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I like to test every possible paid traffic source. It doesn’t matter if people say they work or not, I like to try it myself and get my own results. Like in the 13 PPC challenge, I am always testing new sources. This has led me to find some really good and cheap clicks. I have also lost a lot of money, but I think you have to commit yourself to losing money to be successful, especially in internet marketing. Even if a test is a total failure, the data and experience gained has some value.
That being said, a couple weeks ago I tested a new source for me, Casale Media. This is one of the larger media networks, that a lot of the high traffic sites are publishers on. If you aren’t familiar with media buying, it’s basically a banner campaign that you can run on a CPC basis rather than CPM (usually). Essentially its content advertising. I have had hit and miss results with buying media. This type of advertising is LOT different than PPC, but I had a rock solid converting campaign that I wanted to try pushing some serious traffic to.
Setup
There is a lot of front end setup with this type of campaign. First, you don’t just sign up self serve style like PPC. You have to contact them, get an account manager and an ad setup person. Then you have to supply them with at least 4 different sized creatives, and they prefer to have 3-4 sets of each of these. So if you aren’t good with graphics, you have the expense of having someone make 16 creatives for you. You also “negotiate” a CPC rate that you will pay with your account manager. Then before they will even start uploading your campaign you have to send in a $5,000 minimum deposit. Once they receive your $5k, it usually takes about another week to get your campaign uploaded and running. During this time you have to place pixels on your primary, and final landing pages for tracking.
Results
This test had disappointing results. As I said, the landing page/offer I sent this traffic to converted very well on PPC, but I actually had 0 conversions on Casale. Of course I expected and planned for a lower conversion rate than PPC, but it was clear this wasn’t going to work on my campaign. I only needed to let the test run a 1 day to get a statistically valid sample size. The troubling part to me was that people were abandoning the initial landing page, before even clicking through to the offer page.
This type of adverting isn’t for the faint of heart. The setup time is long, you have a lot less control than PPC (you can’t even pause or resume your campaign, your account rep has to), the deposits can be large, and the traffic can come fast and furious. I have had success and failures with media buys, so I thinks its definitely worth continued testing. Obviously, your results will vary with any network, but for this particular test it didn’t work out for me.
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I have heard some do VERY well with media buys but I personally haven’t grown the Cojones to try one myself yet. Maybe one day in the near future.
Interesting test, thanks for sharing. It’s a pity that they don’t have some Adwords features: placement performance report and site exclusion. I guess with these tools you could get some nice volume and conversions there.
But what is more interesting is that you got 0 conversions. I understand that you didn’t spend the whole 5k but zero conversions? If your campaign is doing ok on content network then something is wrong with their traffic. Or maybe your banners appeared only on one big website and that website’s traffic just wasn’t converting. Do you know where your banners appear or do you have to shoot blindly there?
I am awaiting a final report which should shed some more light on what happened. It was pretty clear pulling the plug was the right thing to do though, I don’t think it would have gone from 0%, to the 15%-20% I normally see.
media buys are really tough… but when you hit the right one it can be a gold mine!
That’s for sure, there seems to be no middle ground though. Either a home run or complete failure.
Holy crap dude, you lost $5,000 in one day???
He doesn’t lost the money, he bought data on what works and what doesn’t
No, I stopped the campaign before losing too much. You can get a refund on the balance of your deposit.
I’m really surprised the will let you back out like that and get your money back! Especially if you could negotiate your cost per click. Seems like they would not want to bother with the little affiliates would they? Or are the affiliates like you their target market?
With all the setup involved I don’t think they like smaller advertisers as you say. But I made it clear going in that I would watch the test closely and if it wasn’t working I would kill it. On the other hand if it did work I budgeted $50k/mo for them, so I think they considered that worthwhile.
Would you recommend any other similar types of networks besides Casale?
[…] been following closely as some fellow affiliates explore some less mainstream traffic sources, mainly media buys. (Those blogs are […]