Media Buying. What does it mean and how is it done?

In a nutshell, Media Buying is the strategic process of wholesale buying of digital advertising spaces through negotiations and arrangements aimed at finding the most efficient placements.

And specifically in the field of performance marketing, media buying is the process of identifying and buying the cheapest and most converting advertising placements for a given product.

In programmatic advertising, media buying is done through some platforms called DSPs (or Demand Side Platforms) which are connected via API to the placements. The software that powers the DSPs is what actually runs the ads (banners, videos, etc.) and does its magic behind the scenes. Neat!

The result is usually web traffic that goes to your site (or your app).

In every DSP the anatomy of a campaign consists of:

• Some creativity (banners, videos, etc.)
• A set of landing pages and tracking links that lead to them.
• A set of targeting rules (for example: males, 25 to 34 years old, who probably drive a car every day).
• A set of optimization rules (i.e. rules that ensure your money is spent in an efficient way).

Media buying on a given DSP becomes successful (i.e. ROI positive) when the optimization rules you have defined work in the desired way. An expert media buyer knows which DSP to use and how to explore and define a set of efficient rules. So media buying heavily relies on algorithms while also on the skills of the media buyer (or media buying team). Both “work together” to achieve results.

Want some examples of DSPs? Google DV360 , Brightroll, Adform, Amazon A9 (the Amazon adverting platform).

But hold up….Google Adwords and Facebook Ads Manager are DSPs??

YES, as every platform that allows you to buy web traffic might be defined as as a DSP. Unlike the above DSPs, Facebook and Google work on very specific placements and they are intended to be used somehow manually. Obviously Google’s and Facebook’s placements are the most important on the web, and their platforms offer highly robust algorithms to optimize the media buying process.

What about DSPs for performance marketing? Traditionally, performance or affiliate marketing is run mostly manually and on DSPs that sell cheap traffic. Mapendo is a platform for running performance marketing advertising in a more algorithmic way, radically improving the results.

In the next article we’ll go through some examples of DSPs for performance and the way that they’re used. So hold on to your bootstraps as we wade further into this topic in the coming weeks.

Mapendo is a tech platform for app user acquisition. We deliver huge volumes of CPA & CPI conversions to the best mobile apps available with A.I.

If you are looking to facilitate and automate your user acquisition process, all while getting trusted fraud protection, visit our site or get in touch with us!

• Website: https://mapendo.co/
• Email: info@mapendo.me