Beginners Direct Site Media Buying Guide
At EWA we get asked multiple times a day, "How do I start media buying?". Its good to know that my affiliates know what makes the big bucks, but before we explain how to get started in media buying, let me recommend this: media buying is not for everyone. It is very risky and you should learn about bankroll management before dropping 50k on the first network you come too. Even with the high risk, it's really the only way you can scale campaigns to earn six figures a day. This email is going to explain on how beginners can get started with direct site media buys, without risking immense amounts of money. Being modest, one of my smallest media buys last month cost me a flat rate of $150 and returned $3857.25. That sounds pretty attractive, doesn't it?
Let's break this into four simple steps for you:
- Selecting an offer and researching it.
- Selecting target website's.
- Making contact with webmasters and negotiating.
- Serving and optimizing.
Some people mix up steps 1 and 2 but I find it easiest and best to pick your offer first. EWA has over 550 offers up now in multiple different niches, so that shouldn't be too hard to find a unique one. There are two ways to turn good ROI with direct media buys. The first is buying from a targeted website then displaying a similar offer. For example the offer National Dish Deal would almost certainly work great on a site that reviews tvs and cable equipment. The other is to buy demographically matched traffic to offers. Examples: A site about quilting would match work well with RezV or other skin care offers because the primarily older white female demographic will match great with it.
So to begin in our example, we are going to select the offer Download - GameVance. Looking at this offers landing page, you can see the appeal to a bunch of different demographics. Unlike many gaming offers or download offers this landing page is well built to not scare off females and the game is a puzzle game which people over the age of 30 enjoy as well. Because of the low CPA, that means we need to find cheap traffic to make this offer work. Now with that said, internal split testing on FB has shown us that women age 18-25 convert and click through the best, giving the highest epc. This is the demographic we want to reach the most then.
Step 2) Time to pick out your target website's. If your doing a targeted website to a targeted offer, this is easy. search a few terms and save 10-20 sites that rank well but don't have a good ad layout. If your doing a general offer (dating, games, downloads, etc), its time to figure out where your demographic goes online. The easiest way to do that is to use Quantcast's Media Planning Tool. Select your demographic and search it. Make sure you pick to sort by most relevant instead of by most volume. The first couple pages of results may not be highly useful but once you get into the top 200-300 sites for that demographic you should be looking at good quality targets. Make sure you check out when viewing the site descriptions the links to related sites. You should be looking for sites that have a lot of Google AdSense ads or other signs that they are not monetizing the site as best as they possibly can. For the GameVance offer, after looking at the data on quantcast, we have identified some sites that will work great to push this offer. Examples include celebrity gossip blog's, image hosting sites and a few arcade sites that feature on female friendly games. The last group there does not have a ton of traffic but its a combination of a content and demographic match for the offer so it will definitely work well.
Step 3) Making Contact and Negotiation. Almost always, this is the trickiest part of doing a direct site buy and the advantage that advertising with ad networks provide you. Average webmasters make it somewhat tricky to contact them. Try these 3 tricks. The first place to check is to look for any sort of contact us form or email. If you can't find that or they don't reply, head over to do a whois lookup. The type of people who own sites that work well for direct buys have never even heard of affiliate marketing. They don't have whois guard or any sort of protection on you looking up who they are and their phone number. Call them, email them, Facebook them - whatever it takes to get into contact with them. The reason I recommended you have 15-20 sites to contact is that often times you will get no response.
Once you get in contact with someone, its time to start your negotiations. The first thing you want to get out of them is the average unique views and total number of page views as well as what they are expecting for advertising. Some webmasters just have crazy ideas like their traffic is worth $5 cpm. You have to feel it out how well the person is going to negotiate. If they seem tricky, move on. Plenty more fish in the sea! Once you have this data, depending on the size of the traffic, you either want to negotiate for a one day test or just negotiate for the monthly deal. I generally break it if the site has under 500,000 imps for the month, just buy the whole month. Its not worth your time to negotiate for a one day test for that. If you are going for the 1 day test, take a monthly estimate for what you would spend and divide by 30 then offer slightly more then that. Don't be afraid to be generous here - a little extra grease on the bearings for later larger negotiations always helps. When looking to do a direct site buy I hate hate hate paying cpm. Just buy a flat rate ad for a certain time span. This gets rid of a ton of complications you can face from CPM buying without an official server. For us, we got in contact with a certain celebrity blog. Their traffic was around 750,000 impressions a month of non repeat visitors to their image galleries. They were expecting .25 cpm, so we offered them $200 even for the month for an above the fold 120 X 600 banner. Everyone is happy, especially the blogger making $50 bucks a month without you.
Step 4) Serving and optimizing. Ad serving software goes into another area that we won't want to get into today. Get into contact with us for reviews and recommendations of the different ad servers. For your VERY first buy, you can use OpenX, but once you get going at all you need a real ad server. Put together 5-10 creative's and generate one tag with all of those. Remember when putting together creative you can crazy and as eye catching as possible. Blinking with audio - why not? Use your ad server to optimize for eCPM. Don't focus on your CTR or CVR, focus solely on eCPM. We put up a couple flash ads as well as a couple image ads. The flash ads had a much higher CTR but very low CVR. We removed those and left up the image ads. This test is still running right now but since the first of the month, we have had about $1600 in revenue. Low ROI right now for a direct buy but still 11 days left in the month. The total time to put together the buy was just about 45 minutes. Once you have one good location, make sure to swap out creative's when needed due to fatigue and negotiate with the site owner for all available inventory. Buy it out ahead of time when available.
That's about everything that goes into a direct site media buying. This whole process can seem intimidating compared to copying down a few ads from the adboard and running them, but I guarantee if you give this a try you will be hooked on the ridiculously high ROI's and once you have the process down these buys will go by quickly and easily. Thanks for running your traffic with EWA - and keep hustlin' till your walking on money.
