Buying Advertising Online: Price of Inventory Vs. Quality of Inventory

Buying advertising online is scary. It can be very expensive and you need to spend at least a couple of thousand dollars to expect to see any real return on your investment. Because of this, mistakes can be made and money can be lost all in the hopes of saving a 25 cents on every thousand impressions you deliver.

Every ad campaign is different and, depending on the product or service being promoted, requires a different type of ad inventory. For the purposes of this article though, I’m going to focus on display advertising.

When buying display advertising, it’s often best practice to run your campaign across a display network. This ensures your ad has a pool of hundreds of sites it can be run on and these networks typically have an algorithm in place that optimizes ad delivery for clicks or conversions to ensure it’s being delivered to the right people. There are hundreds of advertising networks you could choose from, but today I’m going to focus on Advertising.com (AOL’s ad network) and Quantcast.

Ad.com has a great self-serve platform that allows you to set some really defined targets and an algorithm that builds a strong lookalike model for your ad delivery for a minimum $100 per day. They also will run CPA campaigns for higher budget clients, or cost per acquisition, only billing the client on the event of a conversion.