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)
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.
- CTR of your banners
- Earnings Per Click (EPC)
- CPM (Your Cost)
Click Through Rate
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.
