First Media Buy Experience

Written by Richard 15 Comments
Last Updated: November 11th, 2009

Out of the 2 media buys I ran with 1 has ran out of budget, I didn’t really do any optimisation whilst it was running because I was seeing to other campaigns. The budget was only $800 on this one and after a quick check here’s the outcome of how it went:

Spend: $800
Revenue: $353
Profit: -$447

Obviously from looking at those stats it doesn’t look good but within that test I actually had multiple smaller campaigns targeting different demographics, such as US males, US females, UK males, UK females, etc.

I’ve got to gather the sale data and cross reference with the impressions/clicks/traffic to see how each campaign did and take things from there. I will also be implementing a couple more landing page tests to try get the CTR up.

Although I did lose money on this I’ve learnt a few things from media/direct buying, good job the budget wasn’t a few thousand or it would have been a more expensive test .

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15 Comments

#1 Ben
November 11th, 2009 at 3:21 pm

Cheers mate, keep the updates coming. Gonna venture into Media Buys myself pretty soon, and it’ll be great to read other people’s experience in the initial stages too

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#2 Stewart
November 11th, 2009 at 3:38 pm

Was this a media buy accross many websites or just on one website?? If its accross many websites then i presume you can now work out which websites it converted on and which ones it didnt.

Then you can take out another small media buys only advertising on the sites that you know it converted on.

This is what i have been doing with my mediabuys, but before my first purchase i spent weeks staring at quantcast.

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Richard Reply:
November 11th, 2009 at 3:43 pm
That was across one website, I know for a fact it will convert – just a process of finding the perfect creative, lp & offer

Your method is great though, when I begin buying through networks that’s the approach I will use.

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Stewart Reply:
November 11th, 2009 at 3:51 pm
The creatives that seem to work well for me are the ones that look like they have been whipped together by a 10 year old using mspaint. lol

This is because they look less professional, i know that may sound strange but the really amazing creatives just look like they have been made by some big corporate guys. As you can imagine when people see creatives like that we just ignore them, i know i do anyway.

The one thing i need to work on is my adcopy, that always lets me down

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Richard Reply:
November 11th, 2009 at 4:17 pm
100% agree, I don’t have actual data to suggest that’s the case with creatvies but it’s sometimes like that with the actual landing pages.

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Affiliate Josh Reply:
November 11th, 2009 at 5:13 pm
@Richard, At least you had a 50% return. I don’t think that is bad for your first media buy campaign.

@Stewart, Where can I hire some cheap 10 year olds to make me some banners? Great tip!

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Stewart Reply:
November 11th, 2009 at 5:48 pm
good old 0desk.com, lol actually you can get some good phillipine designers on there

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#3 Muzi Mohale
November 11th, 2009 at 3:44 pm

Richard, please do a series of posts to walk a novice like myself through affiliate marketing from the very beginning. I’m clueless on it and interested at knowing exactly the rules of the game, I’m sure I’m not alone…for me I simple join an affiliate program and bang I add that banner on my blog, sit back and wait for commission to roll in and clearly there is more to it than my approach. I don’t understand this part of spending money in the process, instead of receiving as a result of sales/clicks. Or maybe I’m lost altogether, this is far wider than I assume, please rescue the brother Richard.

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Richard Reply:
November 11th, 2009 at 6:37 pm
Paul over at uberaffiliate.com has a great guide which should answer the majority of your question. Fine it here:

http://uberaffiliate.com/affiliate-marketing-guide/uber-affiliate-marketing-guide/

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#4 Mihai
November 11th, 2009 at 6:10 pm

Richard …in the last posts I’ve noticed that you have a negative balance with your investments. Are you still profitable ?

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Richard Reply:
November 11th, 2009 at 6:39 pm
This month might be the first month I fall into the red (for the month) because of the initial investment of trying new traffic sources and media buys.

Then again it’s not even half way over so there is plenty of time to get them being profitable.

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#5 MLDina
November 11th, 2009 at 9:15 pm

It can take some time to really see a profit, but compared to some other results I’ve seen posted, that’s not too bad. Like you said, there’s still plenty of time to become profitable and as long as you learned from the campaign, you gained value.

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Richard Reply:
November 12th, 2009 at 3:03 pm
Yeah, I haven’t put it back live yet but will be when I get everything else sorted.

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#6 GoogleSearchSux
November 12th, 2009 at 9:31 am

I’ve tried my hand in media buying as well recently. Invested about 5k overall. I had some awful ROI and even things were getting better I pulled a wuss and paused after about 2k spend.

I found the biggest issue is lack of transparency between network and you, they fear you’ll go direct, but at the same time they are trying to fill inventory and are probably giving you shitty placements.

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#7 Franck Silvestre
November 24th, 2009 at 8:55 pm

I didn’t really start media buy yet, but from what I am doing(buying banners on high traffic blogs and it work great), I see nice results, and it’s a matter of tweaking and testing as you said.

Best.
Franck

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