Media Buying, Ask Me Anything

My esteemed co-conspirator XMCP123 suggested I post this here too. For the next 48 hours, he and I will answer any question on Media Buying you guys may have. As long as its not super personal, or we can't answer (for legal or other reasons) we'll answer honestly and truthfully. Fire Away...

PS Feel free to also ask XMCP123 and I anything about mexican food or Subway, we're experts on both as well

a) profit margins depend greatly on the campaign and volume. They don't matter honestly. The only thing that matters is net dollars coming in. Profit is profit and you should always optimize to improve that, but if you're making money you're doing something right.

b) Yes, I heavily used retargetting. Using retargetting you can create user profiles that are unique to your campaign. aka you'll know who's in that funnel, you can then re use these for other products and services that are similar and you're creating an asset. I ran through that fast so if you're confused let me know and I'll try to clarify a bit.

c) Both. Main stream CPMs can be huge. Media budgets on a branding campaign are very different than ones on a DR campaign and are usually much higher.

d) No clue, somewhere in the hundreds of thousands, but I'm sure there are bigger fish too.

Evasive, seriously dude? You asked this same question yesterday in a private forum, was my answer (which I will quote below) not good enough for you? Or are you simply just trying to badmouth me?

Your question yesterday "Was the reason you quit media buying and started a spy tool becuase you found it hard to profit on rebills after 2010? (I don't blame you - if you an affiliate and promoting rebills on those networks you mentioned, it is quite tough these days). But I don't believe the excuse that you gave saying you got "burnt out", I just think you found it tougher to make money so you decided to create your own rebill. Which was a smart thing to do - props to you."

my answer: "Evasive - Why would I lie about why I stopped buying media. I burnt out, plain and simple. Affiliate marketing isn't a long term business where you build value over time. You create a campaign, run it and you're left with a pile of cash after, not assets, not something you can show other people. Firstly you asked a question then put words in my mouth and made up some fake answer to this question. I stopped profitable campaigns and was still doing well at the time we launched WRW publicly. The reason is we're building a long term company based on providing a great service to our users. I bought media for a lot more than rebills, and did quite well with a lot of lead gen as well. There comes a point though when you're been doing something for years on end, and seeing stuff start and die, when you want something more stable that you can build and nurse into something real and longterm. That's the "burnout" I'm talking about. Hope that answers your question."

I agree it is a valid practice to run something via PPC before taking it to a media buy. It's not always something that you NEED to do, but running a campaign on any traffic source or form will give you an idea of the customers, what wording and prompts they respond to and who you should be targetting.

When I bought media it was only for others products, but I sometimes put email captures or things of that nature in front of the offer so I could create a LTV for the user.

Good self serve ad networks I like: Sitescout, Adbuyer and Xa.net

mpbiz said:

It's amazing how many bitches pop up to complain when an extremely valuable new service launches. WRW is the shit. I fucking love it.

Mattaw keep it up and thanks for adding some value to the community.

My question:

On smaller direct buys, how many creatives and LP's will you test at once? Can you give an amount of creatives and LP's to test based off how many impressions you're getting.

Ex. 2 creatives and 2 LP variations per 100,000 impressions.

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It really depends how many imp's your getting and the offer right. If you have a high payout offer, you need to send it more traffic. Let's say you have a $1 cpm for a general news site. If you have a $3 dating offer, you could rotate multiple offers (lets say 3) and multiple creatives (lets say 5), with 10,000 imps per, so you'd need 50,000 imps a day to test that and get real data. Let's say the payout is $30 though with the same stats you'd need 500,000 imps a day to get relevant data in my eyes on that. Make sense? It's all relative.

a) For me, there are a few. A huge advantage is first mover. If you're one of the first to do something you can lock down placements before your competition and create a barrier to entry. Obviously there are skill sets like you said which are all important, picking the right offer, optimizing and testing, but besides that you have to set up barriers to entry, something unique that sets you apart and makes it hard to be copied. If you can do that your campaigns will run longer and make you more. It may be an exclusive offer, or a specific way of selling that is hard to copy (code heavy pages for example make them hard to rip)

b) Not sure an exact percentage, probably about half, maybe less. But its about finding something profitable and scaling it out like no other.

c) There are a few ways. The keyword search is great for researching a niche and seeing who's running what and how they're generally running for a kw or network. Then a advertiser search can allow you to drill down into those advertisers and allow you to spot demographic patterns, good placements and creatives when you need inspiration or ideas to start building your own from. Finding a url via keyword search and expanding the urls via quick search works as well. Placement search lets you plug in any website and see who's advertising on it. You can use it to scope out direct buys and who your competition on them is before you start buying there, letting you get an idea of the types of offers you should be testing. There's a ton more you can do, but this isn't a WRW tutorial thread so I'm trying to keep it semi focused

-God- said:

OK, a question that's been itching away at me for a while! So please answer it!

I was speaking to someone a while back who said many vendors are running retargetting on their own landers - landers that affiliates are sending traffic to.

Then, when they don't convert on that first visit, they've got exclusives with most of the networks (preventing you from buying inventory and certainly preventing you from doing any retargetting) and retarget these visitors - visitors first bought to their pages by affiliates, and they then convert for themselves at a nicely reduced cost.

When I first had this explained to me, I was actually quite mad, but I don't know how much truth their is in it. (If they're not doing this, they must be idiots - for what it's worth!)

So, considering the above, do you consider running offers as an affiliate too tough a strategy to truly take on nowadays?

tl;dr Affiliate marketing is dead.

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Advertisers have a huge advantage and smart ones do this. Can't you do the same thing if you have a presell page? Create an audience, retarget to them and sell them multiple offers in one vertical or similar verticals. Aff marketing isn't dead, you just need to market smarter. You can still make a ton of cash doing it, but you just have to be smart about it. Build assets like retargetting lists that no one else has where you can make your segments into a huge asset that can be reused again and again.

TylerDurden said:

How do you choose which offers to run on which traffic source when just starting out (assuming you're not using WRW)?

Is it as simple as picking a handful of offers that your aff manager says are converting well and sending traffic to them from some random traffic source and seeing what sticks?

Then over time you will get a sense of what types of offers work well with certain traffic sources?

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If it's a direct site buy, I'll hang around the site a bit, get a feel for it and what's running there. Then I'll match offers to the demographics of the website (via alexa or quantcast) and test multiple ones that seem to fit, eliminate ones that are doing badly and keep ones that show promise. Optimization 101

For a network buy, it's a bit harder, I'd start with an offer in mind I want to make work, figure out who my target audience for it is, limit those demos on the network and start optimizing my creatives and lps while trusting my rep (a good rep is key) to help optimize placements as most network buys are a bit like a black box, you can't see what's happening but you can see stats.

megatabbers said:

Adbuyer? That's a curve-ball right there. I always knew there was good traffic to be had in there. Just never could fish out (or at least didn't spend enough money to).

Do you use their audience score (or whatever it's called) or pick out your own demos?

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I do not, the way I used adbuyer was to vet right media networks. You can select manual targeting and use it to generally test networks, when you break down networks and see which are performing, then cut out adbuyer and go direct. Make sense?

kamired2 said:

Hey Max, gotta say you guys have built a great tool in WRW

a) How do you decide on using LPs vs DLing and what do you think are elements that make a great LP?

b) You obviously have a ton of experience & data on what images, fonts, layouts, colors etc. perform best on creatives. What are some do's and dont's when designing creatives?

c) Are you noticing any trends in your tool? Verticals growing in popularity / dying down?

Thanks

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a) I test both, whatever performs better I use. A great LP has tons of different points, you have to test, some need a long sell, some a short sell works best. Keep the users escapes off the page limited and have a strong call to action, and TEST EVERYTHING on the page.

b) Some don'ts are never use stock creatives. For Do's, keep it relevant, and simple but also sometimes a messy and unprofessional looking creative performs best. Test ugly creatives in there and you'd be suprised.

c) Brand buys are picking up as the economy keeps getting better. Stuff comes and goes with regulation, right now in the USA its pretty mellow and pretty even, overseas rebills seem to be taking off...

ly2 from WF said:

What do you think is the most important part of SE0?

A. getting facebook likes
or
B. a good site design

thanks in advance bros

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Neither, everything I learned about SE0 I was taught from Subway. Make sure your lettuce is fresh and your tomatoes are distributed evenly and you will see success.