•Failure to Focus on one traffic source at a time – Decide on a traffic source (Ad Network, Social Media, Portal, whatever) and don’t go wandering off into another source of distribution until you’ve mastered the first. The Achilles heel in this industry, the death spiral really, is lack of focus. With the quickness with which online media is evolving or changing, there simply isn’t enough hours in the day for small to medium sized media buyers to master everything. Less accomplished media buyers are drawn to the bright lights of social media, mobile, re-targeting networks without the patience to start by mastering just one. Simply pick one source of traffic (and boy there are lots), and don’t leave that channel until you’ve mastered it. Now obviously, its important not to pick a dead end source of traffic, but with so many great places to start, I’m sure you’ll pick a good one (hint: try Facebook)
•Failure to change or rotate ad creative – First off, know that ad creative means everything from what generates the click (banner or text creative) to what generates the sale (landing pages). All online advertising creative experiences user fatigue over time. That’s just the nature of the beast. The biggest monsters in online media buying are utilizing Elanced teams of creative experts to pump out dozens (hundreds) of new ad creative per week. They utilize sophisticated (yet easy to setup) ad servers like Zedo to optimize creative by CTR, and are constantly testing and tweaking landing pages. The amateur media buyer thinks you can put up a single creative, and ride that for years. Failure to be constantly tweaking is a major sin.
•Overthinking creative or landing pages – Look, everyone knows its harder and harder to engage users (albeit I would argue its getting easier and easier the way technology is playing out). Click Through rates and user engagement continue to drop. Don’t over think your creative. At the risk of pissing off all the creative guys out there, ugly works. You’ve got to be thinking about how to differentiate your ads constantly as to avoid the dreaded "banner blindness". Keep the messaging (on the creative and/or landing pages) simple and direct, and avoid trying to say too much with the real estate you’ve been given.
•Using Long Tail Sites and Ad Networks – We all know at this point there are 100’s (OK, 1000’s) of places for the media buyer to spend their dollars. The stunning and bitter reality is that 95% of these places will lose you money. You’ll lose because 1. you pay too much 2. Your creative sucks and 3. you are prone to click and impression fraud. With so many variables to look out for, one you want to eliminate quickly is the click/impression fraud. Seasoned media buyers do this by avoiding "long tail" publishers and Ad Networks. In other words, stick to sites where you know both where you are going to be placed, and ones that are big enough that you can avoid a lot of fraud. Click fraud continues to run rampant in the industry and by either working with the bigger players or choosing to work with open networks (Quiqo as an example), you can eliminate this variable.
•Unable to get over the learning curve – This really relates to some degree to my first Sin. Many media buyers and advertisers have grand plans to scale their business but become easily frustrated when everything doesn’t work right away. Its exceedingly rare that you’ve got everything figured out right away (unless you were doing Acai/Colon cleanse last year). Becoming an accomplished media buyer takes massive amounts of patience, and the ability to suffer through losses and a steep learning curve. It takes patience and time to optimize successful online campaigns, from finding the best creative and placements to optimizing landing pages, user experiences and offers. Short lived media buyers and unsuccessful advertisers often give up before they have found their secret formula.
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