This section is too quiet!

Hi Everyone,
I already read all of the posts in this section and had to resort to reading warriorforum, since they have more media buying posts at the moment
But I know it's a new section and I guess I am a little excited/impatient.

So, I'll explain what I'm doing right now. After getting tired of being stampeded by google's herd of cute animals I decided to step away from SEO for the time being. I have been experimenting with media buys for two weeks so far, and I am on my second deposit with sitescout. But I have yet to set up a profitable campaign.

After reading all of those posts about how media buys is where all of the money is at, I had this fantasy in my head that I just had to deposit the funds, setup a half-assed campaign and I could start shopping for sports cars on ebay. Well, the reality check is that MB is just as frustrating as anything else in internet marketing. I always think it is funny when I explain to someone that I work in internet marketing, they think my work day consists of me sitting by the pool drinking mojitos.

Anyways, I didn't intend on the thread being a journey or autobiography so here are some mistakes (lessons) I've learned so far, that may help other newbies.

• Stay away from super large websites, at least in the beginning. Websites like Deviantart, Oprah.com and ehow, are tempting with good prices and millions of impressions but the audience will always be broad. That's why most of the ads on those websites are brand awareness like Progressive insurance or Car manufacturers.
• Unless you are doing Retargeting never use Run-of-Network on sitescount, even if you are doing contextual and demographic filtering. I setup a campaign, went to get a sandwich and came back with close to $50 spent and almost no clicks.
• Always use a whitelist when picking individual sites on sitescout. Some of the websites bundle their traffic with other sites that may be in different niches. I picked a site related to food and ended up getting impressions on wikia pages about video games, and a website about cats was giving me deviantart traffic.
• Always check the demographic of the site with G adplanner, quantcast, and alexa. I picked a site that was about mens health and I assumed the audience was male. After getting a horrible CTR and checked the site and the audience was predominately female.
• Always split test an attractive banner and text banner. I've seen a few posts about ugly banners getting more clicks, but that's not always the case. There's probably a correlation between the type of audience and the types banners they click.
• Right now I am trying to target sites that are mostly adults, its summer and most kids are home from school browsing the internets. They may click on your banners but they probably wont buy anything.

Well that's all I can think of at the moment, but I have a couple of questions. So far I have been testing CPA and Clickbank, but I have had zero luck with clickbank products. I am using nicely targeted sites, the campaigns are getting 0.3-1.5% CTR but no conversions. I am not using my own landing pages because I figured I would find a product that converts then split test it with landing pages. But I am collecting the clicks for retargeting in sitescout. Should I give up on clickbank products?

So far the hardest part is finding a product that converts. Do I really need to have my own product? I just got out of eCommerce and was hoping I could get along with affiliate marketing.

Thanks!
Anthony

what CPA network are you with?
Im sure if you joined a high quality network you could find something that converts
maybe try some trial signups if you're having trouble getting conversions, or build your own engaging lp,
I know that sounds quite generic but it works for me,

i also think this part of the forum is too quiet

For CPA I am using peerfly right now. I also have accounts with a few other networks. So far I tried email submits and As-Seen-On-TV offers. I also tried several clickbank products.

With the first deposit I was just experimenting with different traffic and offers and learning the platform.

The last few days I have been doing a lot of research with WRW to see what types of products run the longest. There's very few media buy campaigns that run longer than 30 days other than major companies doing brand awareness. From those stats I'm starting to think media buying is not as big of a cash cow as a lot of people are saying. Either that or very few people are successful with it.

it could be because the targeted audience gets tired of seeing the same ad over and over again, so the CTR and ROI start to drop after 30 days or so

kivd1 said:

it could be because the targeted audience gets tired of seeing the same ad over and over again, so the CTR and ROI start to drop after 30 days or so

Click to expand...

It's just weird because some adwords campaigns will run on the site for a couple hundred days, just not many media buys. But it could have something to do with the way WRW reports the different platforms.

I found an attractive affiliate program today with a large company so I'm going to give that a go next.