When developing an online media plan, don’t overlook value-added ad placements, such as text-based newsletter ads and advertorials. These placements aren’t always popular ideas, but they represent an opportunity to add performance octane to a proposal full of expensive premium ad placements.
For example, I have run campaigns that included the purchase of a large amount of premium placements with high CPMs. If we used average click and conversion rates in the mathematical models, many of the sites wouldn’t have been included in the media plan or would have been canceled after the first optimization round. However, when the average CPC and CPA from the huge amount of value-added text links, buttons, and run-of-site (ROS) impressions were factored into the results of the overall buy, those sites came into line with the campaign’s optimization requirements.
In this case, value-added placements saved the day for the agency, publisher, and client. The agency fulfilled its mission to drive a certain level of performance. The publisher sold its pricey CPM inventory and avoided losing the advertiser by tapping unsold remnant inventory. And the client got the brand impact and visibility of the premium placements with the ROI performance of low-cost placements.
So when negotiating a media buy, check out these seven value-added placements I always advocate: