Media buying is the business of purchasing advertising space and time on web, TV, radio or other digital media to run ads and reach customers. It helps businesses to get targeted traffic on their website.
But before buying online advertisements, there is a phase prior to that which is called “Media Planning”. It assists you to examine your competition and webpages where you are looking for buying the ad space.
Media Planning also helps you create landing pages, banners and placing ads for the ultimate organization. It becomes quite convenient for business owners to get the best results for their efforts.
Brands and agencies want to boost their brand awareness, increase sales, reduce time consumption in buying cycles, and give more time to analyze, learn and optimize performance in order to build an elegant media decision.
Media Buying is paid advertising media that varies from “earned” or “owned” media. By keeping a budget in mind, the very first step in media buying is that you need to determine when and where your ads should appear.
Media Buying comes in different formats, such as banner ads, text ads and video ads. You can buy media from Facebook, MSN, Twitter and many more places. So discover and target the audience you are seeking and choose a time slot when your ad will be displayed online to get the best results.
Important Things You Need To Keep In Mind
Media Buying is the best online visual advertising method to analyze your ROI. It is generally done on a CPM (Cost-Per-Mile) basis. You need to keep in mind the following points to build successful media buying strategies:
- Why: Why do you want to use Media Buying and what are you attempting to accomplish, such as: increase sales, improve ROI and brand awareness, building a community, expand your reach, and many more
- Who: Your audience is whom you want to target and attract to visit your website. You can define audiences by targeting them per their demographic such as: age, gender, interest and profession, etc. You can also take advantage of geographical targeting to target them according to their locations.
- Where: Where can you look for your potential customers, which websites do they visit and where can you advertise to get them? You need to find websites related to your niche where your audience visits and advertise your campaign on those to get more and more visitors.
- For how long: You have to set the time span when you want to run your ad on a particular website. To do this, you need to analyze the particular time frame when your targeted audience can be easily reached.
- What is the Budget: How much money can you spend on your Media Buying campaign? Defining the cost will help you manage your complete campaign expenses easily. You can start advertising with less than $50, and you can spend as much as you want.
- Type of Media Buying: Which type of Media Buying method are you going to use in your marketing strategy?
- Use tracking: What are your tangible goals, such as: what is your ROI, how many sales and clicks you received, how many new followers you get, etc? You need to analyze your Media Buying campaign to know about your ROI, sales and followers.
How Does Media Buying Work?
Media Buying is one of the most consistent and definitive traffic sources to achieve long term goals by buying ad space on those websites which recognize your needs and serve ads to the relevant audiences. (4:02)
Here are three types of media buying methods, you can choose the suitable one according to your business:
Direct Buy: Direct Buying is good for Small businesses and starters. You can directly buy the ad space by dealing with the owner. It is affordable and helps you to build relations with the site owner.
Setting up your own Media Buying Campaign is easy. You can go for a direct media buying strategy with particular website owners related to your niche to get huge traffic from other webpages.
Intermediate Buy: Intermediate Buying is good for beginners and established businesses. Here small networks work to bring together publishers and advertisers. Small businesses can acquire the ad space on the basis of fixed monthly payments, CPM based and CPC.
It is a 100% self-serve platform. Some Intermediate agencies are AdOnion.com, BuySellAds, exoclick, MEC Global and many more.
Network Buy: Network Buying allows you to buy media space that covers thousands of distant websites. By doing this, your chances for success increase many fold. But, it can also hamper your business if you do not have accurate numbers.
With a Network buy, you get a more favorable ROI than an Intermediate Buy or Direct Buy. You need to be sure that you own an “out-clause”, and always run even delivery because traffic comes intensely and energetically.
Where to Book Ad Space:
Media Buying is the strategy of running your ads on different websites to get targeted traffic. You can segment those websites according to their reach and interest. You can take advantage of Media Buying Agencies which provide media buying services to help businesses.
These services will save you time and money. You can check out BuyAds, BuySellAds, Burst Media, Valueclick, Google Ad Network, and many more. Using Google Ad Network assists you to advertise your ad on some highly visited webpages.
Interactive Media Ad Agency:
Media Buyers are the people who work for Media Ad Agencies. These Media Buyers deliver complete services to your Media Buying strategies. They assist you in designing banner ads, choosing the websites to buy, serving the ads, and analyzing your results.
Networks and Exchanges:
Advertising your campaign with networks can connect your business with many small and big websites. The networks market their affiliate websites ad space to sell on CPM (Cost-Per-Mile), CPC (Cost-Per-Click), and CPA (Cost-Per-Action) basis.
Google, Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft have their own set of policies. There are millions of other websites such as CPX Interactive, ValueClick, BrustMedia and AdBrite. Many businesses take advantage of multiple websites for their ads to generate more revenue.
Social Media:
The audience is more active on social media (Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare and many more), so by not being active on it, you are losing a lot of traffic. You can incorporate Social Media into your Media Buying campaign to increase conversions.
Buying ads on social media can also help to you to get success. You have to focus on Objectives, Ad Placements, Ad Types, Targeting Options, Data & Insights, Measurement, and budget. With Social Media you can target a huge audience according to their interest, demographics and geographical location.
Why should you definitely use Media Buying for your business?
Media buying is the purchasing of advertising space over various websites. This space is sold according to the size and budget of the marketer for the product that needs to be advertised. Online media buying allows the marketers to promote their product worldwide and expand their customer base.
There are several benefits to media buying that are mentioned below:
Improves Efficiency
Media buying helps marketers increase the benefits and efficiency of their campaigns by thorough and efficient market research. It also helps increase efficiency by removing layers of contacts that many marketers have to face while pursuing any campaign.
Media buying provides you the access to a vast amount of inventory over the internet. Furthermore, it streamlines the process, which saves you time and allows the marketer to focus on other important functions.
Media buying campaigns help improve efficiency by handling all the tasks of advertising and providing it with the correct place and targeted audiences. As a result, attaining goals becomes easy.
Cost Effective
Media buying campaigns are cost effective because the media buyers can become active members of a marketing team of a company. Choosing a media buyer is beneficial because they will handle deadlines while ensuring the benefits for the business.
It is a cost effective process as compared to hiring a full time advertising manager because media buyers are only paid for the efforts that they make. The media buying campaigns remove the middleman which leaves more budget for the actual expenditure.
Ultimately, businesses can have additional opportunities to make better use of their financial resources and facilitate growth and development in the long run.
Performance Gains
Media buying campaigns increase the performance of the marketer from that particular ad. As advertisers receive the feedback of the audiences, it becomes convenient to evaluate the ins and outs of his campaign.
The feedback and comments helps to improve the product, which leads to overall success. The advertisers focus on utilizing this data for their benefit and improve the outcome.
With this benefit, marketers have a chance to test more, test faster and scale the complete process very well. This helps in monitoring ad performance and they can make relevant adjustments to it.
Time Saving
Online Media buying campaigns are a time saving process because it doesn’t require much time needed in other media buying processes. In this, the marketer does not need to track the performance of the ad on a daily basis.
In the early stages, the process of buying impressions was time consuming. It took time for purchasing the guaranteed impressions from the publishers. But now, with online media buying, the buyer can get the required impressions and get their campaigns to market at the same time.
The ad space gets auctioned to the highest bidder which saves time because the bidding process takes place online. Consequently, they are able to use this time in a better and well-planned manner.
Enhances level of Expertise
In media buying campaigns, marketers use highly knowledgeable specialists that are familiar with all the aspects of online media buying campaigns.
No persons other than the marketer himself and internal marketing team can understand the company’s customers, market and industry easily. In house advertisers have the benefit of having customer knowledge and products to run high performing campaigns.
Media buying campaigns always include the experts who know the media market. These experts have industrial knowledge which helps ensure that a particular media owner offers a good short term or long term deal to them.
Brand Enhancement
With a proper media buying campaign, businesses have a chance to build up their brand because they have a chance to expand their customer base with less efforts on their end.
By getting in touch with higher numbers of customers, brand value gets increased as more and more people get in the company’s touch point. It helps them to know the company in a better way.
Ultimately, with an extra emphasis being placed on how to attract more customers, the company slowly moves towards giving the best quality products and services, and so, it adds to its brand building process.
Higher ROI
Return on Investment (ROI) is the most common aspect that needs to be kept in mind. It is a performance measure which is used to evaluate the efficiency of the investment or the number of investments.
In media buying, the RTB (Real Time Bidding) helps gain the perfect ad space. As targeted customers load the page, and in that duration, ad space is provided to the highest bidder. This process takes less than a second.
The higher the RTB, the higher the ROI will be. Using RTB, your return on investment increases as the marketer can experience the drastic enhancements in click through rates and the conversion rate.
Hyper-Focused Audience
Making the ad customer centric can get you the required traffic, because the ad is placed on the relevant site which brings the targeted audience to your ad. The most powerful benefit of media buying is that you can place your ad at the relevant location which targets the correct audience.
This helps in showcasing the product to the correct people who are already interested in purchasing your services or products. Media buying campaigns help your ad to be focused on highlighting your product correctly to the browsing audience.
By effectively highlighting the product, it becomes quite easy for businesses to make their product reach customers easily. Ultimately, you’ll have better chances of beating your competitors with less efforts.
Add good quality score
Quality score plays a vital role in determining your Ad rank in search engines. This determines the position of your ad appearance in the search engine, which in return specifies the amount of exposure and clicks your ad will receive.
Quality score is important for determining PPC of an ad. The number of clicks you receive for your ad determines your quality score, this helps you pay the website owner on whose site your product is being advertised.
Every click on your ad will make you pay the site owner and will benefit you by increasing your sales and rank in searches. As a result, it becomes very helpful for business owners to increase their sales and profit margins.
Enhanced Customer reach
Media buying can increase a company’s reach towards its customers and gain more exposure through advertisements. This will increase the customers approach towards the advertisement resulting in increased sales.
Online media buying campaigns help the marketer to pace with the smart consumer who can make purchases at any time of the day. It helps increase the chances of reaching customers with fresh challenges to increase your sales.
For this, it is vital to integrate all the media buying choices to increase the customer reach. This integrating of choices provides greater value to the customer and opportunities to reach them.
From the above mentioned pointers, we can conclude that media buying campaigns help marketers advertise their products and services easily on other sites.
This helps get unlimited traffic potential and enhances the marketing of a product just by buying more and more ad spaces. The traffic generated would help increase the sales and profit for the marketer.
Eye Opening Facts
| 72% of publishers and 85% of online advertisers are now using programmatic ad-buying technologies. (Source) | |
| Online display advertising (banner ads, re-marketing & re-targeting) will capture the next biggest share of the online spend at about 34% of total online spend and about 10% of the total marketing budget. (Source) | |
| Marketers are forecasted to spend $27.6 billion on display advertising by 2016. (Source) | |
| Expert media buyers with good relationships with media outlets are able to negotiate and reduce advertising rates sometimes by as much as 50%. (Source) | |
| Programmatic buying is boosting the pace of the expansion of display advertising, now the fastest growing segment of online advertising. With display advertising growing at 21% a year, it’s expected to hit $74.4 billion in 2016. (Source) | |
| 80% of marketers would buy more if there were greater emphasis on quality of viewable impressions. (Source) | |
| US interactive display media will grow from $12.7 billion in 2012 to $28 billion in 2017, that’s an average annual rate increase of 17%. (Source) | |
| By 2016, RTB will make up 27% of all U.S. display ad spending. (Source) | |
| 70% of media buyers are already doing some programmatic trading. (Source) | |
| 35% of media buyers claimed that the likelihood of replacing direct relationship with programmatic buying was high, while 34% said it depended on its success. (Source) | |
| The average Click-Through-Rate of display ads is 0.1% (Source) | |
| The average person is served more than 1,700 banner ads per month. (Source) | |
| Media Cost is decreased by 68% with Programmatic Buying. (Source) | |
| Years of negotiating experience allow media buyers to devote more than 80% of your advertisement budget to space or airtime. (Source) | |
| Through competitive pricing tactics Media Buyers can gain twice the number of impressions for 60-70% of the cost. (Source) |
Top Media Buying Websites
In this chapter, you will get a list of major online media buying networks. Businesses and Marketers are always looking to buy web advertising space to get more traffic and sales on their websites.
These media buying networks permit advertisers and publishers to connect with those customers they want to target. Some of these Ad Networks offer completely featured analytics to analyze their business results.
Sparcmedia was established in 2004 as a performance focused online advertiser. The company identified rapid changes in programmatic media buying and was revamped accordingly to grow as a major media buying service provider.
Sparcmedia’s basic aim is to provide a human touch to programmatic media buying advertising technology. It is determined, and deals in automatic media buying across display, mobile, social, video and rich media.
An experienced team amalgamated with technology to get advertising success, its services are Programmatic Media Buying, Rich Media Engagement, Data-Fueled Media Buying and White Label Trading Desk.
It enables branding to engage your potential audience, prospecting to maximize the results, sales and ROI.
Chitika, the online advertising network was established in 2003 at Westborough. Chitika works on your media planning and buying strategy to display ads to your audience when and where they like to perceive them to make your campaign more valuable. It has four billion strategically targeted ads per month and 350,000+ quality publishers.
Advertisers can reach your customers locally. If you are publisher, you can maximize your revenue with Chitika. You can choose the ad type relevant to your website. Chitika collects data on the basis of Ad impressions. These ad impressions are generated when a visitor visits a page running with Chitika ad code.
All the data (such as referrer, Web browser, operating system, ad impression) is collected and analyzed statistically to obtain an illustrative sample.
Chitika top rank advertising partners are Yahoo, SuperMedia and HomeAdvisor. This website also assists your business with proper targeting and optimizing techniques to grasp the power of programmatic buying to serve correct ad and accurate times.
BuySellAds is a great option for top-level content creators to monetize their brand. It offers a solitary solution to expand the reach and fan base of marketers and businesses. The network has more than 12,000 advertisers and over 1,500 publishers. It is on-demand, scalable, creative and relevant.
If you are an advertiser, you’ll get the best results for automated media buying strategy and a single point of contact with hundreds of publishers with transparent pricing. BuySellAds assists you in Real-Time Performance tracking, targeting, analytics, and reporting that improve your ROI. It delivers 6 billion ad impressions per month.
If you are a publisher, you can sell more by having complete command over your list. Publishers get paid for the potential audience and new customers they build.
You can have complete control over what and where will the ad run. You can also build relationships with advertisers by self-serving, to add benefit in your in house team with fully transparent analytics.
Setting up a Profitable Media Buying Campaign from Start to Finish
Setting up a Profitable Media Buying Campaign is absolutely simple. We will now walk you through the process of creating one from start to finish, as well as give you some really important advice in the process.
The basic steps are:
- Step 1: Understanding your Business
- Step 2: Understanding your Target Audience
- Step 3: Finding Websites to Advertise on
- Step 4: Creating Media Buying Ads
- Step 5: Creating the Landing Page for Advertisements
- Step 6: Setting up your first Media Buying Ad Campaign
- Step 7: Tracking your Ad Campaigns
- Step 8: Testing, Optimizing and Scaling
10 do’s you must follow for successful Media Buying Campaigns
Campaign Planning
For every media buying campaign, there is a phase prior to launch called media planning. This includes analyzing your numbers, competitors and the site on which you have to buy ad space.
It also involves making banners, landing pages, tracking links and placing pixels for the final configuration of your campaign. The process of choosing the site for your advertisement falls under Campaign planning.
The most common and straight forward way to approach a site is to just narrow down to all the domains that meet your campaign criteria and target those sites for ads.
Target the audience
Audience plays an important role in increasing and decreasing sales. You have to target the audience in order to get the correct sales. Successful targeting is the key to success.
From your past experiences and customer feedback, always try to judge what they require and make your advertisement accordingly, so that large numbers of audience gets targeted.
A great advertisement spend is determined by the audience it generates for you. Media buying campaigns can only be successful when it draws a huge group in favor of your product.
For getting good audiences, you must choose the site which has the highest traffic on it. By doing so, your activities are directed in the right direction.
Define your goals and expectations
For succeeding through media buying campaigns, you must be dedicated to attaining your goal right from the beginning. The success of any campaign depends on the goals and expectations delivered from the product.
The primary objective can have a huge impact on the texture and composition of your campaign. If the goal is to generate financial resources, you don’t need to worry about the initial expenditure.
If you have to attract a larger audience, then you have to advertise your product with larger appeal or have to create a good media buying campaign. This can prove to be crucial for the success of your campaign.
Be consistent
Consistency holds the key to success. Some advertisers think of changing the tagline, color or even mix up their new campaigns in the advertisement to make it more attractive. It can backfire at times, too.
Be consistent with your advertisement’s basics so that consumers can recognize your brand from one advertisement to the next. Being consistent doesn’t mean that you have to keep repeating the same layout again and again.
It simply highlights the fact that you should be able to stand on your expectations. The point of consistency doesn’t mean killing creativity from your advertisement.
Find benefits
People don’t buy products- they buy the benefits that accrue from it. Before deciding your campaign, you must see what benefits your product offers them, as well as for your brand building.
Your advertising will always succeed if it has the benefits that customers are expecting. By using a media buying campaign, you can benefit by attracting a large audience by providing them a solution for their problem.
You can provide benefits to your customer such as the product saves time and makes their life easier, which will attract customers to your product. Ultimately, you are giving them what they are looking for.
10 warnings you should be aware of
Budgeting without data
During a media buying campaign, the budget shouldn’t be decided without the data you want to post on an ad. Budget for the ad should be decided according to the size of the ad space you are buying on the site.
The budget of the ad depends on the time the ad will be displayed on the website. It also depends on the number of pages on the website it is being displayed on.
Marketers should not create the budget without working on the above factors because the ad space provider can charge you more for the lesser data. If overlooked, it can prove to be a critical area.
Overlooking Call to action
The call to action serves as the most important point when it comes down to getting customers attention for your products or services. Each and every business has to give importance to the call to action.
With so many points to be kept in mind, many business owners forget to add an attractive call to action on their websites. It proves to be quite fatal when the results appear for their efforts.
Therefore, it is suggested that businesses should place a good call to action on their website. It should also be noted that it can be included at more than one place on the website.
Being repetitive
Being repetitive can surely be a red signal for your website. Don’t use the same ad every time. It decreases customer attraction to the ad. Be creative and imaginative. Unique ads will attract more customers to your product.
Use should not stick to the same type of advertising for every product because it would seem like you are promoting the same product. Also, being creative doesn’t mean that you should not promote your brand.
Your brand should be carried forward in the same manner as it used to be. This would make your brand familiar to the customers.
Effective Website Targeting
Before doing a media buy, you must decide who your targeted audience is and choose your site according to it. For instance, if your targeted audience is younger people, then you must select the site which is being most visited by younger people.
Shocking Media Buying Case Studies
RANGEmasterRANGEmaster is the best cooker appliance manufacturer in Britain and famous for their style and functionality.
The aim of RANGEmaster was to increase their brand awareness and expand their new customers reach and retarget their existing audience.
RANGEmaster incorporated with TCS Media to increase digital activity and make the best use of RTB for laser targeting their audience and to reduce waste.
As a result, it observed that there was quality traffic driven to its website. It also observed a great reduction in its cost per visit to its page. It also saw an increase of 82% in visitors on its website.
SAXOPRINTSAXOPRINT is one of the biggest online print houses in Europe. It was started in 1991 as a local printing business.
The aim of SAXOPRINT was to lift their brand awareness in the UK market, establish themselves in Creative Sectors and Marketing and build their acquisitions of fresh potential customers.
SAXOPRINT came together with Mediareach to formulate an integrated media buying campaign that mainly focused on PR, Media Planning and Buying, Sponsorships and events.
SAXOPRINT achieved 318, 700 inserts in printed media; a total of 1,080,000 reached via event, award and festival sponsorships; they extended their reach to 625,000 at the London Design Festival through website banners and official show guides; they got 451,000 impressions with social media, postcards and unique visitors and newsletters.
Hotels.com
Hotels.com is a leading provider of online and offline hotel room booking and accommodations. It aimed to re-launch the brand and wanted the help of a partner with a properly designed campaign, planning buying optimization and tools for measurement for finding out customer level of awareness.
Media Buying for Internet Marketers – Making Money Online
There are many ways to make money online. And the wonderful thing about Media Buying is that you can use it to make money with each and every one of those ways.
Media Buying is one of the most flexible ways to make money online. One of the most common problems we as marketers face when working with the majority of the Paid Advertising Networks out there, is that they have so many rules that we don’t have the time to know and understand every one of them. They just disapprove our ad, or even our account before knowing the reason why we got banned.
That won’t happen with Media Buying. Because you will be dealing with the publisher directly. He just needs to check your ad and website, and he will approve it in 24 hours max. I myself have not gotten disapproved for any ad using buysellads.com and I have had great traffic coming from it.
Media Buying has huge potential for money making.
