Online Media Buying 101 (... for Dummies)

It is very important to be consistent when preparing to launch new online marketing campaigns. In order for you to be able to make an informed decision on which campaign will work best for you, you will need to compare a few of them. In order to make the right choice you can't compare apples with oranges and thus you will need to collect the same information from every website and publisher. When negotiating directly with publishers, you must try and negotiate deals by following the guidelines below as much as you can in order to be as consistent as possible. For the purpose of this post I will assume you are looking to buy banner ads to promote an e-commerce website and generate ROI. Depending on what you are looking to achieve from your marketing campaign some of the items below might be slightly different but the general idea will always be the same.

The main things you will need to look at when negotiating a new campaign are the following:

• Media Kit – Every site usually has a presentation that contains all relevant advertising information. You should always ask for this as soon as you contact a new site. This usually contains information like: total number of unique visitors to the site per month, geographic location and demographics of their audience (male, female, age group, etc.). This will not only help you get a better idea of what the publisher can offer you in terms of exposure, it will also tell you if your target audience is looking at that site.
• Banner Size – Bigger is always better in online advertising so always try and get a banner that will not disappear on the site. Usually the bigger the size of the banner the higher the price as well so you will need to find that sweet spot where you get the biggest size at the most reasonable price. Don't forget that paying too much is not a guaranty of success and in fact most of the time is quite the opposite.
• Banner Location – Banners near the top of the page usually do better than the ones on the bottom. Always try to go for the banners above the fold. Meaning the banners you can see on a site without having to scroll down.
• Additional Exposure – When negotiating to buy a banner, always try and get some additional inventory for free. Ask for a text review of our site to be posted on their site or links pointing to our site. This will not only increase your exposure on the site during your campaign but also help with SEO as search engines love to find links and content about your site on third party sites.
• Test Campaigns – Whenever you start working with a new site or finalize a new campaign, you must always insist on running a test campaign. Basically, most sites will offer you lower advertising rates so you can run a campaign on their site and evaluate their performance. You will have to push in order to get a really good rate.
• Payment Method – You will need to decide which payment method you feel most comfortable using CPM, CPC, CPA and Flat Rate. For new campaigns and when working with publishers that you are not familiar with I would usually suggest avoiding to work on Flat Rate deals because as the name implies, the campaign payment terms do not depend on delivering specific amount of exposure or results. You get the commitment that your ad will be displayed for a specific amount of time but no other guaranties 

Remember to constantly try and take advantage of any discounts the publisher may be willing to offer. Everything in online media is negotiable so it’s always OK to say that their original asking price is too high and keep pushing for a rate that you are more comfortable with.

Things you will need to pay attention to later on when the campaign is live:

• Click-through-ratio (CTR) – most commonly defined as numbers of clicks divided by number of impressions.
• Click-to-lead ratio – the percentage of how many people successfully registered after clicking our banner.
• Conversion ratio – the percentage of active users from registrations; after people clicked on your banner, how many of them signed up? And after they signed  up, how many of them became actual clients.
• Other Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) relevant to your business or website. Things like free downloads, demo accounts, email subscriptions, likes or followers

For most online marketing campaigns the main focus should always be the results, so if during the course of the campaign you feel that something is not performing, then you should pause the campaign and make changes so that it performs better. Sometimes just changing the banner makes a big difference. Sometimes its the landing page or the message on the ad. You will need to keep making changes and keep optimizing the performance of the campaign while its running until you hit an acceptable performance.

Never wait until a campaign is finished running to evaluate if it was good or bad. You have access to valuable performance data from your marketing suite, your tracking links, analytic software that you should use daily to help you modify and improve your campaign.