4 Online Advertising Traffic Sources

4 Online Advertising
Traffic Sources
95% Marketers Know Nothing About
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About the Author
Table of Contents
Introduction
CPV
Retargeting
TaeWoo Kim is an digital marketer specializing in
customer acquisition, lead generation, search engine
and social media marketing, and all that wonderful
RTB / Media Buys
Ads in Email
sexy “make money” stuff. And yes, he’s sexy too. <insert
cricket chirps>. He also runs marketing at LaunchBit.
You can follow him on twitter @ TaeWooKim
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Are you an online
advertiser?
Here, let me read your mind …
*ohmmmm*..
Ok, I got it.
You do pay per click in search engine
marketing... maybe some ads on Facebook
and found out that it was horrible.. and maybe
some banner ads.
Am I right?
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Unfortunately, that’s the story of 95% of digital
marketers that do any form of online marketing .
And that is exactly why 95% of the digital marketers
out on the web don’t have a positive ROI in advertising.
Why? Simple: because they DO THE SAME THING.
Call me crazy, but if you want results that are
different from everyone else’s, shouldn’t you be doing
something.. well.. DIFFERENT?
Believe it or not, 95% of the advertisers fight for the
same traffic source. And who is the biggest beneficiary
of that competition? Yes, the answer is.. NOT YOU. Just
think about it: how are online advertising companies like
Google and Microsoft/Yahoo making billions per year?
Yet, most advertising campaigns fail to work?
So why not go where there’s much more room for you
(especially the smaller and the medium size) advertisers
to play with?
Here are 4 online advertising sources that most will
never explore, even if they may know it.
CPV
Retargeting
RTB/ Media buys
Ads in Email
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1
CPV
You’ve all heard of CPM and CPC. Blah blah.
Ok, here’s a new term.. CPV. Cost per VIEW.
(Also known as PPV, pay per view)
Ever visit a site like Forbes or NY Times, and they pop this advertising before
they show you the stuff that you want to read? Yea, that’s called
CPV advertising.
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You can usually tell if it’s a CPV advertising because
Because of the relatively low costs, this is quite popular
they’ll usually have a link on top somewhere that says
with affiliate advertisers, local businesses, and regional
“continue to site/article/etc” if you want to skip the ad. In
branding advertisers. As with any form of online
fact, if you really think about it, traditional TV advertising
advertising, you need to test your creatives to see what
is actually CPV based advertising because they pause the
works best. Especially because you can find insane
main program and show you the media created by the
amounts of traffic in a very short amount of time.
advertisers to promote their products or services.
In other words, there is no difference between someone
clicking on an ad link and going to your landing page vs.
someone seeing your landing page directly... except that
there’s no intent, so your conversion rate might be fairly
dismal (if it occurs at all). That’s because usually CPV
targeting is done on a demographics level (age, income,
location, etc.) Just because I’m a 45 year old male from
NYC reading Bloomberg doesn’t necessarily mean I
want to refinance my house to a 30 year mortgage.
You guessed it: this is another form of traditional
interruption marketing.
As far as costs go, the price can range anywhere from
fractions of pennies to prices quite comparable to
banner ad CPM costs, all depending on targeting. And as
far as volume, there are quite a large number of
CPV Imprressions.
Age + Income + Location + Etc. = Ad
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2
Retargeting
Ever visit a website, leave it, and banner ads
start following you everywhere? Creepy? Yes.
Effective? Highly.
This is called retargeting because you can “re-target” a customer who
has seen your website to remind him/her of your product. This type of
advertising also deals with the display network in the form of banner ads. If
the retargeting follows the user, the banner ad might have zero relevance to
the content of the site that your customer might be visiting.
But, the reason for its effectiveness is that on the average, it takes about
5-6 impressions of your marketing message before a buyer will take action.
Imagine having a microphone that has feet and follows your customer
around. Yes, if you do it TOO often, you can annoy the buyer and eventually
lose that customer. So the trick is to go slowly but surely.
Unfortunately, if you have multiple products or services, you have to track
what they’ve seen with individual tracking codes. Likewise, different buyers
are in different parts of the buying cycle, which means you need to know
which page on your website is dedicated to awareness, evaluation, or
purchase. Depending on where they are in the cycle, you can have separate
campaigns or creatives with different bids. The closer they are to the buying
cycle, the more aggressive you want to be with your bidding.
And because of insane segmentation that needs to be implemented, most
marketers just avoid this altogether or just clump campaigns into, which
tends to lower their ROI, eventually causing them to stop all their retargeting
efforts.
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3
RTB/
Media Buys
In the old days of marketing, people used to
call this media buying. Here’s how it worked.
Suppose you want to promote your WidgetCompany.com selling your,
well, widgets. You know that SomeWidgetBlog.com is where a lot of
your customers have heard about you and they eventually became your
customers. So you think “Great, I’m going to advertise there”.
So you reach out to the owners of SomeWidgetBlog.com and ask if they can
advertise on your site, in exchange for payment.
Now there are THREE ways this can happen.
A. Buy directly from site owner
B. Buy through middleman
C. Real-time Bidding
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A. You buy directly from the site owner
This is the simplest but the most inefficient way to buy the media. I say simplest because there is NO middleman between the buyer and the seller. You
negotiate a price, the seller accepts, and the transaction is now complete.
But it’s inefficient, because you have to do this with every single site you
might be interested in buying ads on.
B. You buy through a middleman
Now, going BACK to example #1.. what if the buyer decides he wants only a
portion of impressions on a site? For example, certain products, like dating
sites, convert best at certain times of the day. And in certain cases, you
want to show your ads on only portions of the website. Some people
don’t want their companies or products to be associated with morally
objectionable content.
Imagine if the seller had to deal with MULTIPLE buyers who all want
something different. That would be nightmare. And that’s where advertising
networks come in.
Buyers want to buy from multiple sellers.
Sellers want to sell to multiple buyers.
And, the network does all the heavy lifting of figuring out who wants what in
an exchange for a cut of the transaction. This is where advertising networks
like the Google display network (i.e. Adsense) lives.
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C. RTB (real time bidding)
Whether or not there’s the middleman, there’s the problem of inefficiency in
the market.
Because the sellers and the buyers still have to come to terms on what is
fair, there is tension in the market. Unfortunately, this tension is not static
and is constantly changing.
Say, you negotiated $5 CPM to SomeWidgetBlog.com to display your ad for
1 million impressions for the next 3 months. But there is no such thing as
immunity to time.
Some products sell better at certain times.
Some promotions do better.
Competitors come out with new PR or innovation, etc.
In other words, your sales and ROI on advertising spend (also known as
ROAS or return on ad spend) will vary, which means you need to adjust the
bid accordingly.
In scenario #1 and #2, the bid is fairly “static”. So to solve that problem,
there is a new technology called “RTB” or real time bidding which lets you
bid on each and every impression for that banner ad space. Because this
is technically challenging and fairly complex in terms of how the bids are
calculated, most RTB players go through some kind of service provider that
handles all the complex dealings in return for a percentage of ad spend.
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4
Ads in Email
This is by far one of the most overlooked
sources of traffic that most advertisers fail to
explore.
In fact, if done right, you can get up to triple
digit ROAS (return on ad spend) with in - email
advertising.
Believe it or not, there are literally hundreds of billions of subscription
emails sent daily. I’m sure you belong to some as well, like Groupon.
Because the content is so compelling, the list subscribers want to hear from
them on a regular basis.
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On the flip side, the mailing list owner needs to have an
Of course, all of this assumes that your marketing
effective way to monetize his list. Now, there are really
message is consistent or at least relevant to the mailing
only TWO ways you can make money online: sell your
list owner in your in - emai l tex t or banner ads .. If
own stuff or sell someone else’s stuff.
you sell weight loss programs, approaching mailing list
Selling your own stuff is pretty basic: tell people on your
list what you offer. If the offer is compelling, they buy. If
owners that talk about dog training is probably a huge
waste of time.
not, then don’t. Quite simple. Now, selling other people’s
Then there are other issues that you need to know when
stuff is quite a large topic. The list owner can sell the
negotiating an ad buy in email:
advertisers’ things on three levels: as an affiliate (i.e. split
profits) or traffic provider (pay per click).
A. Open Rate
B. Ad Placement
If you are a new advertiser and have no traction with
C. Ad Format
your product, it is highly unlikely that a mailing list
D. Flat Fee vs Performance based
owner will promote your product on a pay-per-sale basis
because it’s an opportunity cost for them.
But a lot of mailing list owners will gladly promote your
product or service by telling their people about YOU.
There are two ways they will do that: flat fee (X dollars
for Y # of emails sent) or performance basis (X dollars
per click).
As with all forms of online advertising, per click is the
preferred method because it reduces the risk on the
advertiser part. This is MORE so with email marketing
because emails have another variable factor called open
rate. Not only do your ad creatives have to have high
CTR (click through rate), but the mailing list owner has to
make sure that the emails are opened.
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A. Open Rate
Ask how large an email list is AND their open rate. Walk away from anyone
under a 15% open rate.Open rates are a good indicator of click-through-rate
(on opens). In other words, say you are given a choice to buy 2 lists:
1000 people
50% open rate
2000 people
25% open rate
Both have the same number of total people opening. So you would think
they would perform about the same. WRONG. Typically, the first list will
have a higher click-through-rate on opens.
Open rates are a good indicator of how engaged your list is. Ask about
click-through-rate (on opens). But list owners will rarely give you the
lowdown on this.
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B) Ad Placement
Find out where the ad placement will be. Do they sell dedicated/solo email
ads? Or ads embedded in their newsletter content? Ad placement will make
or break your ad buy. Buy only dedicated/solo email ads OR ads that are
placed at the top/top-left of newsletters. Ads placed on the top-right, right,
middle, bottom of (English) newsletters tend to get such low CTRs and are
not worth your time.
C) Ad Format
Find out the ad format. Is it text? Is it banner? Buy text formats. Text ads get
seen no matter whether readers display images in emails or not. And even
for people who do display images, text ads typically generate 2-10x more
clicks than banner ads, probably because they are more like native ads.
For top placement, text ads should generate between 0.5-5% CTR on opens.
So, if a list has 1000 people, with a 50% open rate, 500 people will see it.
And, 2 to 25 people will click on it.
Typically, the CTR number is closer to 1% (5 people in this case). So, it might
only be worthwhile to chase a deal if a list has a LOT of people... BUT, if you
are doing dedicate/solo email buys, the CTR on opens will be a lot higher.
You can probably expect between 15-50% CTR.
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D) Flat fee vs. Performance based
Most email lists will want to be paid on a flat fee basis. You can try
negotiating on a cost-perclick basis or a cost-per-lead basis, but this is often
near impossible. If you are paying on a flat fee basis, you should always
negotiate a rate card. Often rate cards are extremely expensive.
E.g. well known newsletters such as Thrillist may charge $300 CPM.
Bargain down an artificially high price to under 50% the rate card.
Sometimes down to even 25% the ask price. In general, the less well known
the list, the more you can negotiate. A lot of companies who do massive
ad buys will typically have a specialist who just negotiates ad buys in
newsletters with tons of publishers.
Your deal might not go through, because you may not agree on price with
the publisher. So, kick off conversations with lots of newsletters. One of
your bargaining chips is to do multiple ad buys. Publishers are usually more
willing to negotiate if you buy a LOT of ad spots.
Managing ad buys in emails is complicated and time-consuming. For an
easier time, you can use LaunchBit, to buy ads in CAN-SPAM compliant
emails on a cost-per-click basis.
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