Unleash the Beast – Part 3

This is the last in a 3-part series on analyzing online media quality. It’s a doozy,
but an in-depth look. If you missed the other installments, here’s Part 1 and
here’s Part 2.

The Sophisticated Approach
The sophisticated advertiser distinguishes between media sources and offers
a different CPA for each of them. Let’s take a simple example, an advertiser that
sets CPA at 3 levels:

• $5 for regular traffic
• $2 rate for incentivized traffic
• $6 premium rate for SEM traffic.

In this example, all the traffic sources will run this offer, and the ROI will be

positive for all the sources.

In this way, 5 different levels can bring the advertiser up to $300,000 profit from
160,000 users.
Let’s summarize the profit for each advertiser:

This model works not only in theory. In my experience working with advertisers at
Adsmarket, I’ve seen many empiric example of how advertisers dramatically
increased their revenue and their profit by handling and monitoring the traffic
sources better. This brings me to two major conclusions:

1. There is no “Bad Traffic”. You need to find the right payout for each source
   in order to take advantage of its full capacity and potential, “Unleashing the
   Beast”.
2. By monitoring and optimizing media sources the advertiser can increase
   profit by hundreds of percents, “Controlling the Beast”.

Feel free to contact me at Yuval.bATadsmarket.com to learn more about these tools
and about traffic source optimization in general.

Unleash the Beast – Analyzing Media Quality

Contributed by Yuval Ben-Harush, Director of Advertiser Relations

This post is divided into three parts. 

Very often I use the word “Beast” to describe the World Wide Web. It is an

amazing advertising platform that can bring you unbelievable quantities of

customers, from all over the world, at all ages, genders, and socio-economic

levels. Unleashing the beast, meaning using all the traffic sources available,

can bring you, as an advertiser, millions of impressions and hundreds of thousands

of potential clients every day. That’s a fact.

The problem is that this Beast can eat you if you fail to control it. I have seen it

happen that failure to monitor, optimize and control traffic can cause companies

to lose a lot of money.

The Two Q’s Formulas

In order to understand better the beast model, let’s go back to the science of

performance: The two parameters that control the revenue are the two Qs:

Quality and Quantity. From that perspective, “Quantity” is the number of users

(the conversions) and Quality is measured by the users value ($$$$)

Revenue = Quality*Quantity

Profit = Quality*Quantity – Price*Quantity = Quantity*(Quality – Price)

As you understand, in order to maximize revenue and profit we need to maximize

the two Qs. Of course, in order to make a positive profit the following equation

must exist:

Quality > Price

The challenge begins when unleashing the Beast. Working with the large quantities

required from large networks (like Adsmarket) that contain a variety of media

sources, each media source brings a different user value (quality), has a different

capacity (quantity) and asks for a different CPA (price). The unsophisticated

advertiser, the one that does not know how to control the beast, might decide

on a uniform price for all the publishers based on the average quality of users; in

this way he prevents good, high quality publishers from running his offers.

Go to Part 2… and stay tuned by signing up to

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What’s in Your User’s Mind?

This is a follow-up article from Yuval’s first post, The Science of Performance, Explained, posted on October 3rd, 2009.

In my last article, “The Science of Performance, Explained ”, we discussed the most important parameters for publishers in order to make your offers as an online advertiser attractive and to generate high volumes of traffic. One of the parameters was the offer conversion rate. High conversion rates are not only in the interest of the publisher, they need to be in the interest of the advertiser as well. Relevant users need to be converted into action quickly and easily in order to optimize traffic and decrease marketing expenses.

Many books, articles, posts, and eBooks have been written about how to build a good landing page. This is not my intention for this article (but later on I do give you some tips…). I want to discuss with you my way of reviewing, analyzing and building an offer.

The first master rule in building an offer I learned from a very big Israeli affiliate: “Think like a first time visitor in all of your offers”.
You are probably saying now: “This is obvious, tell us something we don’t know”, but unfortunately, most of the advertisers don’t follow this online marketing rule.  I review hundreds of landing pages every month and I can tell you that 90% of them can convert much better with a few small changes.

So, let’s talk about the users:
The user is exposed to a lot of data while he surfs the web. There are many so many options! The number of web pages is almost infinite, he sees dozens of banners with every visit, gets more than a few marketing mails every day and every search he does in Google shows hundreds of millions of results.
This causes a very severe users symptom – they are impatient! The average user visit on a web page is less than 5 seconds!
Users have their trigger fingers on the mouse over the “back” button before they see the content of the page, and are moving forward to the next page (BTW, many statistics systems don’t even count fast-bouncing users, so don’t count on them to see the stats of your landing pages).
The user asks himself 2 questions when he visits your site (in this order):

1. What’s in it for me? – Why should I stay in this website? What can I find here? What’s my incentive?
2. What do I need to do? – in order to get the incentive from the first question.

As you probably understand by now, you have less than 5 seconds of attention span to explain to the user why should he stay in your website. That’s mean that you need to explain your offer, your product, your service and what makes you different in 3-5 words or a clear image. “Free iPhone”, “Best Pizza in Manhattan”, “Low-cost Flights in Europe”, “Win a Wii”, “1 Day Loan”, “IQ test”, “Online Games”, image of a PSP, screen shots from MMORPG etc. Reading is working too hard, so if you are not doing SEO, content is your enemy. Keep it simple, keep it clear and keep it short.

One of the first sales tips I got from my father was “If you want to sale jewelry to a woman show her 3 options to choose from. If you’ll show her 20 options she won’t be able to decide and she will leave without buying”. Too many options is too much work, so:

1. Keep the opportunities for thinking limited
2. Remove navigations bars
3. Minimize the number of fields the user needs to fill
4. Lead the user’s eye to the important places in the page
5. Keep the important buttons (“Submit”, “Check out”, “Order Now”…) above the fold and use a clear call to action.
6. Make sure your banners and landing pages match. If a user liked the banner and the offer in it and decided to click on it, he should get the same offering and the same look and feel in the landing page.
7. And again, keep it simple, keep it clear and keep it short.

One last point, why build one landing page when you can build 3? One of the advantages of advertising online is the simplicity of testing and optimizing different creatives to see which performs better and to improve their conversion; it is cheap, easy, and should be a mandatory step in every new offer launching. My dear friend Dov Yarkoni at Xtend wrote a good post about landing page optimization on the Xtend Blog.

If you have any questions, if you want to consult me about defining a flow, designing a landing page or banners, testing and optimizing, don’t hesitate to contact me at Adsmarket! We have the experience needed, we promoted thousands of creatives and landing pages, we know what performs well and what doesn’t, we know the publishers abilities, we have a team of very talented designers and most important we are here for you, to help and consult.

The Science of Performance, Explained

Yuval Ben-Harush here, Advertiser Relations at your service! Many advertisers ask for our consultancy – “How can we make our offers more attractive and how can we bring more users to our offers?” The first question I ask them is: Who are your customers? The users? – Wrong! Your customers are the publishers! If you will keep in mind that your offers need to be attractive to the publishers, and take the right actions, they can drive unbelievable volumes of users to your offers.

There are two important parameters that you control as a saavy advertiser that influence the attractiveness of your offers to the publishers:

The first one is the most obvious one and the most easy to control: The Payouts (for CPA offers)! Your payouts need to be competitive (compared to other advertisers from the same category for the same countries) and must be profitable for the publishers, meaning, the cost of media will be lower than the total revenue.

Total revenue = CPA * Total number of conversions

Total cost of media = CPC * clicks (or CPM * impressions)

α = the ROI the publisher expects

As you can see in the Total Payout formula above, the second parameter that the publisher takes into consideration is the number of conversions per the traffic he sent. Since the advertiser is usually responsible for the creatives, including landing pages and banners, you have the power to influence the conversion rate for the publisher.

To explain the idea better, let’s take an example:

“Sylvester” is a publisher who wants to run a movie selling campaign in the US. In Adsmarket there are two companies who have such campaigns – Rambo LTD and Rocky INC. Rambo LTD offer $10 CPA per movie sale and Rocky INC offer $5 CPA per movie sale. At first glance, it looks like Rambo LTD offer, $10 payout, is more attractive for Sylvester; however, after testing both of the offers, Sylvester found out that out of 200 users (200 clicks)  sent by him to Rambo LTD there were 2 sales (1% conversion rate). Out of the same amount of users sent to the Rocky INC offer there were 6 sales (3% conversion rate).  The total incomes from Rambo LTD and Rocky INC are $20 and $30 respectively. Surely, Sylvester will prefer Rocky INC offer because, per 200 clicks, the revenue is higher. If the cost of media is for example $12 per 100 clicks (CPC) the conversion rate makes the different from a profitable and non-profitable campaign (see the table below).

In order to compare performances of different campaigns with different amounts of traffic, publishers usually measure the profit per 100 clicks (EPC) or per 1000 impressions (eCPM).

In our example, Rambo LTD’s EPC was $10 and Rocky INC’s EPC was $15.

The EPC and eCPM functions elaborate the conversion rates and the CPAs.  Bottom line, the publisher looks for the following as proof of a worthy campaign:

How can this work to your advantage as an advertiser? By changing and adjusting the Payouts (CPA) and the conversion rates you can influence the publishers EPC and eCPM.  Improving these values makes your offer more attractive  and by that, encourages them to send more users to your offers.

In my next articles we will discuss ways to improve the conversion rate of a landing page and what is the right way to change and optimize the payouts.