Media Buying Secrets that will Make YOU Millions OverNight

Hey, do you like the title thought you would. (Working on my copywriting skills not to bad ehh). But the title actually leads me into my first secret for gaining media buying millions.

Secret #1
There is no such thing as becoming a millionaire overnight. Sorry to break it to you anyone that ever tries to make you believe otherwise are most likely product owners trying to pitch some crappy ass Clickbank or WSO product that really doesn't even have any valuable content  just a pitch for even more products.

There are only things you can LEARN today that will help you become a millionaire tomorrow. With that being said please stay away from buying any type of media buying products the only one that I have ever reccomened was Scott Rewicks course Media Buying Unleashed for the absolute basics of media buying.

I have a list of links on the sidebar of my site labeled "Useful Links". Visit all of these links and read the post on these sites and watch the videos. I can almost gurantee you'll learn way more browsing these sites then buying any guide or product..

The guys over at Revided Media "Mobile Network" even help you along the way they have a huge number of tutorials once you become an affiliate on their network that basically holds you by the hand and shows you how to make profitable campaigns time and time again.

Secret #2 
Know the demographics of your offer and try to match your offers demographics with TRAFFIC that matches. For example if my offer's demographics are Women aged 18-24 in the USA I would want to buy placements on sites that directly have this same type of demo. You can do this by using a free tool called Quantcast..

People really underestimate the power of Quantcast its a free tool that shows you the demographics of a website. You get to see the gender, age, household income, ethnicity, education, and if any children is in the household etc...

(Click Image to view Larger)

You could even go a little further by finding out your audience's psychographics. Basically your audiences psychographics are what do they care about, what are their interest? You can use this type of information when creating your creatives to boost response.

For example lets say that your audience are inspiring NBA basketball superstars a person they might be inspired to be like would maybe be Lebron James. Knowing this information we could make banners & landing pages with images of Lebron on them if you were an affiliate for a sneaker site you could find a picture with Lebron playing in one of the sneakers being promoted & you could use that as an angle..

Here are two great post from an outside source that go much more into detail about Demographics & Psychographics for people wanting to know more about the topics I really enjoyed the post it gave me a better understanding of some stuff anyway I urge my visitors to read them.

Secret #3
In media buying your CTR (Click Through Rate) is everything especially in CPM bidding models (A higher CTR results in lower Cost Per Click) but even in CPC models the advertisers with the highest CTR usually gets served more impressions to their ads due to the ad networks eCPM being higher. (Basically if advertiser A has a CTR of 5% and advertiser B has a CTR of 1% the ad network will serve advertiser A more impressions even if advertiser B has a higher bid due to the fact that they will be making more money from advertiser A because of the high CTR.)

In order to achieve high CTR rates you should ALWAYS be split testing new creatives banners/text ads with different messages that will appeal to your target audience. Here is a nice little blog post on Split Testing Banner Ads. Here is another great post you should read Ad Design Infographic.

But why stop there? Why not split test direct linking vs landing page or split test offers even conversions paths this all sounnds complicated but its actually quite easy when you have a tool such as imobitrax (Mobile and Web Tracking Software).

As some of you may have notice most of the "Secrets" I discussed wasn't even secrets to begin with just alot of stuff we overlook sometimes that cost us major money down the road. I think the real big secret is to always be learning implementing new ideas & new campaigns.

Using and Understading your Media Buying Data

Hello, today I will be talking about maybe one of the most important parts of media buying, you probably guessed it DATA!! Without data you are stuck in theory mode, you basically say stuff like this landing page will never work or this offer wont convert, your distribution channel (traffic source) has low quality traffic before you even ran any test! To succeed in media buying YOU MUST NOT THINK LIKE THIS! When you spend money and lose that money don't ever look at it as losing money look at it like you are GAINING DATA.

Once you understand the data and know how interpret data media buying almost becomes like a game and is actually FUN and you can use this data to make even the worse campaigns show a profit. (Note that some campaigns are not going to be able to show profit no matter what you do). Today in this post I hope to inform you as much as I can about data this will be a very long post so grab some note paper you might actually learn something.

Getting your Data
First things first for you to gain data you need to go out there and actually run a campaign. It could be from facebook ads, plenty of fish, an ad network or direct to site media buy does not matter my point is just start somewhere. Go to one of these distrubution channels and find a campaign all ready running in whatever distrubiton channel you chose see whats all ready running there and try to emulate that advertiser. (Remember this. When you are first running a campaign

Recording and Organizing your Data
After setting everything up and actually sending traffic to an offer whatever it maybe you should now have some data you can use such as, Impressions, Clicks, CTR (CLICK THROUGH RATE), Sales/Leads Revenue and Profit and also a Conversion Rate. You really need to use a program such as excel to ogranize and record data. Check out the image below for an example. (Click Image to view in larger size)

The image above shows a perfect way to organize your media buying data. Before moving on I would like to go into detail about each variable.

Impressions
This is a VERY IMPORTANT variable always know how many impressions you are being served!

Clicks
Again just as important as impressions is the clicks you get from those impressions.

CTR (Click Through Rate)
From the impressions and clicks you get from those impressions you get a CTR this is an extremely important variable. This variable helps you understand how well your ad is performing compared to other ads.

CPM (Cost Per 1,000 impressions)
CPM AKA Cost Per 1,000 impressions is the amount you pay for a 1,000 impressions to your ad.

Number of Conversions
Whether it's sales or leads you are generating you need to know exactly how many conversions you are gaining out of a campaign.

Payout
This is how much your are paid for each lead or sale gained.

Revenue
The revenue is the total income you made from your campaign.

EPC (Earnings Per Click)
This is the amount you earn on average from each click you receive.

Cost
The cost is the total ad spend you spent on advertising to get those impressions and clicks should I even have to explain why this is important to record?

Profit
This is the total revenue gained after the ad cost has been subtracted.

CPA (Cost Per Acquisition)
Simply put this is the cost it takes to generate a single lead/sale.

CPC (Cost Per Click)
This is the average cost it takes to generate a click.

eCPM (Effective Cost Per 1000 Impressions)
This is the amount of revenue you generate per 1000 impressions.

These are all very important variables you should really know and try to familiarize your self with.

Note: There are some simple math you must know how to calculate in order to make it far in media buying, I am trying to keep this post as short as possible so I could not post all the math here but I all ready made a whole entire post dedicated to all the math you need to know Media Buying Metrics You NEED to Know.

Optimization
There are certain variables that we as marketer's can control.

• Where you buy from
• Placements you buy (Above the fold etc..)
• Price you pay for that placements
• Creative you use (Banners, Ad Copy & Landing Pages)
• Offer you choose
• Demographic Targeting
• Price you are paid by that offer

Note that just doing something wrong with one of the variables on the list can ruin your chances of showing a profit from a campaign. For example buying traffic from an ad network where most of the offers on that network that are running are diet and trying to run a dating offer on it. Another example would be me choosing to use a low CTR Creative (Banner) which in results gives me low clicks and a higher CPC (COST PER CLICK). The point is that there are certain things that we can control and we should always be testing, tracking and optimizing them.

Out of all the variables I mentioned above there are 3 variables that are the most important that you should ALWAYS BE OPTIMIZING (A.B.O) no matter what.

• CTR of your banners
• Earnings Per Click (EPC)
• CPM (Your Cost) 

Click Through Rate

Your CTR is affected by your banner quality (Note if you have a non relevant offer to a certain demographic it does not matter how good your banner ads are you will receive a low CTR) Using data you could see how well your ads are performing. Sometimes the difference between a non profitable campaign and a profitable campaign is a couple tenths of a percent. A high CTR equals more clicks resulting in a lower CPC. You should always be testing different creatives to try to beat the current creative's CTR.

Earnings Per Click

Your EPC is affected by the offer you are promoting (Conversion rate of the offer and offer payout). The way you optimize for this variable is by testing similar offers you are running by different advertisers and different cpa networks. (Sometimes you might want to test the same exact offer from a different cpa network to see if it converts better, also some networks have a higher payout for the same network).

Price
In most networks you could adjust the actual price you pay for CPM or CPC. Although you have to sometimes bid high for reach (Volume) if your not showing a profit in a campaign this is a variable that you should play around with. (Note that if you don't bid high enough you might lose traffic to advertisers that are bidding higher than you).

Removing Non Converting Websites
In most distribution channels you could see exactly what sites are converting for your offer. For example, lets say I am running a dating offer on an open ad network (A network that allows you to view what sites your ads are running on) and the ad network is listing my ads on three different websites.

datesforyou.com 10 CONVERSIONS
findgirlsez.com    0  CONVERSIONS
lovematches.com 0  CONVERSIONS

lets say on datesforyou.com we have 10 conversions and on the other two websites we have zero conversions. With this DATA I am now able to see that these other two websites are not converting at all and I could immediately stop spending money on traffic from these two websites. A smart media buyer here would either spend more money for datesforyou.com placements or even try to opt for a direct to site media buy with them cutting out the middleman (ad network) for even higher profits. Always do more of whats working all ready working!

Day Parting
Now the more advanced advertisers might even dig a little deeper with their data and decide to see what what part of the day people are actually converting in.

Using the same example lets say from datesforyou.com we can see that we almost never get any conversions from 6am-11am from our data. We would apply a technique called day parting which basically stops the campaign from running during these times WE NEVER GET ANY CONVERSIONS on saving us a ton of money and increasing ROI!

You see its all about the data, with data you can see exactly whats working and whats not working. Once you know whats not working you simply put an end to it and once you know whats working you do more of that (in the datesforyou.com example we knew that this site was converting the best so we spent more money on placements there.)

Once you know how to make a dollar with a campaign the truth of the matter is that its not that hard to scale it up to $10 a day then a $100 and so on. (Always focus on making your FIRST DOLLAR with a campaign or another words optimize till you see a profit then scale. But never stop optimizing this is how most if not all campaigns die).

I would like to give a big thanks to Scott Rewick and his course "Media Buying Unleashed". I really learned a bunch from him and got most of the knowledge in this post directly from his course. I am in no way affiliated with any of his products but I encourage all new media buyers hell even old ones alike to purchase his course for the fundamentals you need to become profitable in media buying.

The 5 deadly Sins - Media Buying Unleashed

So I just picked up my copy of Media Buying Unleashed a Media Buying video course by Scott Rewick (One of the top Online Media Buyers in the world) and I am telling you this is one of the best sources of information I have found on the topic of media buying. If you are newcomer in buying media like myself you would know that there is very limited information on the subject but so far I picked up a bunch of solid information that I could actually apply to a campaign. There was a particular part of the course that id like to share with my visitors the 5 deadly sins. Here they are.

Failure to Focus on one network at a time - Decide on a network and don't  go wandering off into another network until you've mastered the first. There is a deadly sin in this industry and that is lack of focus. Most people don't spend enough time understanding a network, before jumping off to the next one. Stick to one at a time and get really good at it.

Failure to change or rotate ad creative - All online advertising creative experiences user fatigue over time. Campaigns which run out of steam quickly are those that fail to change or rotate their ad creative. This includes changing images, headlines, descriptions and landing pages. The most sophistacted advertisers are constantly testing and roatating in new ceative.

Too ambitious with design or creative - Engagement and click through rates for standard IAB Units continue to fall, yet many advertisers fail to think critically about what will generate the most engagement by users, even after time and money is poured into their designs and concepts. You may have a nice logo and a stunningly attractive ad but will your target audience notice what reason they have to click?

Using Long Tail Sites and Ad Networks - Ad Networks that serve long tail publishers have a much higher incidence of click and impression fraud resulting in lower ROI for advertisers. Is a $.40 CPM really a bargain when half of the impressions and 95% clicks are fraudulent? Sticking with premium distribution will not only increase your brand value but will also deliver increased ROI.

Unable to get over the learning curve - Many advertisers have grand plans to scale their busness using digital media but are disappointed with their first attempts. It takes patience and time to optimize successful online campaigns, from finding the best creative and placements to optimizing landing pages.

Please note I am posting this as a huge fan of Scott Rewick's work. I take no credit for the above content and all credit should go to Scott. I thought the above content would be very useful to people just starting out in media buying. If you are new to media buying I actually suggest you pick up his course you can find it here Media Buying Unleashed.

Media Buying Metrics You NEED to Know

To run a successful media buying campaign there are plenty of stuff you need to know how to do: Identifying your target audience, Tracking, Testing (Optimizing),  Banner, Landing Page Creation & Geo Targeting (Day Parting etc) are all stuff that could make or break a campaign if you don't know how to do them or don't know how to do them correctly.

But just as important as the stuff mentioned above that so many media buyers over look is the actual metrics (Mathematics) behind media buying. Although the math is very basic arithmetic it is highly effective in aiding you in creating profitable media buys.

Total Impressions 
The total impressions are the total amount of times your ad was viewed. 100,000 Views = 100,000 Impressions.

CPM 
In simple terms All CPM means is cost per 1,000 impressions. So for example if you have 100,000 total Impressions on your ad and your CPM (Cost Per Thousand) is .20 cents youd pay $20 for the total impressions.

CTR (Click Through Rate)
Another very important metric is your CTR. If there was just one metric I had to focus on other than revenue generated and ad spend (cost) in display advertising it would definetly be the click through rate. Directly increase this and you increase your ROI point blank period.

Click Through Rate is the actual percentage of clicks you get from all of your impressions. So for example if you pay for 10,000 impressions and get 100 clicks thats a CTR of 1%.

Conversion Rate
Your conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who come to your offer from your ads and make a particular action whatever it may be CPL,CPA,CPS. For example if I am promoting a Clickbank product that pays $50 per sale and I get a 1,000 people to click on my and 20 of those clicks buy the product my conversion rate would be 2%.

EPC - (Earnings Per Click)
This is very important metric. Epc is the average amount of money you earn every time your ad is clicked and procedes to your site. This is generated by dividing your total revenue by number of clicks/visitors. So for example if you get 10,000 clicks/visitors to your site and earn $5000 your EPC would be $0.50. So EPC = Revenue/Clicks.

eCPM (Effective cost per Milli - 1000 Impressions)
Effective cost per Milli is the earnings you earn per 1000 impressions your ad is served. So for example if you earn $10 in 1000 impressions you eCPM is $10. A very important metric. 
eCPM = revenue * 1000/impressions So for example $100 earned out of 100,000 impressions means your eCPM is $1 (COST PER THOUSAND IMPRESSIONS)

Media Buying Formulas

This formula calculates how much you would spend every time you advertise with media buys. For example, if your CPM is $0.20 and your ad is displayed 100,000 times, then you would pay a total of $20.

This formula calculates how much you would get out of your advertisement campaign. For instance, if your ad is displayed 100,000 times with a CTR of 0.35% and EPC of $0.72,then revenue generated would be $252


Profit is revenue generated minus your expense for advertisement. As you can see from the formula, you will make profit only if the revenue generated is larger than the ad spend or your expenses.

Media Buying Key Metrics

1.  Your Bid Price, CPM or Monthly Fee
2.  CTR of Your Banners
3.  EPC of Your Offers

If your smart you could see how knowing the media buying metrics (mathematics) can help you stay profitable in your campaigns. Id like to link back to cpamarketingformula.com. I took some of the content from their eBook "Media Buying Shortcut", I learned a good amount of stuff from it pick it up if you can.