Generally, a media buy is whenever you buy advertising on a site, but PPC (Adwords, Bing) is often not considered a media buy. Direct site media buying is one of the highest ROI advertising methods online. It is simply buying banner ads and text links on high-traffic websites and forums and sending them to affiliate offers. There are a lot of misconceptions about display advertising, mostly that users have “banner blindness” and ignore ads on websites. Many advertisers are finding huge success with the massive amounts of inventory and little to no competition which means cheap traffic. However, as with any large scale media buy, profits don’t always come without conducting some split tests. If you go into a high volume media buy with just one or two landing pages and creatives, it’s likely you’re going to lose money.
Here are some key essentials that will allow you to optimize and scale your media buy:
1) Pay attention to your budget. This is a very important step when it comes to media buying. Having a budget will let you determine what type of methods are compatible with what you’re trying to achieve. There are ads that run hourly, monthly, by the clicks or as frequent as your budget allows. Start off with an initial small budget and do test runs on different campaigns. When you can see which ads work best and on what websites, then go ahead and invest more to keep them running.
2) Don't place buys on default pages. People often do not change the default page on their browser. They launch a Web browser and then, as the page starts loading, they jump elsewhere. Depending on the way sites measure an ad served, you may actually be 'charged' for ads that a user never sees. Sites often ask for a premium on default home pages, a spot where I loathe buying even at a discount.
3) Identify your target market. If you have a specific product or service that you’re trying to promote, you have to make sure you’re reaching the right audience, otherwise all your marketing efforts will be wasted on low quality traffic and tire kickers that will only result in wasted time and money. Look at the demographics of the site you want to advertise on; take into consideration age, sex, status, and location of the visitors. This will help you to tailor your ads to the interests of potential leads and customers. Alexa is a good tool for find the demographics of a website.
4) If you’re promoting a CPA offer with a media buy you need to make sure you have multiple alternatives. Not only should you split test them to see which converts best, you should also have one ready if you’re winning offer goes down. If you own the entire back-end to your offer, you want to split test several different pricing structures. If you have any customer retention data, consider that when setting your price points.
5) Creatives – For performance marketers, click through rate is the saving grace. This is what bumps down the competition and gets the cheap traffic for solid ROIs. Go in with at least 10-20 different creatives and see what yields the highest. Split test different borders, different colors, new calls to action, etc. There is ALWAYS room for CTR improvement.
Generally speaking, media buying (if bought on a flat-rate) can be extremely profitable. The advantages of this method are that you have direct relationships with several high-traffic website owners. You can start on a relatively small budget, and you’ve effectively cut out the middle man (the ad networks). Once you have a few placements running, it can be a very stable source of traffic since you’re not competing with other affiliates and have diversified your risk.
