Two Elements That Will Revolutionize Your Media Buying Success

I have some advice for you. A piece of sage advice I want to pass on to you for keepsake and frequent reflection. In fact, my hope is that you’d take this advice and teach/share it with other media buyers as much as possible because this is a bigger “secret” than any bidding strategy you can find in premium Facebook groups or on Youtube…

And — the unfortunate truth is that no one (that I’m aware of) even talks about this, let alone does training on this massive “cheat code” to media buying…

“Aggression & Decisiveness Covers a Multitude of Sins”

After spending over 8M in the last 60 days (over 105M in my career) and training dozens of media buyers in various niches, there are a few common “lead indicators” I’ve picked up on when I comes to becoming an exceptional media buyer as well as continuing to perform at a high level within the ads manager.

The two largest indicators I look for & train on in this topic are aggression and decisiveness.

When managing ad spend of any decent proportions a media buyer must be able to make decisions quickly and be okay with the result. In online forums and various Facebook groups on “media buying” you’ll hear over and over again about how to “be patient” and “let Facebook optimize for 3-5 days”…

Except there is one major issue with those statements…

They assume there are no other indicators to a successful campaign than CPA (or whatever the end result is)

Most businesses can’t afford (or would rather not afford) to wait 3-5 days on a campaign spending $1,000+ per day if it’s a complete loser for 2 days in a row.

“Anyone Wanna Waste $5,000?”

Yes. Facebook’s algorithm does indeed need time to optimize properly within a period of time. However, there is a stark difference, I’ve found, between operating a machine-learning based platform correctly and simply running a business. Profits need to be made, clients need to see results, and revenue needs to be produced for continued business.

How do you improve your ability to make decisions faster? Begin asking yourself the right questions…

“If I were to achieve a purchase price at $X CPA what other things also have to be true?”

– What is your average conversion rate on the page?

– What is the average conversion rate if someone reaches the order form?

– What’s the average cost per unique outbound click?

Each of the above questions are extremely important if you hope to add any level of consistency and ease to your life while media buying.

If your average cost per unique outbound click is $1.00 and you wake up to an ad set that has a $7 cost per unique outbound click… what are the chances of that particular ad set to deliver great results for that day?

Not so high. Now immediately as I say that, I can hear the “algo-nazis” screaming,

“But but Ashton, wHaT iF yOu jUst hAd a FeW mOrE cLiCkS — lEt fAcEbOoK oPtIMiZe

You could be right, but that’s the difference between what I’ve seen make excellent media buyers and the not-so-excellent.

I’d rather make a fast decision, stop the bleeding, and reset the ad set for the next day than cross my fingers and ‘hope’ the algorithm corrects itself.

This does NOT mean you get emotional and just turn things off because you’re scared. Far from it. This means that you must be DATA driven in every action you take.

Which also means that you must have enough data to make decisions off of empirical evidence and historical results

Media buyer, hear me.

It’s shocking how many media buyers out there know very little about the true goals and objectives their client/boss are looking for.

It’s even more shocking how few business owners actually know the numbers they need to hit in order to hit their monthly targets.

Being able to not only articulate your KPI’s but also what other metrics must be true (Lead cost, CPC, CPM, CVR) in order for you to hit those KPI’s is a total advantage. If you can, at any time, recall them, you are already well on your way to being a 1%’er when it comes to media buying.

But this should be a minimum standard for you going forward.

Know your numbers. Your client’s and bosses will be glad you did.