Everyone who comes to the decision of becoming a media buyer makes some serious mistakes. Let’s imagine that you are a shiny brand-new media buyer that has mastered all the terminology, but ended up in a deadlock in the whole new world of online marketing. It’s not surprising, because the way to success in online marketing is cluttered up with rules. Once you’ve handled them it will be much easier to pursue your goals in the future. So, where do we start? It’s never too late to learn.
Sin 1: Choosing dead/undemanded affiliate offer
First things first. Choosing the demanded valid offer is the thing every newbie media buyer can stick to.
So, where to get them? You can run offers from direct advertisers or seek some cool offers from affiliate networks like Mobidea, LeadBit, ExpertMobi, etc.
Well, if there are still gaps in the understanding here are some tips you should keep in mind in order to move forward:
Investigate the market
Choosing the right offer to run is a matter of online marketing. In order to succeed you should investigate the online market and pick out the offer that is the most demanding. Choosing bestsellers is the easiest way, but be warned that in that case, you need to compete with other media buyers promoting the same offer.
Don’t be shy to take advice
There are a lot of Affiliate/Media Buying Marketing resources on the web where you can share or receive experience with or from other affiliates and media buyers all over the world.
Here’s the list of the most popular resources:
- stackthatmoney.com
- affiliatefix.com
- warriorforum.com
- wickedfire.com
- cpaelites.com
Collect all the tips you can get from the professionals and draw your own conclusions so you can go on.
Do not hesitate to ask your friends or relatives, the ones you believe most. They may give you a piece of advice on the product you’d like to promote.
True power lies not in strength but in knowledge. A good AM definitely should be well-informed about the situation on the advertising market and always ready to assist you.
Become a living testimony
The best offer you can choose is the offer you have tried yourself. Be the live testimony of a customer. Know the product you’re promoting, so you can focus on its benefits. Promote the products you would buy for yourself or would recommend to your closest friends and relatives.
Spy on competitors
What if there is a lack of information you need? Well, you must find money trickling pocket to spy on. There are a lot of Ad-spying programs to help you in that case. I would recommend you to try Adplexity as the most convenient, with detailed statistics for your own analysis.
Sin 2: Creating the dull/obscure landing page
Let’s face it, it’s not all about the traffic quality. Creating a good-looking landing page is the basis for the traffic to convert, whereas neglecting the quality of the landing page makes things get ugly.
Here’s the list of serious tips you should always remember when you’re creating a landing page:
An awesome CTA is half the work
One of the basic indications of the successful landing page is the CTA.
The web is full of research about the right color for the CTA button and other stuff. I’ll just explain to you the things you must keep in mind:
► Distraction/Misleading
Make sure that your CTA is easy to find while exploring the landing page. Don’t clutter up your page with a lot of buttons leading away from the target you have planned. Placing a navigation field distracts the audience’s attention. Don’t make your visitors decide, lead them straight to the target.
► Design
For the CTA button, use colors different from the background, don’t let them merge.
The usage of artificial CTA buttons works to increase the conversion rate. Imagination is the key to creation.
Look at the example. Don't you feel kind of lost because of the huge variety of CTA buttons?
Text conglomeration
This rule concerns both the landing page and the CTA button. Shorten your mottos, explain basics with a single word. No one likes to read a bunch of texts unless they intend to.
Don’t expect your audience is that patient to read all these lines.
Asking too much information
During the lead generation process, you might need to collect your customer’s personal data. Diluting the landing page with a lot of filling fields is obviously a disaster, try to put yourself in the customer’s position. No one likes huge registration forms. Still, if you can’t imagine how to avoid filling in a form and collecting data, there is a solution for that: use one or two fields per page or give them an illusion of short registration process, asking to fill all the information a bit later.
“Crap, so many fields to fill… I’d better do this tomorrow…. Maybe.”
The usage of unappealing or irrelevant images
Online ads are overfilled with stock images and some of them are already well-recognizable and trite. To increase the interest in your landing page use the real photos instead. Use relevant images matching the CTA or offer. Megan Fox is cool, but a smiling child will do better for promoting diapers.
Video Content
Do not expect too much placing video content on the landing page. About 90% of visitors ignore video content both in ads and on landing pages. So the space left on the landing page should be structured to explain to the visitor what you’re doing or selling. Keep in mind that video content takes up a lot of space on your landing page and may cause slow lander page loading.
Speed up landing page loading
According to some research, the average appropriate page loading speed is between 4 and 8 seconds. It may not seem critical but for 75% of the audience, those 8 seconds are enough to bounce and never come back.
Test your landing page loading speed, use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to receive recommendations about lander speed optimization.
Multiple offers per page
If you’re running multiple affiliates offers it’s better to use separate pages for them. Value the efforts you have already made to track visitors to your landing page. Not seeing the product your audience is after may be confusing. Making them decide may cause them to leave your page.
Typography improvement
Simple is the best, make your text legible. Ornate fonts may seem nice but distracting from the goal or hard to follow. Test your landing page typography on the devices you’d like to run your offer on, make sure the text is readable with them. Use the bold text to attract the audience’s attention to the things that are really important, but be careful not to overdo it.
Sin 3: Neglecting the ad formats alteration
The world of online advertising provides you with a lot of advertising opportunities and ad formats. It’s good to stick to the one you feel is most conversive, but I suggest you to try all the basic formats before making a final choice. Some of them are less irritative but more profitable for both advertisers and publishers.
Banners
The oldest and the most popular advertising format for publishers. Less irritative, and yet less profitable.
The proper banner placement is your ace in the hole. There is a bunch of spots you can use. Some of them are in sight, some of them are not. E.g. footer placement is cheap, but if the major information is at the top and the middle of the page - the bottom of the website lacks the audience’s attention.
Pre-roll, mid-roll, post-roll video
Video advertising is claimed to be the most innovative advertising format for now but still... The most irritative advertising format ever. The possibility to skip a video ad gives your audience a sigh of relief.
The typical video ad running time is up to 30 seconds, and as it works with the landing page: first 5 seconds of the video is enough for the audience to bounce and to skip your video. So, this short time period should contain all the essence of your advertising campaign and be able to attract the average visitor. Same thing here, 94% of the audience skips the advertising content according to the research.
Native Ads
Another advertising format gaining popularity by it’s less irritative interaction with the audience. All the ads may seem sluggish to native ads because they are sneaky like a tiger and assuming the website’s form. But there is no Ad format without any pitfalls, so as the native one. And it’s about the performance. Why? There are no proper standards about how to run and how to maintain those kinds of ads. All the guidelines are no more than suggestions. Well, maybe the situation is about to change in the nearest future.
Popunders\Popups
Let’s not beat around the bush. Your humble servant is in popunder business so I can’t be unbiased. Pops are the best alternative for banners and video ads. It’s cheap and profitable. But still there are some rotten apples: popunders are irritable to the audience. Using pops to boost your lead generation flows? Well, then you know what you’re doing. But the fact is: your ads will be definitely seen, that’s why pops are still holding the market as the most conversive format.
Search Engine Ads
The easiest and the most legible advertising method, provided by bing, google, and other search engines. SE text ads are less irritative and the success of the campaign highly depends on the word targeting options, bids and a small text you will place your advertising motto in.
There are a lot of other advertising formats, of all kinds and sizes so it’s possible to devote a whole big article to them.
Sin 4: Levity traffic source selection
So you have chosen an offer, your landing page seems attractive and you feel like it follows all the requirements. What now?
Traffic is the main commodity of online advertising, so you need to choose a traffic source you will get your audience from.
The first and foremost thing when choosing the source is knowing your audience. Create an image of your ideal customer and then you can decide what traffic source to choose. A lot of media buyers are claiming Facebook as the best source of traffic. It’s convenient, powered with user-friendly design and a huge choice of targeting options. Can’t tell you why, but the facebook works not so well for me. Some of the audience’s interests are missing and some of the Facebook audience doesn’t show any interests at all, lookalikes seem irrelevant and you’re always under pressure of getting banned and without being explained the reason.
Also, there is a huge list of ad requirements, so you can’t run any offer on Facebook and neither with Adwords.
So, it’s time to catch a tail and look for an advertising network. There is a huge amount of them all over the net, with all possible traffic targeting options and niches, you name it. In addition, I would like to mention a lot of advertising formats provided by them.
I must be said, the size matters. Well, Jinbelli doesn’t feel embarrassed about that. The good sign is: we’re a fast-growing network, so there are two cool advantages for you: 1. You’re exclusive, and we love all of our partners. 2. Constantly growing possibilities.
Sin 5: Unused tracking sources
Traffic source statistics provide you with little data. At least, you’d like to see how things are going.
That’s the time for you to meet the tracking sources, some great tools to track your campaigns’ exhaustive statistics.
There are plenty of them, but I’d like to mention the ones we work densely with Voluum, AdsBridge & Clickbakers.
Here’s a small example of Voluum tracking statistics. You can sort data by ad networks, specific campaigns, devices, etc. The data you receive can be used in further campaign optimization.
Sin 6: Selecting random targeting options
Targeting options are the gear wheels of your advertising campaign. You must focus on the first of all in order to launch a successful campaign.
Almost every advertising network has a common list of targeting options available.
GEO
There’s nothing new about that, but GEO targeting is the first thing you should think over before launching a campaign. The average traffic cost depends on it so is successful traffic conversion. Make sure the product you promote is highly demanded in the country you’d like to select.
Some advertising networks allow you to use more precise GEO targeting, such as area or city targeting.
Make sure your ads and your landing page meet language requirements.
Devices
This one should be easy. Since the mobiles are conquering the market, almost every offer is most likely to succeed on mobile platforms. In addition, there are some complications with blocking mobile ads, so if you’re doing it right, your ad will definitely be seen. The only thing you need is to choose between iPhone, Android or why not use both of them? And still, desktop traffic is cheap, sold in huge volumes with the appropriate quality. Precise device targeting is often suitable when you’re promoting an app or trying to reach your audience following trends and buying every new smartphone appearing on the horizon. However, if you don’t need to target a specific device, you’d better skip this step.
OS
Same as the devices. Using the potential of OS targeting means you already know what you’re doing.
Mobile ISP
The most valuable mobile traffic is 3G. Just choose the country and a mobile ISP from them. This one is useful if you’re going to run offers working on the WAP billing. If you’re going to run on several ISPs I would recommend you to run one ISP per campaign.
Browsers
That comes from the experience or specific targeting needs. Running the offers thru specific browsers you’ll form your own vision which browser converts more and which one you should avoid.
A small tip: Exclude Firefox and IE browser from your campaigns.
Time
Most affiliates neglect the opportunities of time targeting. Don’t do it. Time targeting is definitely worth it.
To get the most of your campaign and to spend less, pick the high-converting hours for the selected GEOs.
A good affiliate manager can provide you with this information.
Jinbelli analytics observed top-converting countries to provide you with some helpful data. According to our observation, the best conversion time is late at night, when everybody is at home and free for any advertising adventures. The chart below reflects the highest conversion time spots in the capitals of the countries, the average conversion success time is plus-minus 2-3 hours.
Black/Whitelists
A generic section where every good media buyer spends most of their time.
The one thing you should stick to while optimizing the campaign on your side.
Use the conversions and your win-rate as the measure of the success zone. In order to do so, you’ll need to integrate with tracking resources. The best way to gather a list of success zones is to compare the number of conversions with the zone volumes.
► Blacklists
Blacklisting is the opportunity to exclude zones that are definitely slacking with traffic/conversions.
Almost every traffic source has them, but none of the traffic sources like them.
As you may already know, traffic sources are eager to sell you all the traffic they have, even LQ.
Creating a huge roll of blacklisted zones may cause you to cut yourself from the opportunities, reducing the amount of traffic you may get.
If you’re running several campaigns it’s better not to transfer the blacklists. The zone that was unsuccessful for one campaign, may be successful for another.
► Whitelists
Whitelisting is the opposite thing.
It works almost like blacklists, but instead of blocking the websites that are slacking with traffic quality for your campaign you’re able to choose the cream zones you’d like to get traffic from.
Often used to increase ROI for some campaigns that lack win-rate.
Using whitelists also means that you need to pay more, choosing traffic from a specific zone.
Bids
A lot of newbie media buyers try to save money using the lowest possible bids. It’s the obvious money loss. Why? Using the lowest bid may cause your campaign to gather all the low-quality traffic your source has or receive no traffic at all. By bidding with a price above the average CPM you’ll be sure that you have paid for quality traffic and you’ll receive more high-qualified traffic for your campaigns.
Another cool feature any advertising network provides is the distribution options.
Measured
An ordinary distribution option is set by default. Your advertising budget is spent in a plain, measured way until you’ll reach zero balance or the end of the time frame set.
Double-time
Also called an aggressive way to spend your advertising budget, causing the double-time speed, receiving a huge amount of traffic in a short time period until you reach zero balance. I would suggest you try it only if you’re perfectly sure that your offer will do just fine.
Sin 7: Lacking optimization
Here’s a piece of advice: Don’t cut anything that wasn’t optimized properly.
If your advertising campaign stats seems inappropriate, first you should think of both optimizations on your side and traffic source.
What can be improved?
Check the bounce rate of your landing page, if the numbers exceed 60%, then you’re in trouble.
Play with targeting options, try different GEOs, starting from the cheap-costing countries with huge volumes. Test it on different devices. Use tracking systems to receive more detailed information. Check if your bid is okay.
Make sure your landing page matches the audience needs. Test several LP designs.
A/B testing is your best friend. Run several ads with different mottos/creatives and choose the one that converts best.
Common Interests
The fact is, almost all traffic sources are interested in your success to make sure you keep coming back to run new campaigns with them. Don’t rush to blame advertising networks for providing you with some fake traffic, ask your AM to provide optimization on their side, especially if you have already exhausted all the options above.
Conclusion
Here are 7 deadly sins every media buyer should avoid. In fact, you have just got 7 ways to win or, in other words, 7 vital tips to level you up as a successful media buyer. The path to success lies through experience, improving your skills and intuition. Keep it up!