One thing that I used to always recommend was PPC above Media Buys. Not only could you get a great return, but it was so easy to set up and get live. Unfortunately since the market is saturated with competitors, those nice CPAs get worse and worse each year and sometimes become unprofitable. So where can you turn for relevant and instant traffic? I started taking my clients, especially start ups to doing media buys instead.
A Media Buy is when you pay for adspace on a website or a blog. The ad is usually in the form of a banner ad.
Not only have I been able to generate better CPAs through media buying for my clients which may be budget and spend cautious, but the results and brand building have been amazing. Here are some things to think about when trying a media buy to compete with a PPC ROI.
Type Of Site:
Blogs - Blogs are great because they have readers that come back on a regular basis so you can get the 7 exposures to a click that is commonly found with banner serving and remarketing. If the blog owner is curious about your product, they may even click on it and use it or request a free trial so that they can do a review which may help to drive sales and also to build your brand since their readers may begin to trust you.
Forums - Forums can be a good option because you have a very targeted audience that has the same interest about a topic. The one thing you should be careful of is how many posts are just spam and how active the community is and has been over the last year. Some forums look great but have died out and others are growing strong.
Websites - With websites, you can select pages, articles and other things that are relevant to your product. You can also negotiate sections and pages easier to keep your costs down as opposed to having to buy the entire site which may not be relevant for you.
Things To Look For:
Keywords - Use a spy tool or keyword tool to see what keywords are driving traffic to the sites you are looking at and then look at your ppc and see how well it converts. You can then create an expected return based off of that. You'll also need to guess what the CTR is for these to help make a better guess on the buy.
Activity - Does this site have a lot of activity or does it have a huge bounce rate and just spam bots or spiders. Activity doesn't mean sales or no sales, it can just help you to make a smarter choice when you are stuck between a couple of sites. Sometimes the sites with no activity outperform sites with, it just depends on the site and the loyalty of the readers.
Space available - You need to make sure that you are tracking all sizes and where they are placed. If you know the site has the traffic you need, monitor and measure each space and try a couple out. Even if one doesn't work, another may work extremely well.
I never really looked at Media as a way to beat out PPC in the past, but with the current prices growing per click, Media is starting to become my go to channel. It takes a little more testing and some luck to find which types of sites are going to work best, but when you find the niche you can really start to grow and expand your reach and sales or leads.