We recommend you review the following tips to make sure you get the most out of your display campaigns.

LEARNING STRATEGIES WITH THE AD EXCHANGES

Everyone wants to be profitable on their first dollar spent. But it's important to understand that the ad exchanges consist of 5,000+ big sites and tens of thousands of smaller sites. Predicting performance on these sites accurately requires a lot of data, which can be expensive. So you need to select a learning strategy that meets your ROI &/or budget constraints. There are two strategies that we recommend:

1) Plan on spending at least $5000 in learning spend to measure performance across a fair number of the sites we reach. We'll be able to evaluate performance on each site, remove the sites that aren't working and run a more optimized campaign. You may not meet your target metrics on the first $5000 in testing spend, but you're hoping to identify good placements that meet your targets. If you find a sufficient number of placements that work at market rates, we can "flip it" to CPA, so you only pay on conversions.

2) Use an Audience Profile to measure the users that are converting on your other campaigns (search and/or display). It takes approx 3000 conversions to identify your top performing segments - but it's free. TargusInfo is a leading data provider who segments the US population into 172 segments that represent the US population. Once your profile is built, you can target your ads to individual segments that are known to be the most likely customers to convert. This costs a lot less money than step #1, but can take longer to get scale.

INCLUDE MULTIPLE CREATIVE

We recommend that a campaign have more than one creative (typically of different sizes).  If you have additional creative available, we suggest you add it to the campaign.  You can easily add additional creative by clicking on Edit Campaigns from the AdBuyer dashboard.  Note also that the highest quality sites (e.g. Yahoo) have stricter standards regarding creative. Please review their creative guidelines to ensure that your creative will be approved.

PLACE A PIXEL

We encourage all of our advertisers to place a tracking pixel so that AdBuyer.com can better optimize the campaign.  Without a pixel, our system has limited insight into what is driving your campaign performance.  You can access a pixel by clicking on the "Conversion Tracking" link on the dashboard.

UNDERSTAND THE ADVANTAGES OF DYNAMIC CPM PRICING AS YOU DETERMINE YOUR BID

A dynamic CPM is the maximum average price you are willing to pay, but the price you pay may be lower.  We will bid between $0.01 and twice your maximum bid for inventory, paying more for the inventory that works well for your campaign. You will receive the benefit of a lower price if you bid higher than the auction-clearing price, so you will often pay less than your maximum bid.  If you are hoping to pay $1.00 CPM, we would suggest a dCPM of $1.75 - $2.00 to ensure you reach the highest-quality audience.

THINK CAREFULLY BEFORE INCLUDING DEMO TARGETING

Demographic targeting is appealing, but it is only available on 10% of all site in the Exchange and requires a very significant premium because it is popular.  We recommend either adding at least $1.00 to your CPM pricing to ensure you get delivery. We also recommend using AdBuyer's Audience Finder to find your target audience more efficiently.

LEVERAGE AUDIENCE SCORES

AdBuyer.com anonymously pools results across our marketers to determine which sites & placements work best. We use metrics that are important to online marketers including click-through rate, conversion rate and total sales. Each placement receives an Audience Score between 0-100; higher scores are better. We allow you to specify the minimum threshold for each of your campaigns, eliminating the waste of spending ad dollars on sites that been ineffective for marketers like you.

Audience Scores offer one-step targeting, eliminating the need for individually targeting sites, demographics, contextual targets or behavioral segments. We recommend that clients start by targeting a minimum Audience Score of 60. That means you will target only the best performing 40% of placements that we’ve measured for advertisers like you. This will provide a good combination of volume and high-quality sites. 

Audience Scores are available for Direct Response Advertisers as well as specific advertiser categories: B-to-B, Careers, Dating, Education, Giveaways, Health & Beauty, Shopping, Software, and Vice.  We will be adding more categories in the near future.

BE PATIENT

It can take some time (and money) to find the ideal audience. Make sure you allocate enough budget to learn what works and what doesn't. The good news is that our tools will steer you towards the pockets of best performing inventory and quickly determine where you can find the best ROI.

ASK FOR HELP

The account management team at AdBuyer.com is here to help you. If you have any questions, or need help managing your campaigns, send us an email at support@AdBuyer.com.