Commentary

WebU: Your Ads, Your Buys

Stewardship steers media buying

Stewardship is the only way to make a good media buy great. Sure, negotiating low CPMs and securing great placements are key to online success. However, in many ways, they are purely theoretical. Buy-maintenance ties the negotiated proposal to practical reality. Stewardship holds your suppliers accountable, forcing them to deliver what they promised in the desired time and manner.

The stewardship process begins even before the buy starts. It is not uncommon for available inventory to contract between the time the agency finishes the buy and it's approved by the client. The media buyer needs to make sure that the tenor of the buy does not change even if the inventory does. Replacing a specific placement with run-of-schedule damages the buy. Don't bastardize the mix just to keep the vendor on the plan. It is better to spend less money on a site but get exactly what your client needs. Salespeople will often push back, citing required minimum budget. This is not to disparage - rather they lack a macro perspective of the larger media buy. If the most important placements are no longer available, perhaps that publisher should be taken off the buy. Buyers need to review insertion-order changes with an eye for detail.

Within 24 hours of the campaign launch, all placements should be live. Pull ad-server reports early to make sure that the tags have been properly implemented. Ironically, digital trafficking is very much a handcrafted process. As such, it is prone to human error. It is not uncommon for impression and click tags to be switched by mistake. This means the ad server will count impressions as clicks or vice versa. Prolonged exposure to switched tags will ruin your post-campaign reach-frequency reports. Determine quickly how many clicks have been falsely reported. Keep that number handy since all stewardship reports will need to be done manually. Great stewardship means even-keeled delivery. Constantly monitor for slumps or spikes in impression volume. Last year, my ads on the green section of a major portal were pre-empted by a car manufacturer. Keeping a close eye on the daily reports, I discovered this before the sales team. Their account manager planned to make up the shortfall during the last month of the flight. Piling the impressions into a single month would have ruined the effort. Conversely, a very small site experienced a traffic surge and served my entire campaign in the first week. They were kind enough to serve bonus impressions. Advertisers don't want their impressions bunched up - they have product to sell all month. Work with your sales reps to monitor the ad delivery.

As you optimize, it is important to distinguish between effective and efficient clicks. Some placements earn high CTRs but still the CPC remains too high. The reverse can be true also. Add rich-media metrics and client-side traffic data and the picture becomes even more crowded. Unfortunately, many CPQ brand sites don't actually sell anything, and that clouds the click-to-conversion issue. Decide early on which metric is the priority and optimize toward that end. For a brand-building effort, the CPC may be less important than associating with specific content. Alternately, coupon distribution to stimulate trial may be a secondary, more measurable goal. Understand your goals from the outset and optimize accordingly. The worst thing you can do is chase all of the metrics, because you will end up with mediocre results for each one. Harnessing your data is the key to stewardship. This is the most technically challenging aspect of digital-media buying. Online buyers do not enter the field because we love html, but ultimately our technical abilities set us apart from offline media executives. Become adept at understanding the ad-server technology and, by extension, reporting. Buy-maintenance can be eye straining, but the devil is in the details. Only through exacting stewardship can a good buy become great.

1 comment about "WebU: Your Ads, Your Buys".
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  1. Carlos Cruz from RJ Palmer, April 11, 2011 at 3:08 p.m.

    FIRST!

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