If you're doing small buys directly with (clueless) webmasters, free platforms are fine but if you're running over 1 million impressions a day with Ad Networks or large, high profile sites, you definitely don't want them to just take your pixel and optimize and run everything off their numbers and their ad server. That's crazy.
1) Get a good ad server that you can get your Publishers to accept billing off of. Give them logins so they can see their numbers.
2) Get a good demographic to target. Not an offer, not a market, a demographic.
3) Negotiate a test buy at $5k, even delivery, 1 per day cap targeting that demographic. Remnant traffic $1.5 or less CPM.
4) Get 5 offers with EPC's at or above $1 on your networks that are aimed at that demographic. This obviously isn't bullet proof but it's the best guess you're going to get.
5) Get at least 3 ad versions per banner size (if doing banners)
6) Set up your ad server to rotate all 5 offers/ads evenly for 100 clicks and then have the optimizer make the offers compete, showing the highest eCPM offers more until you have a clear ranking of 1 through 5 for what is bringing you the best profit. It is unlikely that the network will be able to optimize back to your CPA goal with a $5k buy even delivery so asking them to do it on a test buy is not going to be too effective. You are looking for the offer AND AD that has the highest eCPM.
7) Negotiate a full buy (1 m+ impressions per day over 30 days). Try to do retargeting.
8) Run your top offer (and keep your #2 and #3 offers on deck)
9) Ask the network to then optimize to 50% of your CPA payout (at $1000 a day, they should be able to do this in about 5-7 days. If it takes a lot longer, you are getting screwed or have a lazy rep).
10) Create more ads and get them approved by the vendor if you're direct linking and compete with your control.
11) Reserve 10-20% of your traffic for testing other offers/ads
12) Negotiate a quarterly IO and ask for 35% lower CPM.
13) Start loosening your daily cap 1 impression at a time to ramp your traffic.
14) Tell your rep that if they have excess inventory (remnant) that they can GUARANTEE for your targeting, you'll take all of it.
15) When your #1 offer dries up, run #2, then #3 and any others that had decent margins. Optimize your ads to get better ROI.
16) Repeat and bank hard.
Direct linking works better for Network Buys. CTR on landing pages is freaking tough to get above 40%. With .4% CTR on banners as an average, it's tough to get a high enough conversion rate for good ROI.
All your tracking and optimization is in the ad server and it does it automatically. Having one also allows you to know your ROI at all times.
It makes the "throw and stick" method of finding offers that work hands off. You do need some good $$$ to get enough data on 5 offers with 3 ads a piece though. If you're new, the Networks can be tough to deal with and the Ad Server companies even tougher.
If there's a discrepancy between you and the Network's ad server though and you don't bill off of your numbers, you are giving them a license to steal.
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