$250 Worth of Media Buy Advice
Posted by Riley Pool | Posted in Affiliate Marketing, CPM, Media Buys, Money Mondays | Posted on April 27th, 2010
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Here recently I finally took part in my first media buy and I ended up losing my $250 because of the mistakes I made. I was all dreamy-eyed because it was my first media buy and it ended up costing me my entire investment because of it. You live and you learn. Thankfully, it wasn’t an expensive buy and I will chalk it up as a $250 lesson learned in media buying.
I was wanting to promote a niche dating site and I thought I had found the perfect site to contact for a direct buy. After a few back and forths with the domain owner and we agreed on a flat fee of $250 for a 30-day long run of the site. I was going to share the banner inventory with another banner, so I would see half the site’s traffic. When I asked how much traffic his site received, he told me, “[Sitename].com gets around 3000 unique visitors per day.” and “The site gets around 300000-350000 impressions on average monthly.” After my 30 days was up, I ended up getting a total of 17,398 impressions, resulting in 86 clicks and 0 conversions. I have run this offer for well over a year now and the average conversion rate I see is 12-18%.
So here’s my $250 worth of media buying advice to anybody who is about to do their first buy.
- Check the demographics of the site you’re interested in buying banner inventory on. Use Quantcast, Compete or your favorite demographic website. Even these results will not be perfect. Your best bet is to ask for a media kit, if one is available. Make sure the demographics match what works best for your offer.
- Whenever you ask for the amount of traffic a site has, ALWAYS ask for proof of this. Check the website’s source code, see if they’re using any type of analytics tool, such as Google Analytics. Ask for a report of the last 30 days worth of traffic, at least.
- When scouring the details of this traffic report you just asked for, see if you can determine where his traffic comes from. Is it type-in traffic or is it from organic search results? If it’s a bunch of type-in traffic, you can probably bet that your target audience will develop banner blindness quicker.
- While you’re still analyzing that report, check which countries this traffic is coming from. You better make sure the traffic comes from a country that your offer allows!
- Finally, do some math to find out how many conversions you will need to be profitable. If it was a flat-fee per month, it’s easy to figureo out what it will take to be profitable. If it’s a CPM buy, calculate how many conversions you will need per thousand impressions to be profitable. Using data from other traffic sources, about how many clicks does that translate too? Using that information, what CTR should you be expecting? How do these figures relate to other traffic sources you’ve tested? Does it seem realistic that you might be profitable? I hope so!
P.S. Yes I’m a fucking idiot for not doing proper research. Thanks for noticing. =)
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Ouch man – Can you pin-point why you had such a low CTR too? Was it because of the demo?
I couldn’t really choose the demo I was targeting. It was a gender-oriented site, and I knew that gender worked well.
The CTR was 0.49%. Do you consider that low?
0.49% is definitely not low for media buys. That ctr is an indication that in term of audience interest, the demo was right.
,49% is a pretty decent CTR. But damn I’d hound that site owner for a refund since he basically told you you’d get 150k impressions.
Been having a lot of fun with media buys lately. Here is my thoughts:
1. Use Compete to get a sense of the traffic volume. Remember to look a pageviews over uniques. Match that to the website’s “proof”, they all lie.
2. Use a high quality ad server and rotate your banners aggressively. Insist they place your ad tag.
3. Your winning metric should be eCPM, not CTR.
4. CTR’s can vary widely based on many factors; ad type, size, demographic, placement on page.
5. Shoot for placements above the fold.
6. Insist on an out clause. This would have saved you. Everything is negotiable.
Also, when site owners quote you their stats, often they will use their AWStats figures which will sometimes be as much as twice as high as what Google Analytics would report.
I agree with the others above as well. He misrepresented what he was selling and should at least give you a discount or another free month for it being so different than what he said he was selling.
Thankfully it was only a small hit. Since the site is obviously trash at that price care to share what site it was?
Their CPM was almost as high as Twitters!!
To all, I fought and fought with the peasant owner of the domain and he wouldn’t budge. I’ll just chalk it up as a loss and provide some insight to other people hoping they don’t make the same mistake.
I thought about outing the domain, but it would pretty much out one of my favorite campaigns so I decided to keep it to myself. Sorry!
You are one step ahead of the game by being able to take this much out of it so don’t consider it too big of a financial loss. Experiences like this are absolutely necessary if you want to learn a lot quickly in my opinion especially about media buying.
I’m just curious, how many creatives did you test?
Thanks John. I always try to find the positives in every situation.
On this one, I was testing out 9 (3 designs, 3 variations) creatives. I know it was a small amount to test, but I was ready to throw up a lot more if everything was showing promise initially.
For sites that small, I’ve negotiated performance based deals paying the webmaster on a CPA basis.
That’s not a bad idea at all. I might have to try this sometime. Do you find the webmasters are wanting complete transparency on your end? I would probably provide this by obtaining a cloned affiliate account at the network.
I did the same thing a couple months ago. I didn’t get the impressions they said they were getting. The site had a lot more international traffic, but I was targeting US traffic. Fortunately I had done a two week test so it saved me some cash, but I definitely learned a lesson.
You don’t have to clone affiliate accounts. Try Hasoffers platform for perfomance based deals.
[...] $250 Worth of Media Buy Advice Here recently I finally took part in my first media buy and I ended up losing my $250 because of the mistakes I made. I was all dreamy-eyed because it was my first media… [...]