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Getting started with Media Buying

May 23rd, 2012
Affiliate Marketing, Traffic Sources
12
16,519 views

Last week I was lucky enough to attend Affiliate Summit Central and while I was there I met quite a few new interesting people. Without a doubt, the most interesting person I met was a guy named Max from WhatRunsWhere.com. Max is the COO of WhatRunsWhere and he was invited to ASC to have a sit down with attendees and discuss media buying. Prior to my discussion with Max, I did not have a whole lot of knowledge about media buying. I’ve done a few small media buys for PeerFly and I have a lot of publishers who make good money doing media buys, but to be honest, it just wasn’t something that I had given a whole lot of thought or research. Max, on the other hand, knows pretty much everything there is to know about media buying and he was nice enough to share a lot of information with me, which I am going to now share you with you.

What is a Media Buy?

A media buy is simply what it sounds like, buying media. You purchase advertising on a website or network of websites for a set time or budget. For example, you could email me and offer to buy the 300×250 banner placement on the right side of this post for $250 for a month. You are purchasing that media placement at a set rate for a set time. Often with media buys you will purchase the space at a set CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions). In that case, you would pay maybe $3.00 for every 1,000 times you banner is viewed (not clicked). Sounds good, but why is a media buy better than just buying some traffic on AdWords?

Benefits of a Media Buy

There are a lot of benefits to doing a media buy as an affiliate marketer. With most media buys you can get a direct link approved. So, if the advertiser has put together a great converting landing page there will be no need to put in the time and money to getting your own landing page together to presell the offer. There’s also a huge opportunity to scale.

Depending on the site you are doing you are media buy on, there may be a great opportunity to scale your campaign and get a lot of traffic. Not to compare apples to oranges, but one big issue a lot of my publishers are having with 7Search is simply scaling their campaigns. You work hard to get something to work and then there isn’t a huge opportunity to scale. With most media buys, that will not be a problem. For example, let’s say you do a media buy on E! Online. A similar demographic of user may be an avid reader of Perez Hilton and TMZ.com. You can test their display traffic with a media buy, grab more of their inventory with a higher CPM, and scale through the roof.

Risks of a Media Buy

With most direct media buys you’re probably going to have to sign an insert order for traffic and it can cost anywhere from $5,000 – $50,000+. Obviously, there’s a lot of risk in simply handing over $5,000+ for some traffic that you aren’t 100% sure is going to convert for you. When I was talking to Max at ASC12 he said it’s really important that you pay close attention to the terms setup within the IO (insert order). Some terms will require you to use your entire spend (no refunds). If you run $1,000 worth of impressions and it’s not working out you definitely need to have the opportunity to get your balance back.

Also, with a media buy you may run into issues with getting placements updated or removed. If you’re running a set of banners on a site and the offer those banners is going to goes down you need to be able to switch out your creatives and update your links. If you are stuck doing this through an account manager then by the time everything is updated you could have wasted thousands of dollars. Max said at his peak he was running media buys generating over a million dollars a month in revenue and he would spend 18 hours a day monitoring his campaigns because if something went wrong he could easily lose $5,000+. It would be to your advantage to start small before you attempt anything on that scale and luckily there are some great places to do your own media buys with a much lower barrier of entry.

How can you do a Media Buy?

Setting up your own media buy is actually pretty easy. You can try doing a direct media buy with a website owner or you can go through a network that brokers out the display traffic of other websites. For my next media buy I plan to go through a network. Specifically, I plan to use SiteScout.

SiteScout is the #1 Demand Side Platform for the Data-Driven Media Buyer! We Are Experts in Online Display Advertising, Real-Time Bidding, Behavioral Targeting, and Ad Serving!

I’ve had many people tell me SiteScout is a great company to work with so they are going to be the company I use to setup a media buy case study (to be posted later). They have billions of impressions in their inventory and a wide range of websites you can buy media on. They also appear to have a knowledgable and helpful team. The minimum deposit is $500, which is higher than your average self serve ad platform, but it’s also pretty cheap compared to some of the other media buy platforms I’ve look at. If you’re interested in using a network to do a media buy I suggest you take a look at them!

As I mentioned, I plan to do a case study on my next media buy using SiteScout, so keep your eye out for that. I will mail it to my Affiliate Manager Exclusive subscribers first, so hop on my list if you aren’t on there already! :)

If you have any questions about media buying you are welcome to post them in the comments below or email me. Let’s make some money.

Facebook’s AdSense – The Next Great Traffic Source

May 18th, 2012
Affiliate Marketing, Traffic Sources
11
8,143 views

Facebook went public today and with that they got a huge influx of money, but also a huge influx of responsibility. Now, they need to make a lot more money to continue to keep investors interested and making money as well. Although I am sure Facebook has many plans on different ways they can increase their revenue (ads on their mobile traffic?), one way that is being rumored is that Facebook is developing their own offsite ad network. Something similar to the current ads on Facebook, but for 3rd party publishers like yourself. Basically, Facebook’s own AdSense. If the rumors are true and they do release their own offsite ad network it could very well be the next big traffic source and you could make a lot of money from it.

Traffic Source Waves

It seems that traffic sources work in waves. The first people on the wave make the most money and as times passes and more people use it, the wave begins to lower into the water. Two great examples of this are Google AdWords and Facebook Ads.

Believe it or not, there was a time when affiliate’s were welcomed and encouraged to run traffic on AdWords. An affiliate could setup a campaign on AdWords to an acai berry offer from their favorite affiliate network, spend $100 on AdWords and make $2,000 in sales. Google was much more lenient on their advertiser policies and traffic was dirt cheap. Many people made a lot of money. With time, Google figured out that affiliates may have been hurting their user experience and advertisers started competing more and driving up click costs. Eventually, you got to the AdWords we know and hate today.

Facebook Ads had a very similar wave. When it was first released you could basically get any ad for any offer approved. Not only that, but with little competition the price for traffic was super cheap. A lot of people made ton of money. So, will you be able to do the same thing with Facebook’s offsite ads? Probably.

Facebook Offsite Ads

If Facebook offsite ads are released then there will probably be a few differences between it and the traffic source waves I mentioned above. We may not see the same great results right off the bat because…

Facebook has learned a lot from it’s experience with Facebook Ads
Facebook already has a lot of compliance measures in place.
Everyone will have their eye on it anyway.

When Facebook ads was first released (Facebook Flyers) they had no idea what they were doing. Unfortunately, they have a pretty good idea now. So, if they release offsite ads they will probably have a lot of compliance measure in place and they may be just as strict with affiliates. Also, with the huge amount of advertisers they already have the market could get saturated pretty quickly with and that’ll essentially drive up prices. There is also a lot of attention being placed on it already because of the privacy issues. If I can display ads on my blog based on your interests on Facebook, is that an invasion of your privacy? Facebook’s privacy policy has a sketchy history so the media will have their eyes on this new feature if it’s launched.

Tons of Great Traffic

I can see a ton of potential as both an advertiser and a publisher with offsite Facebook ads whether they’re friendly with affiliates or not. As a publisher, I imagine the ads will be very intriguing for website visitors. There’s no such thing as banner blindness when you’ve never seen the banner. Click through rates should be awesome. As an advertiser, there should be huge potential as well. Currently, I have active campaigns for different fan pages I run using Facebook Ads. These campaigns are still doing really well because I am targeting a very specific interest group and I’m consistently paying less than $0.05/click. If I can transfer that campaign offsite to similar sites within the niche of my fan pages I bet I’ll be able to get extremely cheap traffic. Of course, I can funnel traffic from my fan page or build a list and monetize it similarly to how I am now.

If you’re going to ride the new traffic source wave you have to be ready the minute the wave is created. The first people to hop on will be the ones who make the most money. You can be sure I’ll be posting about it right after I setup my campaigns (:)) and I’ll definitely be keeping my exclusive subscribers up to date, but you should always keep your eye out for new traffic sources. Keep your eye out and let’s make some money!

Blacklisting Bad Performing SubIDs on 7Search

March 1st, 2012
7Search, Affiliate Marketing, Traffic Sources
48
26,601 views

Once you have setup your 7Search campaign, have everything tracking properly, and are generating some traffic the next thing you can do to help yourself push towards profitability is optimize that traffic. If you followed along my article on how to setup a 7Search campaign you should have everything tracking properly. If not, please go take a look at that article before you continue.

Read This First! Setup a 7Search Campaign

Analyzing Your 7Search Traffic

The thing I like most about 7Search is the fact that it’s search traffic and it’s so cheap. After you setup a campaign you should start to see traffic almost immediately as long as you bidding enough to get you in the top positions. Depending on your keywords and bidding, you should have a nice amount of data within your first $5-10. I am going to go ahead and share my Lids campaign data. Now, you’re going to see that a majority of my traffic came from one keyword and although I do plan to do a follow up post about that keyword specifically, I do not want you to get the impression that this is your million dollar keyword and you’re never going to have to “work” again. With that said, here is a screenshot of my PeerFly stats for my Lids campaign in February.

That campaign did not do great. However, I do have enough data to try to optimize. 7Search shows that I got 1,212,705 impressions and 1,056 clicks. I spent $19.06 in total with an average CPC of just $0.02. Unfortunately, I only made $4.80, so my net loss was $14.26. However, there are quite a few different sources that sent me enough clicks to know that they are not going to convert for this campaign and I have gone through and blacklisted those. I will explain how to blacklist in a minute, but for now let’s take a look through all of the different sources I got traffic from and which ones can be blacklisted.

Getting the ability to Blacklist added to your 7Search account

The ability to blacklist sources is not automatically available in your 7Search account. 7Search decided that in order to stop abuse, they need to manually turn it on in each account. As long as you have deposited in your account and setup a campaign that is driving traffic they have no problem enabling it though. Even better, I’ve included a form at the bottom of this post that you can fill out and once you do it’ll automatically send a nice email to my contact at 7Search asking him to turn on blacklisting within your account :)

How to Blacklist on 7Search

Once the ability to blacklist has been added to your account (you will get an email letting you know that it has been enabled) you can access the blacklist feature by going to My Account, Preferences (edit …), and then click Manage SubID blocks >> under your Account Tools.

After you click Manage SubID blocks >> you will be taken to the page to add subids you’d like to blacklist.

Again, you will not be able to see the Manage SubID blocks >> link until you have had the ability to blacklist subids enabled on your 7Search account. Please use the form below to request that ability.

Once you have gone through and blacklisted bad performing subids you may need to go through and add new keywords. Your traffic is going to increase, but at least you’ll know that the traffic you are getting is from sources that are performing for you. Keeping a close eye on both keywords and the sources of traffic you’re generating traffic from using those keywords is important. With this combination though, you can setup a successful and profitable 7Search campaign. Like with any campaign, it simply takes research and testing.

I look forward to seeing how your 7Search campaigns perform! Of course, please let me know if you have any questions and let’s make some 7Search affiliate money!

SubID Blacklist Ability Request Form

Setting up a 7Search Campaign

February 28th, 2012
Affiliate Marketing, Traffic Sources
123
51,424 views

Yesterday I sent out an email to everyone who has joined my newsletter, Affiliate Manager Exclusive, with a quick example and walk through of setting up and tracking a 7Search campaign. Today I am going to go into a little more detail on how exactly that is done, give you some example offers you should run on 7Search, and I have even included a screencast going over my example campaign. Later this week I am going to do a follow up post on how to optimize your 7Search campaign by finding and blacklisting losing sources.

Join 7Search and get $25 FREE!

Of course, before you can setup your 7Search campaign you need to join as an advertiser. Use the banner above or click here to join under my link. Once you create your account and deposit at least $50 you will get $25 added to your account for free.

Once your account is setup simply click the Create Campaign link on your Campaigns tab and you’ll be taken to the New Campaign form.

The form is pretty self explanatory, but there are a few things I’d like to note. To insert the keyword that you are bidding on that the user has searched for in order to see your add simply add the variable ###KEYWORD### to your ad title, ad description, display URL, or destination URL. This can really help your CTR.

For your destination URL you need to pass 3 variables into your link so you can track everything properly. Those are:

###KEYWORD###
###AFFID###
###RID###

As I explained above, the ###KEYWORD### variable will pass the keyword as a subid into your link. The ###AFFID### is the affiliate’s ID number from 7Search that you are getting traffic from. The ###RID### variable is that affiliate’s website ID that they are generating traffic from. Obviously, each affiliate has their own ID, but each affiliate can have many websites so each website has it’s own ID as well. It’s common to see that one website from an affiliate on 7Search may be generating conversions, but another may not. Later I will explain how you can blacklist a certain website an affiliate is sending you traffic from if it is not converting for you.

You will want to pass these variables into your PeerFly Affiliate Link as subids. I suggest passing them in the following order (this is what the end of your Affiliate Link should look like):

&s1=###KEYWORD###&s2=###AFFID###&s3=###RID###

With those variables added to your link you will be able to see a subid breakdown for each click you get from 7Search on your PeerFly Reports and then track which keywords, affiliates, and websites on 7Search are generating leads and which ones are wasted clicks.

Finding Keywords

After you create your campaign you are taking to the page to add keywords. 7Search has a very nice keyword search tool with all their data built right in.

Type in your main keyword you would like to work with. For each campaign there should be a main keyword obvious. For the one I used in my example screencast above, that is scrapbook. So, I type in scrapbook and 7Search returns suggested keywords with some very cool data:

The keyword
Estimated searches per month
Estimated clicks for the top position
The top 3 bids for that keyword

Using this data you can access how much volume is possible and how much it’s going to cost you. The actual keyword scrapbook gets about 200 clicks a month and it looks like I’m going to have to bid at least $0.05 to get some traffic. That’s not very much traffic at all and fighting for it at $0.05 a click doesn’t seem worth it. As you go down the list you’ll see there’s less and less volume available for those keywords and apparently zero clicks. This is a little disheartening, but I’m sure there are other keywords that I might be able to get some traffic on if I continue my keyword research. Just for example purposes, I am going to choose 10 of those keywords and explain in the video below how I go about bidding for them.

Place Tracking Pixel

The last step to setting up your 7Search campaign is placing the 7Search tracking pixel on the offer on PeerFly. You can find the 7Search tracking pixel by clicking the [Track It] link on your Manage Keywords page, the Conversion Tracking link on your Dashboard, or by clicking here.

Just copy the pixel code and then place it on the offer on PeerFly. Placing the tracking pixel on PeerFly is easy. Once you get your first lead your tracking code will be “verified” on 7Search. No need to do this manually. By adding the pixel you are helping 7Search optimize your traffic for you.

With that information you should be able to setup your 7Search campaign and start getting some traffic. I will be doing a follow up post on how to optimize your campaign based on the traffic you have gotten. I will also be doing a case study from my own campaign.

I suggest to get started you run some of our top email submit offers. Please let me know if you have any questions. Let’s make some money!

Setup your campaign? Learn how to optimize and PROFIT