Home > Paid Traffic Sources > Display / Media Buying

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How is SiteScout for Media Buying? (19)

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Hi,

I joined STM since last 10 days. I'm not a newbie but this is my second stint at CPA marketing, after almost 4 years.

I planned to start with dating offer at PoF. But now wanted to try non-dating offers first as there seeems to be huge competition in Dating niche. I chose 2 affiliate offers which arn't relevant to dating (PoF) traffic.

So I wanted to try another traffic source, other than pof. I did some research about SiteScout. Their demographics and geo targetting seems to fit in the offers I inted to promote. But because of initial investment of $565 (including taxes), I was bit reluctant.

Do you guys have experience buying traffic through SiteScout? How is the platform? Their support? Keeping in mind I'm just wanna start. Just wanna make sure I'm going with right platform. Please suggest another source of traffic (preferable cheaper), incase you think sitescout isn't a good start.

Thanks,

dbadwal

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I really wouldn't recommend starting (or re-starting) with Sitescout. It's very competitive, and there are some seriously expert people out there. Plus, there are a lot of variables to tweak, which drives up minimum budget.

The interface is lovely, but it's a pretty tough traffic source.

If you want to try media buys, look for smaller niche media buy sources. Finch has recommended a bunch of them in his Premium Posts in the past.

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I'd pass on sitescout until you have 2 things:

1. Bank roll to weed out all the fraud impression placements
2. A solid campaign you know works across a broad demo of sites so that you have a level of expectation.

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Thanks a lot Caurmen. Really appreciate your timely reply. Otherwise I would have paid those $550+.

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Thanks Smaxor. Timely reply is much appreciated.

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SiteScout can be REALLY profitable (like every other source) if you know what you're doing / what do you want. Solid guys, great platform. I made mid six figures with them in the past!

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Do you guys have any advice in order to catch websites sending fraud impressions / fake clicks on RTB platforms ?

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I should have come here before I signed up for Sitescout! I've only run one test campaign there so far, capped at $25. I got 20,000+ impressions for $20.01, but not a single click. 18K+ were from just one site. It looks reputable enough & gets a lot of traffic, according to Compete.com, but zero clicks is a bit on the low side of bad, even for a first test campaign. I'm thinking to test the campaign somewhere else, maybe good ole Facebook, where at least you are only paying for clicks. Any suggestions? Or even a link to another relevant thread on this forum (since I'm brand new here :-) )

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Thanks bstrd. It this point in time, I don't have any data. So no clue what am I gonna achieve. So I put my plan aside to pay to sitescout.

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mara: You should check your stats for the non-performing placements. You can always optimize your creatives / placements!

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Had bad experience too. They refunded my account when I proved them traffic was fraudulent. They told me that it was the publisher and to try other websites...

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If you dont know what you are doing, your acc. will look like this:





*conversion tracking wasn't on for some campaigns,
but its pretty much the same, maybe $50-$100 total.

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I wish i had screenshot for: " If you know what you are doing, your acc. would look like this"

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I'm not saying i know what i do, i just try to understand it sometimes. Also, conversion tracking is messed up for me too!

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That's the screenshot that i was missing

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I've made things work on SiteScout in the past, the problem is that the publishers often block my creatives over time, usually right around the time I start to scale.

We use sitescout for testing, its great to see what kinds of CTRs you can expect on your creatives and get an indication of the kinds of sites that perform.

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I figured I shouldn't make a separate thread for this Sitescout related question:
It seems the budget matters as to how many impressions you get, anyone else noticed this? They claim this is not the case, but whenever I set my daily budget to $5 I rarely get impressions, bump it up to $50 and the impressions start coming in immediately. And I do not have the "deliver the budget evenly throughout the day" option on.
So how much does your budget matter?

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There's no point in setting a $5 budget because they stop sending you impressions as soon as the daily budget reach that value.
This means that setting $5 = no impressions at all.
(or was it $10 ? i can't remeber)

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Ok, because they don't want to overcharge you too much? I read somewhere that it's best to set your budget at $5 initially until you find out the actual $cpm you'll have to pay.

But it will not matter then if I set my budget at $50 or $5000? It will still serve as many impressions in the same period of time (assuming the impressions are < $50)? Because I'm still confused this one placement I've got has 3M impressions according to the ad planner for the GEO I'm targeting. I'm bidding and winning on 90% of the impressions, yet I don't even get 100k/day, could it be that the impressions in the ad planner are on a monthly basis?

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