Home > Paid Traffic Sources > Display / Media Buying

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Media Buying AMA: Back from the dead (15)

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This section has been pretty dead recently, so ask me anything to do with media buying. I will respond to most of it with what I hope is great info that is helpful to all of you!

Go for it...

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Do product owners have any distinct advantages over affiliates when it comes to buying media on major exchanges/platforms?

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^^ thump up for this...

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I think they actually have a huge advantage that can lead to higher margins. You control everything in your funnel, so when you're buying for yourself, you know all your margins and have direct control over quality and quantity of leads. Assuming you can do a half decent job of creating banners and picking placements you have a competative advantage. An affilite can't just steal your profitable placements because their payouts would be much lower. For example: If you had an offer where your RPU (revenue per user) was $40 and were buying a $35 CPA, some affiliates may not be able to compete because their payout could be say $34 and the placement would be profitable for you but not for them.

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Best place/way to start media buying? Broad question I know, but I've never done anything related to media buying

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There are a ton of guides on here answering that, a quick search of top resources will show you that. I would say WhatRunsWhere but then it would just be a shameless plug. We do have a great resources section at whatrunswhere.com/resources.php with a ton of free content that can get you 90% of the way there. Besides that, I'm a big believer is learning by failure. Go out, read a bit, test stuff out on a limited scale using a self serve platform and learn from your mistakes.

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Do you think RTBs remnant inventory it still profitable in 2013 or we really must look for managed / direct buys to get a decent ROI ?

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I think remnant inventory is still very profitable. As with any buy, it really depends on placement. There is definitely more competition for the inventory due to more self serve DSPs opening up, but there's still a lot of opportunity there.

Actually, as we see programmatic buying continue to evolve, RTB will become a more accepted way to sell all inventory not just remnant. Understanding it and making it work now will set those people up for future success in the future.

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Also keep in mind that if you own the product, you not only have the advantage in a higher CPA initially, but you own all the data so you can upsell, cross sell, and potentially end up with a customer lifetime value that is many times what that initial CPA is. That's really the beauty of owning the offer. Once you can start to estimate the average CLTV and how long it takes to come back, you can even run at a loss upfront when you scale.

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Bang on! Also - with that data you can retarget and buy media in more creative ways. You can also actually tweak ad sources to improve RPU. For example, if you know that site X sends you 25% of your sales, you could start to include thank you notes into orders from that website, or contact the webmaster and work out some kind of customized promotion deal that may be different than what an affiliate can negotiate due to the leverage you have by being the product owner and that backend view that the affiliate doesn't have.

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If you were a newbie to mainstream media buying (but not affiliate marketing), what would be your process for beginning the testing phase as an affiliate? Assuming a good-sized budget. Obviously your tool would help in providing the initial direction as far as finding inspiration for campaigns, but beyond that?

So for example...say I see bizopps all over on TribalFusion. I know nothing about TribalFusion. I am a newbie to mainstream media buying. But I am a member of X affiliate program that tells me Y bizopp offer is doing well. Would you jump right in and start a managed buy on TribalFusion with a standard lander and hope a few placement and banner optimizations would make you profitable? If it doesn't work, would you rinse and repeat with something else following the same process?

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Just because it is "mainstream" doesn't mean that you won't have performance metrics associated with your campaign. I would run it the same way I would an affiliate campaign but back it out to those metricsYou may just have different metrics, like a clickthrough or enagement within the ad unit instead of a CPA or a CPL. WHatRunsWhere can be used to find better placements, create better creatives and also just understand competitors overall strategy that they're using to buy. The advantage here is when you understand that strategy, especially the intent you can limit your risk through every stage of the buying process.

With your example, that's not exactly what I would do. I would look at all the offers doing well, if I saw a biz opp doing well with multiple advertisers across a network, I would write that down as a thing to test. I would then test similar products as well as the original on that network. Or on similar websites to the ones they're buying on or doing the best. Just because they're running through TF doesn't mean that you can't contact the site and do a direct buy.

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I'm not sure you understood what I meant by mainstream (as a guy who does adult media buying I just meant non-adult) in the first paragraph, but the second paragraph covers what I was looking for. Thanks.

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Ah thought by mainstream you meant brand vs non branded affiliate stuff

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What would you recommend for a self-serve DSP?

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