GoFuckYourself.com - Adult Webmaster Forum - Top 5 Areas of Focus When Setting Up Your Ad Campaigns

Outline Your Campaign

Start by outlining the Campaign details on paper or in Excel. Jot down what you want to achieve and details around who you are marketing to. Summarize the details of what niches and the volume of traffic you will need to buy to achieve your campaign goals.

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Select good creative and have several options that are matched to the Campaign requirements and the content and style of the site and matching the niches you plan to buy. We will start the campaign with many creative options and remove the ads that are not performing after we have collected a few days of data.

Creating a Plan

Plan out a few options of how to achieve your goal, plan the cost of each option and which is the best value. When you have an ad buy planned out review each site you plan on buying or if buying a RON campaign take some time to create a blacklist that filters out traffic that won’t be appropriate for your campaign.

Put your overall goals down in Microsoft Excel or some type of spread sheet that works to organize everything. A spreadsheet can help you with calculations and formulas that will help you calculate CPMs, CTRs, CPAs, convert weekly impressions to daily, and find averages. Record details that made you purchase that site or position such as the ranking details from Alexa, Google, the trended daily impressions, unique impressions, and any click data available.

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Then focus on your individual campaign goals. It’s good to prioritize these as well, this will help you pick your niche targeting and geo-target. Depending on the level of tracking detail you need or have available to you, you may need to set up multiple campaigns with different niche targeting options, geo targeting options and in some cases delivery options such as the ability to select WiFi or even individual mobile carriers, etc.

You will need to organize campaign data as well as creative data. For smaller campaigns you can add a sheet to an Excel spreadsheet for the campaign details, then add additional sheets for each site you are running on to keep track of creative details such as file names, link codes etc.

Campaign Setup

Setting up a campaign and optimizing it for success can be an easy task or it can be a chore depending on the attention the to detail. The more work done up front to make sure the campaign can be tracked effectively.

Create easy to read tags and urls following a naming convention you can stick with, the easier it is to review and make sense of the data during its execution or afterwards to find out what worked and what didn’t.

Today’s Media Buyers have a lot of tools available to them and it can be overwhelming. The most important tool you have available is the campaign dashboard provided by the Publisher or Ad Network you are buying traffic from. Here you can see how many impressions and clicks your campaign is earning.

You need to be able to match data from the websites or ad network you bought for your campaign with your own web stats or affiliate program dashboard data.

Campaign Execution

Now that everything is all set its time to throw the dice and make some money. Start your campaign and because you have done your homework you have a good idea of how your campaign will perform. There are always unknowns that effect performance. As you master Media Buying the unknowns become less and less just as a skilled athlete can repeat the perfect pass or swing over and over again.

With the campaign running you need to just be patient and wait for some usable data to come in. Its best to wait at least 48 to 72 hours minimum, this gives you plenty of data to review while accounting for the time it takes for all the affiliate data to be processed and available. Now that you can see how well the campaign did, take this time to figure out what worked and what didn’t. Look at the performance of each banner or pop to see which creative performed and what didn’t.

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Keep the top performing 20% to 40% of the creative running after this first performance check. Its too early in the campaign to rule low performing banners out completely, we just want to get rid of the ones that are not converting at all.

We also need to see what sites are working and which are not. If you have purchased a spot on a specific website and it is not converting, you need to tweak things a bit to improve conversions. Anything not converting at all after a few days should be set up with another affiliate program. If you bought a Run of Network campaign, you can use the Blacklist to block sites that have not converted for you at all.

We are ready to let it ride again. Give the campaign another 24 to 48 hours and have a look at the details again. Optimize the best you can and then repeat this process until you have maxed out your performance or until the campaign is over.

Post Buy Analysis
This process is sometimes called an Actualized Recap. With the campaign over we need to put the details into our spreadsheet and compare what we expected to achieve from what actually achieved.

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Just like during setup, attention to detail with your analysis will help you to prosper in the future, you won’t be repeating mistakes over and over again. Write and save all your findings, apply what you have observed to each future campaign you do. The most important part of this process is to learn and not repeat mistakes.

Thanks for reading and Keep it Juicy!

Rob
Chief Research Officer
JuicyAds.com
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2014 & 2011 GFY People's Choice "Best Ad Network"