TJ7 – Media Buy Mogul’s Banner Ad Secrets Revealed With Max Teitelbaum

Welcome back listener! This is once again Traffic Jam, the show where you learn each week from the very best traffic experts out there on the internet that you could learn how to build and grow a profitable audience for your website. I’m your host James Reynolds and you’re listening in to episode#7.

One quick mention at the top of the show, and this goes out to you if you are a female entrepreneur listening in from Australia, Victoria Gibson, our inaugural first guest here at Traffic Jam, is holding Break Out Success Live on May 11^th on Melbourne. This is a one day event and the description is as follows; full disclosure, I have taken this from Victoria’s website so I make sure I get the details right for it.  #1, you’ll uncover the steps big online players are using right now for more impact success and profit; it includes intimate sessions of mind storming, I love that phrase- and inspiration for female entrepreneurs. Jump start your success online with specific and actionable game changing steps that will turn your approach to your online business on its head for big results. If you are a female entrepreneur and anywhere near Melbourne, Australia, and then get yourself to that event. Victoria is an extremely successful entrepreneur and I know she’ll be sharing her top secrets at this one day live event so for further information, head on over to her website that’s dedicated for this event, and that is breakoutsuccesslive.com.

So what’s coming up on episode#7? Well, when you stick around until the end of the show today, you will learn how to turn your videos into visits in this week’s one minute traffic tip. I’ve got for you all the latest goings on in the world of traffic in the section we called, This Week’s News in Traffic, and finally, playing out the show, as always, the Traffic Jam jam.

But before all of that, coming up next we’ve got this week’s feature interview, Max Teitelbaum, a successful, young entrepreneur who created his first star up at the age of fifteen, and by the age of twenty, had already made millions as an affiliate promoting offers via media buy, which is buying banner advertising to third party offers, off which we would then be paid a commission when a sale was made. Max is now the co-founder and COO of whatrunswhere.com, a company that helps people buy media more effectively by providing data of competitors and verticals within the online advertising space.

If you are advertising online, perhaps from Google, or Facebook, or any of the other networks, or even considering it, on this interview, Max reveals exactly what you need to know about setting up your campaign so that it makes you profit from the start, where you should be placing your ads, the exact elements that make up an effective banner, as well as his sneakiest, and somewhat unexpected tips surrounding effective banner design. So let’s get stuck in to the interview right now.

James: Now today the topic conversation is online media buying and to peel back the layers of this particular traffic channel, I’ve got a successful, young entrepreneur all the way from Toronto, Canada and that’s Max Teitelbaum. How are you doing Max?

Max: Not too bad, happy to be here.

James: Well, it’s awesome to have you on the call, I think you’re going to be sharing some great stuff with us today, but before we dive deep into the topic of online media buying, you have to tell our listeners a little bit about how you got in to this because the word on the street is that you’ve got pretty damn good at media buying even from a pretty early age, practically in your teens. Tell us your back story.

Max: Yeah, it was actually in my teens. I started buying media online; I started running a small affiliate company when I was 15 years old. And between the age of 15 and 19, I bought millions of dollars’ worth of media online for other people’s products and services. So we would buy all that media for them. Through all that, I really learned what works and what does not and how to really make a buy work.

James: So walk us through some of the numbers Max, I know you are buying a lot of media at one stage, tell us about some of the success that you had if you are willing, and able to share some of those numbers.

Max: I don’t like to brag and I am a fairly reserved person but I bought somewhere between $3 – $4 Million of media in pretty much three years and obviously that ramped up towards the end and brought up provocatively other people’s products and services.

James: So tell us exactly what you were doing because as I understand it from our conversations and what I heard of you from elsewhere; you were buying media and then to sell affiliate products. Is that right?

 Max: Exactly! So we would get paid on commission. So example a bank comes to you and says, I have a new credit card and I want people to sign up to my credit card, and I will pay you X dollars everyone that you can sign up. We would actually come out and create ads and media for them to drive those actions of sign-ups for their products. And then we could create more dollar values for those sign ups and what we bought we would be making money.

James: Got it! And then it’s just a simple mathematical equation. Good, we have set the scene on your experience, then we’ll move through to present and exactly what you’re up to right now a little later on, but I’d really like to do with you over the course of the next 20 minutes or so is really sort of peel back the layers of what media buying entails and for you to literally walk us through the process of what a typical media buy would be. Let’s get started from the beginning, what do we need to know before starting out with media buying online?

Max: Sure. There are a lot of things that you need to know before you get started with media buying. But before that, we need to short term what it is, because buying media can mean a whole bunch of things; it can mean placing advertising on websites, it can be an online media buying, buy you know, media buying is when you place an ad on a property; it can be an offline media buying, it be something like buying a TV advert, and I don’t know anything about that, all I know about are only media buys. So before you actually start doing a buy, you of course need to be doing research. Because you cannot be just throwing something onboard and hope it works. You need to be able to fix your head and be able to understand what works where and how you can really use that information to limit your risk and ultimately make more money with what you’re doing. And where that comes to is researching where other competitors are running ads, the demographic of the place that you want to buy, find competitive rates, and then also generally just what’s working, and what’s the trend over at that space. And we’ll talk about later what we’ve created, but those are the high level basics of what you sort of need to know before you start buying.

James: So we’re talking about competitor profiling, we’re talking about understanding the demographics of your target market and those types of things I would imagine. Where would be some of those places where you can go and capture that data and get that deeper understanding into who you should be targeting and where you should be targeting them?

Max: Well, I mean to me the only place you should go is whatrunswhere.com. Well, I am a little biased because that is my current company, and we provide all that information for people and really end up in a granular view help them be buying media more efficiently and limit risk because if you think about it, you can buy media based on what your competitors are doing and take what based on some cases, tens of millions of dollars on testing to figure out what works and use that as a starting point and you’re going to be more successful right off the bat.

James: Absolutely, yeah you’re hedging your risk there aren’t you? If you get that data up front, rather than testing on your own dollar as you go.

Max: Exactly!

James: Cool! We’ve established we need to do a little bit of research to make sure that we understand the what and the where; let’s talk about where we can actually go to get our media. What are some of the different places that we can make that purchase, Max?

Max: absolutely! There are three main places you can go to purchase media; a direct buy, buying through an ad network, and buying through what’s called a DSP or demand-side platform so go through either. A direct buy is a one to one relationship, I would go to your site, and I would say, hey I want to buy an advert here and I will deal with just you to negotiate a buy and put the ad to your site.  An ad network is a collection of websites where you can say I want to buy and they’ll put you across your network of sites, either on specific sites but you don’t have as much control or transparency of the things that are happening but they all of the management for you so you just supply budget and then work with them to optimize your buy. And then finally, a demand-side platform or DSP is a more programmatic way of buying which allows you to bid somewhere to how you would on adwords, or you know, any other platform for media in real time and buy across a very granular  list of  sites  that you can pick yourself. So it’s like doing direct buys but on a larger scale.

James: Got it, cool! I think it would be better to give some examples and also to kind of explain the pros and cons of each one. Direct buys, I imagine, are pretty much self-explanatory; you’re going to a single website, contacting the owner or the administrator and say, I want to buy space on your site. What are the advantages and disadvantages in comparison to perhaps some of the other methods doing direct buying?

Max: Well, the advantages and disadvantages; one is you have to sign a much larger contract- usually, when you do direct buy that’s the disadvantage, but an advantage in some cases and a disadvantage in some cases the inventory’s cheaper, in other cases, you want a premium because you’re going directly to them, the other advantage is if you can pinpoint a way that’s working, you can lock that and create a barrier through your business so you can basically pick something that nobody else can copy if you are able to negotiate with the correct terms.

 James: Got it! OK cool, let’s cover off the next one which is the network or agency buy and tell us about some examples as some networks that you can go perhaps and then move on to the pros and cons.

Max: Sure. There are hundreds of them from any way like CPX interactive to Kasala Media to Fusion. What they do is they have a large number of sites and they scale your campaign for you. If you have a manager that does the buying for you, they’ll do a lot of the work for you and help you be successful. I mean the cons are that you don’t have the options of what is happening on your ads over the network or where they are showing up, and if you don’t have a good network or representative, you can lose quite a lot of money because they don’t work for you. Without that sort of granular control you put your fate in their hands.

James: Got it! Ok, cool. And then the final example you gave is us uh, you have to repeat what the actual wording was, but it was a bidding model right, did you say it was DSP? I probably got those letters the wrong way around.

Max: Yes, DSP. Demand Side Platform.

James: Got it, you need to give a little bit more explanation to that I think.

Max: Yeah sure, these are large platforms that sell other people’s inventory on a large scale- across ten, twenty thousand publishers, and pick people you want advertising or pragmatically, buy across a large audience. The pros there are because you’ve got huge levels of control, and you’ve got huge levels of transparency and you know exactly where your ads are showing up. The cons are it takes a lot of know-how and time to do and again, there is no hand holding; you’re on your own at that point.

James: Yeah. So where would be the best place to start for someone that’s brand new to media buying?

Max: I would think it would be easier at the direct buy model because you could pinpoint sites are working, or on the DSP side model; one of the smaller DSPs that have a very low minimum to start buying on. 

James: Right, got it. Let’s move forward from there. Let’s talk about some of the buying models and get a better understanding of actually how these media buys are priced. What’s the model – is it CPM, CPA, CPC? And I guess perhaps, for our listener out there, we should probably give some explanation to what each of those means.

Max: Sure. Most buys are based on CPM – what that means is cost per a thousand impressions. So if you have a $1 CPM, you pay $1 for every thousand times your brand is shown. And then, some are CPC, which is the cost per click which means you only pay when your ad is clicked on and it goes to your website. And then a few others are still based on CPA, which is the cost per action or acquisition, which is where you pay when somebody does something like sign up for something or fill to specify the action that you want them to do. But the majority of the buys are based on CPM where you take the upfront risk and then you need to make your ads and your model work from the traffic that they are giving you.

James: Yeah, and I guess this is perhaps one of those questions of how long is the piece of string? What are some of the pricing ranges of a media buy, perhaps using some examples that you’ve bought yourself Max?

Max: It can honestly go anywhere depending on the website and depending on the traffic. Obviously, a large, large website with low quality traffic like, let’s say one of the torrent sites you may be able to buy on for a couple of pennies on the CPM. And also depending on the country, if you are on a premium website, or you’re on a very niche vertical website, you can be paying upwards of $10 – $15 CPM, depending on the traffic and where you’re buying. There’s a huge range. It also depends if you’re buying, remnant, unsold inventory, if you’re buying premium inventory. So premium inventory is inventory that they sell to large brands and it’s the first impression, when you come to a website that’s the first thing you see, while remnant inventory is inventory they’re unable to sell later in the trade. So they discount it, like a retailer would discount old clothes.

James: well, I guess here we’re going to have to talk about the topic of testing and actually establishing which is going to be most profitable because as you and I know, it’s not only the cheapest traffic, the most expensive is often the most expensive for a reason, but I’d like to cover that topic with you a little bit later. For now, I think we should just talk about what the order process might entail. How is this stuff ordered? Do you whack it on a credit card; do we do a bank transfer? What’s the process? Because I’m guessing the numbers are pretty big in some cases.

Max: Yeah, it really depends on the model that you buy on. For some, there is no order process. You sign up to a website and you deposit money and take care of the terms of service. For most ad networks and most direct buys, you’re going to sign an IO or what’s called an Insertion Order. What this is is a little contract that says here are the terms of my buy. And what they’ll do is they’ll turn up things like what your CPM is or what you’ll pay for the inventory. Do you have any restrictions on who you need to target? What is what’s called an Out Clause how quickly can you stop the buy if you need to be stopped? What’s your entire budget? How quickly do you need changes to be done? – all that is going to be termed up in what’s called an insertion order. And that’s going to dictate the terms of your buy, that’s where your negotiation go and where you sign it before your buy is about to go out.

James: Got it. And is there anything we need to be aware off there, or are these standard terms and pretty much good to go- sign and get started?

Max: the Out Clause is a thing that I would be wary about. An Out Clause, as I said, means how quickly you can get your buy paused. If you have 24 hour Out Clause, when you say pause my buy, somebody has up to 24 hours to stop it. Let’s say that you have a 72 or even 96- hour Out Clause, if you’re spending $5000 a day, and you say stop my buy, they can keep your buy going for three to four days, as per your Out Clause, with no penalties. So they can cost you between $15 -$20,000. So having an Out Clause of 24 – 48 hours is really important.

James: So would you make that a condition of sale Max, if you were to come across an agency who would say 4 days, you would say, wait, hold on a second here, we need to get this down to 24 hours?

Max: Yeah, one, maybe two, if I’m being generous.

James: Got it. We sure got it covered in a short and simple answer. We talked about research; we understand where we can get the media, where it can be placed, what the buy model is, and how to order. I guess the next step is we need to create some ads. What components make up an effective banner ad?

Max: It really depends on the style. As you are creating, there is no one set of components but there’s three things that people put in to their ads. One of them is the headline- it’s the thing that catches your eye. “Free Food” – you know, something that gives the general idea of what you do but is very eye catching. And then you’re going to have, depending if you have more text, a sub headline; more text explaining what you do; in the free food model, you can say, buy one, get one free, or something like that. You may, or may not have an image in your ad. And then finally, you will have the call to action or CTA, which would do something like- which drives to complete an action. So you can use something like try us today, click here – something like that.

James: Got it. And which ones have the greatest impact over the effectiveness of the ad?

Max: Obviously, the largest elements of the ad are going to be the most impactful first. So if you have an image, your image, your headline, the background color of your ad. When you create ads, you just test through everything. You can never be happy with everything. You have to have a concept. You test what you do, you start testing with the biggest elements, and you sort of move down from there.

James: so I guess that’s going to start off with the big idea, move to the headline, perhaps move to the image, seek that call to action, and perhaps your sub headline last, you know, in descending order, right?

Max: and then there are all sorts of other things that you can test: border around the outside of your ad, different border colors and all that kind of stuff.

James: Yeah, button color and all that kinds of stuff right? Cool! So Max, you obviously see a lot of banner ads, you’ve probably created a lot in your time as well. I’m sure, some effective, probably some complete flops. What design principles are common to the most successful ads?

Max: Well, the first thing is research. There is no one successful ad. If you can research what other people are doing and what other people have success with, you can spot commonalities. Sometimes, because of these trends, in all the ads we use the same style – some are creative, some have cartoons. Are they using a lot of text? You start to spot the similarities in the ads. Are they all using a specific call to action? Are they using a specific style better? Incorporate those elements back within your own ads. When I was starting – you really have to keep it simple, because you don’t want to test a different number of messages and ideas at the very beginning, so overcomplicating things, leaving few variables to test, and making it more complicated once you figure out what works is really important. And then, also, if you can make your ad match or blend in to the publisher’s website, or the website you are advertising on, that makes it really effective. If you can convince a user that it’s not an ad, it’s part of their website, people are really, really brainwashed to be immune to ads so what’s the point of making your ad jump out and defy it more.

James: Yeah, I think it’s sort of going back to the old days of direct mail and pay for insertions and people will do those advertorials that blend in to the copy that was around, I’m sure the principle that you’re speaking about is the same for media buying as well.

Max: Exactly, because if you think about those days, when you get paper mail, you just usually throw it all out. You’re like, oh, this is an ad, and I don’t want it. Now, online, you can’t throw it out, but you can ignore it. We have to figure out how to beat what’s called banner blindness.

James: Got it. Ok, cool. Alright, I’d like you to reveal some sneaky tips as well, Max. Have you got some really cool top tips that you’d probably keep to yourself and normally share, give our listeners something really good to take away today.

Max: Sure, I mean, as I said, the first thing is to make your ads blend in to the website so if you do direct buyer site or website buy where you can tell what the website looks like, if you can make it look like it’s part of the website and blend in. if you can do that, it can cause your site to be more successful. Something that we always do, we always make ugly ads, and we test those against our normal ads. Ugly works, and it’s surprising but it works because it doesn’t look like an ad. People don’t believe me but back when I was buying, I created a lot of my ads in paint. And they were ugly as anything, but they worked because they don’t look like ads. And then there are other things that you can do to sort of try and trick the user in to clicking on to your ads, because it’s not tricking them but getting them engaged with what you’re doing and then you bring them to your offer page to sell stuff in there. Even some things such as a scroll bars and even play buttons on those ads can make them think it’s a video or there’s more here, and then, as I said, banner blindness- so a successful ad, you will see eventually that the click through rate and the effectiveness of the ad will start to drop because people see that and they start to tune it out. So you need ways to capture and if you don’t want to change your creation completely, you can do things simply like changing border colors, or solely changing a couple of elements and to somebody it’ll seem a new ad and they’ll start taking notice again.

James: Got it, cool. If you think about it- this ugly works better idea, just tell us one of your most ugly, repulsive, horrible looking ads Max that was most successful for you. What did it look like?

Max: One of our best ads is simply we opened up paint, we took a square image, put it in the middle of a 300×250 ad unit, and opened up the word tool in paint and typed our headline and our call to action and put that up. And eventually put a red border around it, but you know that really ugly ad that took us literally a minute to make in paint, and did fantastically.

James: Yeah, and you can see that almost everywhere. I mean if you pay some attention for instance to Facebook advertising, you’ll see that the ads that seem to be sticking around the longest and getting the most impressions are some of the most disgusting looking ads, just with a nasty red border around it.

Max: Yeah, cause it catches your attention.

James: Absolutely! Cool! I think we understand the importance of testing, we mentioned that earlier in relation to testing different elements – headline, call to action, the sub headline, image – that type of thing, and what else should we be testing in our campaigns Max?

Max: You always have to test your ad placements. The ad and the placement are the two most important things. So once you’ve done your research, you have to test a whole bunch of different places to find the ones that work. And I compare it like if you like a certain flavor of jellybean and you have a big jar of jellybeans, you have to take a handful and you have to pick out the ones that you like. It’s the same type of thing. You have to test elements of your landing page – where you send somebody after they click on your ad, and then it’s always about testing it and improving your ad, testing new copies and ideas.

James: Cool! I think this is probably an appropriate time to talk about your service, What Runs Where because service or piece of software actually allows you to do a lot of this- research and campaign monitoring in a semi-automated fashion. Tell us a little bit about that product.

Max: Sure. What we do with online advertising is collecting intelligence on display on mobile media. So we go around and collect information from the web. So we are able to show you where your competitors, or anybody who’s advertising, what exact sites they are buying to, what networks are buying through to be successful, what banners they are using, what their most successful banners are, and a whole bunch of other statistics they have, or the demographics of the people going there. We help you do all that research in a very automated fashion where you can just go in and let’s say you’re Ford and you’re looking at Nissan, we’ll show you a 360 view of Nissan’s whole campaign. So as I talked about earlier, you can see what ads they’re buying, or hear what ad spaces they are buying on, and I might try buying on the same places.

James: Got it. So what type of scenarios can the software be used in?

Max: There are a ton of them; the first one is when you are buying, you do all the research there and you use it to sort of limit or estimate your campaign to work successfully. You can also use it if you’re pitching a client; show the client what their competitors are doing online. Because some people, they are buying, but they do not know where they are buying because they are buying to that black box network; and then it can be used for prospecting as well, new places to buy, and new client.

James: I’m just imagining about the possibilities for perhaps consultants out there to use it as a pitching tool to go and compare what steps the prospect is doing in comparison to their competitors, I imagine, it that’s a very powerful use; and of course monitoring your own campaigns and getting them started, it takes out so much of the risk I can imagine, whereas before you’d have to test those and probably waste a whole bunch of dollars in the process. You can actually alleviate some of that by just using this tool to see what’s working already.

Max: Exactly, exactly! And you mentioned consultants. If you can go and pick your clients and say, here’s what your competitors are buying, this is what we can do for you to make you more efficient. You’ll probably win that client over another agent who does not have that information.

James: Yeah, absolutely. So, how does this software work Max? Are you able to reveal what goes on underneath the lid?

Max: The way that I would describe it, it’s like the web is a highway and we are driving down the highway and there are billboards on the side of the highway, and we simply write down that and then we identify who’s selling that and where on the highway it’s showing up. So we create a database out of that then create a ton of data and make something useful out of it,  ways of how we can track it and see how well these are doing.

James: Fantastic! It’s all clever stuff. I will be diving deep in to it and checking out the exact capabilities of what runs where. Max, I think we’ve pretty much gotten towards the end of the interview. Is there any place that I should direct our listeners to if they want to come find out more about you and what you get up to?

Max: Correct! Whatrunswhere.com or anybody can always email me at max@whatrunswhere.com I’m always happy to talk.

James: Fantastic! Well, I’ll make sure that those two references are placed beneath this interview, wherever it appears. It will surely go on TrafficJamCast.com and we may be posting it elsewhere. So wherever you find it, you should find links beneath. Max, thanks for your time today, you’ve shared fantastic stuff and I just want to thank you for coming on the show and sharing your time.

Max: My pleasure!

This week’s news in traffic: Well our news from the past seven days comes from the two big players, Facebook and Google. Let’s first of all deal with Facebook. They’ve established new restrictions for how many invites a user can send. With the latest update, you cannot now send more than 100 event invites at a time. And an event can only have 300 pending invites at once. This could hinder the efforts of some event planners and marketers of events, but on the flip side of the coin, Facebook users can avoid getting too many invitations for events that are not relevant to them. Let’s face it, over the past year or so, it has become a complete pain in the butt. We get so many events invites sent out for things that don’t really qualify to be an event. So I think this is a good move in behalf of Facebook.

Let’s move to Google. Google, who ironically rely on advertising for some 95% of its revenue, doesn’t want ads on its hotly anticipated Google Glass augmented reality eyewear product. This prohibition came in the fine print of a policy made public on April 15^th, which says Glass wear developer may not serve or include any advertisements and they may not charge users to download apps to the device. This announcement, which coincided with the news that Google glass explorer edition prototypes, are about to ship, and this indicates that the Mountain View Company behind the development of Google Glass is proceeding very carefully, even slowly, when allowing third party developers to access the head mounted display’s full capabilities. It also means that developers won’t have an obvious way of making money from their apps, and marketers will not be able to tap in to the traffic from this channel, at least in an obvious manner initially.

I have another five-star iTunes review this week, and it’s from Chall, who says. “Great content James, thanks so much for sharing your knowledge on traffic, please keep the podcast going, I’m learning so much. “  Well, Chall, we are full steam ahead with a whole bunch of great interviews lined up with experts in YouTube marketing, and email in coming weeks, so stay tuned for those- we’ll absolutely keep them coming. And if you are enjoying this, then I recommend my other weekly traffic tips over at SEOSherpa.com, the home of my search engine agency, where I publish a short weekly video on how you can optimize your websites for higher search engine ranks. And over at ClickJam.com, home to my Google adwords management agency, you’ll learn pay per click marketing techniques. Subscribe to both of those, and you’ll be a traffic whiz in next to no time. And of course we do offer complete managed services from both of those sites. So to get your traffic done for you, contact the teams over there. On upcoming shows, I’ll be answering listener questions so if you have one for me, head on over to TrafficJamCast.com and leave a message using the voicemail, or leave a message option. I really would love to hear from you.

The one minute traffic tip; okay so this week’s tip, if you are using YouTube as a traffic channel which of course you should be, given the average user watches 21.8 hrs. of online video each month, which is nearly one full day. While people do watch a lot of video, my own research, watching closely my YouTube and Wistia analytics, is that engagement drops significantly after about the 2 minute mark and very few people have the patience to watch videos more than 5 minutes in length. So if you have a longer video you are using in your marketing, post the long version in to your website, and then break that video in to shorter versions of one to two minutes in length. You want to use this videos to engage viewers fast so pick the best parts of your video footage and then cut them short on a cliffhanger, a bit like you see on soap operas, leave the viewer wanting to know what happens next, at the end of the video, put a call to action, telling the viewer where they can see the full video. That of course will be a link to your website, where they’ll find a full length version. All that remains then is for you to upload your videos to YouTube, optimize it for the keyword terms you want to rank for, and include a nice, easy clickable link in your YouTube description box. And there you have it, a nice, easy way to pull viewers away from YouTube to your own site.

That completes another episode of Traffic Jam, I’ll be right back next week with another expert interview and all the very latest traffic tips and news. If you’ve enjoyed the episode, please leave me an iTunes review, I really would appreciate it, and I will probably give you a little shout out on next week’s show too.

Playing us out this week is a funky little jam from Breakestra, the LA based soul jazz band, and it’s called Hit the Floor.