I wanted to incorporate a company review section of the blog. If you notice, I’ve sort of revamped the blog to only include categories of topics I’m most interested in writing about. With all of the traveling, trade shows and publisher managing, I’ve been able to get some really good information to pass along to publishers. For starters, I want to give the Adbuyer Advertising Agency Network a review so that you can possibly start testing out this traffic source. Reviews for AdBuyer are scarce but if you would like another one to go along with this one, check out the Adbuyer Review over at Emonetized from Affiliate Marketer Tim Schroeder.

What Adbuyer Is – Adbuyer is essentially a platform that will allow you to create campaigns across some of the larger major ad exchanges. Integrated with the Right Media API, Adbuyer also has access to DoubleClick and OpenX. The advantage is that they offer one single dashboard to manage spend across your entire media.

A Word On Audience Score – This is the important part to pay attention to. Adbuyer ranks each impression with an Audience Score between 0-100. This is to help automatically determine your audience. They say that Audience Score eliminates the need to test AND compare different targeting options. I dont believe there is any SURE way to eliminate the need to test but being able to compare different targeting options is a plus. The largest categories currently now for available audience scores are your typical large niches such as Careers, Education, Dating, Health & Beauty, Shopping and Software. The 3 advantages of using the audience score:

1. Cheap – Helps you reduce your upfront learning costs
2. Fast – You only bid on impressions that are likely to target your consumers
3. Easy – Automatically test 4 key variables:

• Behavior Targeting & Data Buys
• Contextual Categories
• Demographic Targeting
• Site Targeting

Step 1 – Getting Adbuyer Setup – They make this simple:

1. Target Audience – You tell them who your target audience is. They use this information to help find your targets via their accessible inventory across ad exchanges. If you have multiple targets, you will be able to setup more campaigns along the way. You will also provide geographics and language targeting here. Any information you provide them regarding who you want to target will allow them to help you generate more recommendations.
2. Campaign Settings – Whatever information you give them, they will provide their recommendations here. You can also target specific ad networks and channels if you want. You can choose demographics here as well but IMPORTANT TIP – Adbuyer says that only 10% of sites on the exchanges have demographic data so this could limit your inventory and/or raise your prices.
3. Campaign Budget – Simple. Tell them what your daily budget is. Tell them the CPM or CPC price you can pay, when your campaign will start and end and your frequency cap.
4. Add Creatives – Adbuyer only allows creatives of a max size 40kB file size. They accept .png, .jpg, .swf, and .gif files. The supported sizes are 120×600, 160×600, 300×250, 468×60, and 728×90.

Once these are done, your campaigns start going live.

If you are new to media buying or have never used an ad exchange before (mainly Adbuyer in this instance), here are some tips before going live.

1. – Use multiple creatives in your testing phase. You have to. If you are going to be lazy or cheap at the very least use your creatives in each size format in testing. I suggest 3-4 creatives per size in testing but that is up to you.

2. – Pixel tracking – Some affiliates will agree, some will disagree. It’s up to you but I would suggest using the Adbuyer tracking pixel so that Adbuyer can help optimize your campaigns. If you dont use their pixel, they wont be much help.

3. – Patience – If you have to be patient in this game when it comes to media buying. Countless times I’ve seen publishers give up on campaigns just in time to see the next marketer do nearly the exact same thing, wait it out by optimizing and continuing on profitably while the other marketer just scratches his head. You have to have a BUDGET. Dont go in there thinking small time or you are just going to get mopped. Use your head, work with their reps and optimize your campaigns.

I can tell you that buying media off Right Media and DoubleClick can be an absolute pain in the ass for some. Not all, but for starting marketers, the intimidation of those two can scare you away from a traffic opportunity. Adbuyer makes it simpler for you to access that inventory.

New Marketers – Adbuyer makes getting started the easiest by allowing you to create your templates for advertising. For more information on how to get started without any creatives visit here.