Losing your ass on your first media buy--how did your early attempts go?

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Truffles

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Apr 20, 2009
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Ok, not asking for advice, I'm testing that shit for myself and researching/learning as I go.

What I want to hear are some stories with some numbers about your early media buys. Did you lose your ass by dropping $1k+ on Burst's shit traffic? Did you actually make any money? How much did you spend before you got your first conversion?

Lets hear some horror stories (and maybe some success ones if you want).

In case you did lose your ass, I have found a possible replacement:

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Truffles said:
What I want to hear are some stories with some numbers about your early media buys. Did you lose your ass by dropping $1k+ on Burst's shit traffic? Did you actually make any money? How much did you spend before you got your first conversion?
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Perhaps you should share some information about your media buy first?
 
Koschei said:
Perhaps you should share some information about your media buy first?
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Fair enough. Nothing spectacular as I'm on a tight budget right now, however I'm slowly burning through $20/day on AdBuyer.com and stupidly thought I could get an email submit offer with a $1.50 payout to not only convert but to give a positive ROI.

Now I'm testing a $40 rebill but I learned the hard way that Burst Media will give you nothing but shit impressions.
 
Truffles said:
Fair enough. Nothing spectacular as I'm on a tight budget right now, however I'm slowly burning through $20/day on AdBuyer.com and stupidly thought I could get an email submit offer with a $1.50 payout to not only convert but to give a positive ROI.

Now I'm testing a $40 rebill but I learned the hard way that Burst Media will give you nothing but shit impressions.
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I remember Ruck talking highly of Burst.

BTW I like the idea of this thread, I'd share if I had any experience with buys
 
I would love for him to comment as I'm sure he spent an assload more on them than I did. FWIW I am running a skincare rebill (and I recall him saying that skincare did decently) so perhaps I didn't throw enough money at it. If I did things off of just clicks it was by far the lowest performer based on number of clicks and impressions. Unfortunately I didn't have any conversions to measure off of as of course that is ultimately the most important metric.
 
Truffles said:
Fair enough. Nothing spectacular as I'm on a tight budget right now, however I'm slowly burning through $20/day on AdBuyer.com and stupidly thought I could get an email submit offer with a $1.50 payout to not only convert but to give a positive ROI.

Now I'm testing a $40 rebill but I learned the hard way that Burst Media will give you nothing but shit impressions.
Click to expand...

Indeed, email submit seems like a wrong fit for this. I have not run with AdBuyer just yet, but here are a few general questions:

1) What targeting options are available and which ones you are using?

2) How good is your CTR and what is your effective CPC? Are you rotating enough ads to find out what works best? Are you getting enough statistical significance with $20 a day to be sure you really found what works and what does not?

3) Are you direct linking or using an LP (of what kind)? What is the EPC for this offer/LP combination on other traffic? Ask your network for average EPC. It could be way off, but at least one number to benchmark against.

That's just the basics. The devil is in the details.
 
i had an experience with burst. It wasnt positive. Spent 5500 to make 500 back.
My account manager sucked and bailed to a conference right when i started to get some converions. So im not really sure if it was because he sucked or the traffic sucked.

Some referals slipped through and they were mostly myspace layout sites and arcade sites. One referal site even tried to infect me with a virus.

Ive done adbuyer also and it didnt convert at all for me.
 
Sounds like none of you guys know what is going on with your buys. I'll give you guys a freebie. Read mass traffic secrets and some valuable posts about media buying on wickedfire. If you can't even find these and read them, then there is no reason for you to do media buying. It is all about research and analyzing data. Burst is just like any other traffic source other than shitty ass etology traffic. If you know what you are doing, you'll profit.
 
One question though, why are you starting out with ad networks? why not just start out slow with direct buys, and learn that way? Seems like a much better route to me. At least that's what i did
 
@ Truffles - Before I can even begin to start commenting here, what sort of data and metrics can you share on "PRE"-Media buy? As in you tested creative and/or ads on a ppc source yes? I only say this because most marketers who go directly into media buying decide they want to do media buying "instead" of ppc whereas I have always tried to suggest to do media buying as another traffic source.

If you tested some ppc first whether it be an engine (text ads/image ads) or a social source then you probably have some metrics on how you performed. Walking in Burst Media without prior metrics is suicide, but so is most media sources like this unless you have a pretty good understanding of how well you have performed paying by the click.

I know you said you werent looking for advice but instead for stories on success and failure but if you would like to discuss the campaign, give me a holler.

Tip - Must work with Burst Media Rep's VERY closely because if you get their myspace layouts, glitter, icons, arcade traffic, you are truly fucked.
 
If I got a $500 buy on an offer that converts @ 1.70, with a backup that converts @ .90, and its on a CPA basis (I keep 20% CPA), how would i figure how much to be made? I'm missing a metric involved to find out the potential. Basically buying on a CPA basis eliminates any chance of losing money on the buy right?... its not a past story but thats why im negotiating ATM
 
I really didn't want to make this thread about helping me get started with display, but I appreciate all the suggestions from knowledgeable folks here. Some additional numbers below...

Ruck, to be honest I didn't test this offer via PPC. I've never been great at PPC to begin with and figured with CPC prices so fucking high these days that I'd be better off testing things with smallish budgets on display. I know everything I read said to test with PPC first but since I wasn't having much success with anything there I figured I might as well test display anyway. I might take a step back and just try out some banners on content networks and see what I can do there as that seems like a happy middle ground. I'm shooting you a PM.

Koschei said:
Indeed, email submit seems like a wrong fit for this. I have not run with AdBuyer just yet, but here are a few general questions:

1) What targeting options are available and which ones you are using?
Day 1 was Audience Score and when I saw what it gave me I then switched over to Manual Targeting and isolated the networks that gave me clicks and picked what I thought to be appropriate channels given my target demographic of 35+ women. I FULLY realize that I did not have enough clicks to be anywhere close to statistically relevant however I figured that for the amount of impressions I received it could at least give me a basic feel. I tried this method with the initial email submit campaign and optimizing on such little data actually boosted my CTR by about 200%.

2) How good is your CTR and what is your effective CPC? Are you rotating enough ads to find out what works best? Are you getting enough statistical significance with $20 a day to be sure you really found what works and what does not?
Avg. CTR for the rebill campaign (the only one I care about now) is .10%, avg. CPC is $0.58 eCPM is $0.56. Testing 2 728x90's and 2 300x250's as I recall reading that those tend to perform the best. Not sure how useful this is but a couple of the networks have given me mid double-digit CTRs after around 1k-1.5k impressions (which means only about 5 clicks each).

3) Are you direct linking or using an LP (of what kind)? What is the EPC for this offer/LP combination on other traffic? Ask your network for average EPC. It could be way off, but at least one number to benchmark against.
Network EPC is above $1 and I am direct linking (of course). I haven't had a chance to ask about avg. EPC for display traffic as my manager is out of town this week.

That's just the basics. The devil is in the details.
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Truffles said:
Fair enough. Nothing spectacular as I'm on a tight budget right now, however I'm slowly burning through $20/day on AdBuyer.com and stupidly thought I could get an email submit offer with a $1.50 payout to not only convert but to give a positive ROI.
Click to expand...

$20 a day, fair enough but signing I/Os for media buys on zip submits is fucking suicide. Sure, you may have a killer creative and get a shitload of clicks for your spend and you may even get conversions, but how long do you think that zip submit will last? As soon as the advertiser decides to scrub your ass, you're fucked. And most buys aren't self-service, so you maybe sending traffic to a dead offer while you're scrambling to contact your ad rep.

Anyways good on ya for trying, but definitely read DA's posts about media buying as there's some gold in dem hills.
 
Spliffic said:
$20 a day, fair enough but signing I/Os for media buys on zip submits is fucking suicide. Sure, you may have a killer creative and get a shitload of clicks for your spend and you may even get conversions, but how long do you think that zip submit will last? As soon as the advertiser decides to scrub your ass, you're fucked. And most buys aren't self-service, so you maybe sending traffic to a dead offer while you're scrambling to contact your ad rep.

Anyways good on ya for trying, but definitely read DA's posts about media buying as there's some gold in dem hills.
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That's what I liked about AdBuyer--it is self service so there are no insertion orders and I can budget whatever I want and pause whenever I want (with a couple hour lag time).

For the record I did read DA's posts but unfortunately a lot of it is only useful if you are at a level I'm just not at yet. Not ready to make the investment in an IAB approved ad server, not signing big IOs, etc. Now the demographics info is gold and I have been researching that like crazy. I come from an ad agency background so I have a head start with knowing what to look for there but I might go back and reread his posts with the benefit of hindsight now.
 
Props to you for going out there trying something first hand. Burst did bad for me also, and they ran in categories I excluded in the IO. Spent $17k and made 2-3k back I believe. I don't think it was them as a network, but more the campaign I ran.

There are much better adnetworks out there though.
 
Sohan said:
Spent $17k and made 2-3k back I believe.
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How did you manage that? Didn't even a mild form of panic set in when you had spent $5000 and only made $800 or so back at the 1/3rd mark of the campaign?

Beware of what a lot of media companies refer to as a "click factor", often claiming your clicks start off inflated and the more you spend, the more they drop. This is a load of crap, I remember cornering one my reps at ASW and asking him to tell me the truth about the click factor, but he wasn't drunk enough to divulge. Working on him ;-)
 
Spliffic said:
most buys aren't self-service
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Thats what i really hated about it. My rep was unavailable when i really needed to talk to him. i pretty much had to trust that he was optimizing it for me, then he disappeared to a conference and someone else took over.
I think the bottom line is unless you have a good rep, your fucked.
 
gdubs12345 said:
i had an experience with burst. It wasnt positive. Spent 5500 to make 500 back.
My account manager sucked and bailed to a conference right when i started to get some converions. So im not really sure if it was because he sucked or the traffic sucked.

Some referals slipped through and they were mostly myspace layout sites and arcade sites. One referal site even tried to infect me with a virus.

Ive done adbuyer also and it didnt convert at all for me.
Click to expand...

Sohan said:
Props to you for going out there trying something first hand. Burst did bad for me also, and they ran in categories I excluded in the IO. Spent $17k and made 2-3k back I believe. I don't think it was them as a network, but more the campaign I ran.

There are much better adnetworks out there though.
Click to expand...

gdubs12345 said:
Thats what i really hated about it. My rep was unavailable when i really needed to talk to him. i pretty much had to trust that he was optimizing it for me, then he disappeared to a conference and someone else took over.
I think the bottom line is unless you have a good rep, your fucked.
Click to expand...

I just cannot understand why would you guys drop $17K into a black box.

If you have to "rely on a rep" to "optimize your buy" without getting real intelligence on which sites you can target and which ones are converting, what is the point of this? gdubs12345 said earlier they are even cloaking the referring URLs and "only a few slip through". Even if you are profitable, but still do not know what targeting criteria drove the conversion, how can you reproduce and scale this success?

What is the point of these blind network buys? Seems like trying to catch a dark cat in a dark room:

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