct to site buys can be as low as $100/month with small time webmasters and forum owners up to thousands a month buying from large portal and social sites. Direct buys are great since there are fewer restrictions on ads/offers, and often times there is less competition since most people won't go through the initial work of finding diamonds in the rough.

I usually recommend to people that if possible test and verify the demographics of your offer on something self serve such as FB or POF if you're a bit gun shy to go to large sites right away, or via small direct buys. Small direct buys are great and they have great ROI potential with limited ongoing maintenance. I have some buys that I haven't touched for months that still get 300% roi month after month on a smaller scale.

When going to large sites, often times their minimum budgets will be 3-5k. But, understand everything is negotiable and your daily budget can vary greatly once you take into account even delivery, flight dates, etc. For large direct to site buys you will want to test their remnant inventory first, so it's up to you to verify the demographics of the site and make sure that the majority of remnant inventory to purchase is going to be within the demographics of your offer. There are other ways to go after broad demographics & offers, but this takes more budget to get enough data to make the proper decisions. With a test buy on remnant you're simply trying to find out how good the traffic converts for you. Most refer to this as an eCPM, but that's kind of a weird term from an advertiser standpoint. Basically it's just the amount of revenue per 1000 impressions for that site. You can break it down to eCPM per ad, offer, lander, etc. Then it's just a matter of keeping the highest eCPM elements and going from there.

This was a very simplified version of it, and you'll definitely need an adserver for large direct buys and of course network buys. Make sure your ad server is IAB compliant so you can actually bill of your own numbers. Billing off your own numbers, 24 hour out clause, even delivery, frequency cap, remnant, and correct geo are some essential terms to have in your IO, but there are others which I like to have in there.

Buying traffic is all about creating a proof of concept in lower risk environments before scaling upwards. As long as you avoid the big loss the rest works itself out for the most part.

ZFM is full of hype and rehash..

There is a good book related to this subject called "Act Now" Its on Amazon. Its a good read.

I've tried media buying, in the end it didn't work out. The conversions weren't nearly enough, could probably have spent more time with it but didn't think it was worth the extra time.

media buying might be very exspensive.