Internet Marketing GuideMo' Money – Make $$$ Online

We all know that media buying can take a lot of cash. Before entering most buys you have to sign an Insertion Order with the amount of impressions you want to purchase. You then have to wait a certain amount of time before you can exercise your out-clause and get out of the buy if things don’t work out (some networks are worse than others but I could tell you one nightmare of a story). As I suggest in my Free Media Buying 101 Guide, your chances of succeeding are much greater if you master the campaign on another traffic source before committing to a large buy.

There is one source out there that works pretty well when your doing your initial testing. That is the ADSDAQ Ad Exchange by ContextWeb. It is very similar to Google Adwords, Adbrite, and others in that you bid on inventory (CPM or CPC) but they keep their publishers to a strict standard, hence conversion rates are much better (at least in my experience). Before testing your offer on their network (or any network) I suggest analyzing demographics via Quantcast. Begin by entering the name of the network (or website) into the search field at the top:

You can do this for virtually any website and/or advertising network. It is essential to know your audience before starting a media buy. Ad networks and websites can actually ‘quantify’ their sites and choose which which type of data they wish to share.

The first thing I look at when analyzing a network is what country is the bulk of their traffic. This allows me to choose if I want to target a domestic audience or international. As you can see with ADSDAQ they are primarily all United States:

The next thing I like to analyze is the overall demographics of the network. While they do offer targeting options (such as certain categories or based on keywords) I like to know what makes up the bulk of their audience.

We can then use this data to break up this audience into their sub categories thus ‘laser targeting’ our audience. Like a typical media buy we can play around with frequency capping and ’set our own CPM’ by bidding the amount to see a ROI. The best part about all of this, you can pause when you want too! You don’t have to have Insertion Order, an out-clause, or many of the other advanced features of a typical media buy. This works great for affiliates that are just breaking into media buying.

Once you completely master your campaign on the ADSDAQ Ad Exchange you can take the demographic data, frequency cap, your winning creatives, to more ad networks/sites and do a traditional media buy (with an Insertion Order and set amount of impressions). By doing this, you’ll greatly reduce your financial risk media buying. I hope this helps, feel free to ask any questions below!