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Media Buying Ask Me Anything Pt Who Knows (31)

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So I haven't done this in 6 months to a year, I figured I'd bring it back for the holidays. Ask me anything about media buying and I'll spill what I know.

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What are you using for Mobile media buys?

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why is whatrunswhere support so awful? some mobile traffic sources like mobfox and sitescout haven't had any indexed ads in 365 days / it is impossible to view the index.

your product works marginally OK so i continue to use it but i will tell you i have considered cancelling on the basis of the shitty support alone

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I want to see a case study using data from your retargeting campaign :P

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Would you say that split testing traffic between US states (instead of treating whole US as a single country) is a waste of time ? If not so, how did you proceed (north states against sud || east against west || ... )?

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how do you go about finding sites to buy traffic from in the health/fitness niche. specifically in Sitescout?

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We don't actually buy any traffic these days. It's a conflict of interest with our users. I can't answer this directly but we see a ton of mobile networks popping up all the time, the usual suspects like millenial, admob and the like are what we see the most often.

This is the first that I've heard of this. I will personally look into it. I can tell you our support team is in house with us in our Toronto office, we honestly never get complaints about support so this is surprising for me. I will be looking into the issues you have brought up here and would be happy to jump on a quick call with you and talk anything through.

What exactly do you want to know?

It really depends on the campaign and how granular you want to be. I'm a big fan of testing everything if there is enough volume. If you think that it's worth your time you can eek out extra margin by testing things like this with large differences. I can tell you as someone that spends a bit of time in the south and the north, there are large cultural differences that you can take into account in your advertising to make it more efficient.

Sitescout has a really great whitelist feature. You can do research in WhatRunsWhere by keyword or advertiser, take top performing sites by duration and prevalence and then plug it into SS. SS will then only buy on those sites it has inventory for. Quick and dirty hack to create campaigns super quickly

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I want to know how effective it is compared to your normal media buys. Your ads follow me around the net!

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What are your plans for mobile awareness? Right now it seems it's mostly indexing ads that are set to run on WIFI traffic, what about 3g / carrier traffic?

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Honestly, in terms of immediate ROI we break even or lose a bit of money there, but it's about branding as well. We want you to keep us top of mind, so when you think media buying you think WhatRunsWhere, talk to your friends about us and the like.

Retargeting can be used for insane ROIs on direct response (DR) stuff though. It's like building your own little asset lists of people you know like or buy a certain thing....

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Right now we only cover Wifi traffic. The honest answer is cost wise it doesn't make financial sense to do it on the carrier side. We're exploring a few ways to fix that. In terms of the product, it's about continuing to improve it, adding more coverage, more networks and more devices for our in app stuff in the future.

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Next question for you. What value do you put on your branding campaign? Do you just spend as much as possible without going into a loss?

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No, not at all. We limit our branding to mainly marketing outreach from our inhouse marketing department, retargeting and paid sponsorship. We measure these channels and a clear ROI is still assigned to them. At the end of the day branding is helpful but everything is measured and analyzed.

Branding is a key part of a great product so we try to estimate that value based on what we see if that makes any sense

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When approaching an adult site for a direct buy, should you come off as an "agency" or can you get away with contacting them as an affiliate?

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I have never bought adult inventory, so I do not know, my assumption is it is much more lax.

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Hi mattaw,

I'm interested in media buy, i have spent out about $200 in sitescout with one dating offers, set up about 10 campaigns with about 100 cretives,and get 150 clicks, my CTR very low 0.02%~0.06%. but the more worse i get 0 conversion from this offer. (PS: i have run this offer on FB about 4 month, CR very stalbe, about 5%), i don't why can't get any conversion. Before i start run this, i have checked other advertiser' ad placement on Whatrunswhere .


Yes, i have saw some good CTR banner, but only 0.2%. Does my sample too little and need more data.?
Do i need more budget or some others? change a new offers?.....

Sorry , i'm a newbie for mediabuy.

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I’ve ran a bunch of GDN text contextual ads with success, but I want more scale and diversity in my traffic source… So I want to get banners ads working for me.

But I've had trouble getting traction with them - even with the same exact targeting that works for text ads.

I’d like to know WTF am I am doing wrong? How can I make this transition smoother?

Any tips, tricks or metics I should be hitting?
Should I try anything else?
Or should I try something else completely, like Adsonar text before GDN banners?

My thoughts are making banners are the next step in scaling my existing success and will open the door for more diverse traffic, than sleeping with the devil - Big G. Being that if I make banners work on certain sites, I could go do direct buys on them when armed with that intel.

Other topic: Why should I buy WRW over Adbeat? Sell it.

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The adsonar transition will be easier for you if you've had success with a similar medium already. Moving to full banner isn't hard, it's just more split testing. You have to test out different elements. The copy is similar though but you have a much bigger space to work with. If you're super comfortable with text ads, why not use a split box banner like the ones sitescout offers to just run text ads in general media buy spots to get your feet wet. All it is is a different medium to send the same message

In terms of us versus Adbeat. I think our data talks for itself. We have more data, better quality data and we don't make any data up (for example their estimated spend is honestly laughable, it's just not accurate, especially with RTB how do you know what each impression costs?). We have world class LIVE support that is there to help you (They are in our office with me here in Toronto) and constantly are innovating. Good enough sales pitch?

I mean a 200 test is low. That means you're spending $20 a campaign to test. Take a single campaign, use the money to get significant data on it and go from there. The A/B testing methodology will be the same, you just have to test test test, but pick one vertical. You can rotate in different offers to test for higher conv rates, but stick with one TYPE of offer.

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You saying GDN isn't similar?

Awesome. This helps. Any other sources have the split box banner?

If I'm thinking of the same thing, I actually thought Adsonar did - a reason I mention them. and one of my top placements from GDN is in their network.

No. Keep going.

Do you have 'Ad Impact' indexing score similar to Adbeat.com? I know on my own campaigns this is waaay off in some cases. Just yesterday me and a buddy were scoping big advertisers and comparing this metric... And yes, it seems a little shaky. But better than not having it.

Also, can I drill down on data more in WRW? ESPECIALLY day parting? Or at least week-parting?

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I'm considering media buys and I'd like to start off with the GDN promoting physical and digital products as an affiliate. But I wonder if this is even possible on the GDN? Or would I have a hard time to get my campaigns approved?

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Hey mattaw,

I've used a lot your service in WhatRunsWhere it's great. I've been spying some competitors like Pandora's Box and The Tao of Badass
and it has helped me a lot.

Now for my questions.

I just invested $4k in adult traffic and I'm having great results, around %100 ROI.

I'm new to this media buying thing.

I have a dating ebook and I'm expanding to have a lot of different products on
that market. I want to expand my advertising to different networks.

I'm thinking of expanding to GDN or other Banner Display Networks like (CPX Interactive,
Tribal Fusion...)

What do you recommend?

I've been afraid of going the GDN way because I don't know if they will like a landing page
with only a Video Sales Letter.

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If you have a large budget just hit up a network that has a seat on AppNexus / CPX.

If you sell yourself well you could agree with them to run CPA or at worst you do CPM like most of the affiliates.

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My question would be... what networks have seats with AppNexus and CPX?

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Does moat.com offer a comparable service? Seems pretty limited but they seem to be going after big brands as clients.

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mattaw.

I saw that you have banners running on AppNexus network.

Is it straight contact with them or do you use a display network?

I'm trying to find the networks that use the AppNexus network.

Thanks

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Sorry about the response time here, let me bang these out

I would say go with low barrier high control networks like GDN, Sitescout or any other network that gives you granular control so you can limit risk while testing where you want to test. Then it's the same as your adult buys, just buy and optimize to what works. Use WRW to get some early intel and use that as a starting point to help too!

We offer a lot of stuff Moat doesn't like our mobile product, more coverage, international coverage.... the list goes on. Moat is geared towards big brands and agencies. While we sell to a lot of similar companies as well, we also cater to the performance marketing space which they do not cover or really care about.

That is just display retargetting via Perfect Audience

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Get it. Thanks very much. I'm going to test my offer on GDN and Sitescout for now.

Hopefully can scale this baby to $10k/day in some time, but still getting the hang of it,
so for now I'll keep on with my $1k/day.

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What retargeting network do you use? For some reason SiteScout just doesn't seem to work great for me... Retargeter.com did decent, but they're not the cheapest.

Edit: Just saw you said Perfect Audience above... my bad.

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It is an interesting question.

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Hey mattaw,

I'm currently using SiteScout to check up my banners CTR and see what converts better.

Would you recommend choosing specific sites for my offer or doing RON and seeing what
sites convert better?

My clicks to conversion doesn't look to be that high, let's wait until 1000 clicks to see if
I can get at least one conversion.

I don't know what to expect from the impressions but I got 50k impressions, 0.2% CTR
in some banners and no conversion.

I'm guessing I need to wait for more clicks to see what happens...

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I'm finding it strange mattaw.

On my account on Sitescout I created different campaigns, all with RON, and I created
4 different campaigns.

One for each RON. One uses Appnexus, another uses Matomy, one uses Google and the
other I think it's Right Media.

Some of the networks I'm getting impressions, but I'm not getting any impressions from
Google, already increased bid but still 0 impressions strange.

Another thing is that I've got more than 100k impressions and apparently no conversions,
240k impressions, 500 clicks and no conversion. The landing page is proven to work on
other sources of traffic, but not so much on this networks... it could be the sites are
not related.

I'm happy because I'm at least testing CTR of each banner, but because I'm not getting
conversions at all I'm worried with this banners.

I also am wondering if it's something to do with my tracking, but I tested it a couple of times
and it seems that I could at least see if they were buying from sitescout, but it confirms
that with all the clicks no one has bought from my Sitescout traffic.

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