Don’t Make These 4 Media Buying Mistakes – Expert Advice

Media buying has become an essential strategy for businesses looking to reach their target audiences effectively. Whether you’re a seasoned marketing professional or a newcomer to the field, the world of media buying is rife with complexities and challenges that can easily lead to costly missteps. 

But be not afraid!

We have asked our leading Media Buyer Manager, Paul Yoh Chin Poh, to shed light on the most common mistakes advertisers and businesses make when setting up their online ad campaigns, so now we are ready to spill some beans! 

On a serious note, all the observations in this post are based on real advertising experience. We will explore the most widespread mistakes and how they can be avoided – something not that many specialists willingly share, but sharing is caring! We’re always happy to share and provide you with the most in-depth insights.  

What is media buying?

Media buying is the process of acquiring advertising space or time on various media platforms to promote a product, service, or message. It is a fundamental component of advertising and marketing strategies, and it involves negotiating, planning, and purchasing ad placements to reach a target audience effectively. 

Media buying can encompass a wide range of media channels, including television, radio, print, outdoor (billboards, transit ads), digital (websites, social media, search engines), and more. For the purpose of sharing knowledge about online promotion, we will obviously focus on its digital sources. 

One of the highly effective media buying platforms is Google Ads, which has become a powerful media buying tool for millions of business owners worldwide. That’s why most of the common mistakes we’ll be touching upon in this article will be related to this platform. In case you’re making your first steps on Google Ads, we highly recommend this guide to learn how to set up your very first campaign there.

However, we will also cover other popular advertising platforms:

Facebook Ads is a highly popular platform provided by Facebook, now known as Meta Platforms, Inc. It allows businesses and individuals to create and run advertisements on Facebook and its affiliated platforms, including Instagram, Messenger, and the Audience Network. 

Microsoft Ads, formerly known as Bing Ads, is an advertising platform provided by Microsoft. It allows businesses and advertisers to create and run pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns on the Microsoft Bing search engine and its associated networks, including Yahoo and various partner sites. Microsoft Ads is similar in many ways to Google Ads and offers a way to promote products and services through search engine marketing.

LinkedIn Ads is an advertising platform provided by LinkedIn, a popular professional networking and social media platform. It allows businesses and advertisers to create and run targeted advertising campaigns to reach a professional and business-oriented audience. LinkedIn Ads is specifically designed for reaching professionals, job seekers, and businesses in a B2B (business-to-business) context.

Yandex Ads is an online advertising platform provided by Yandex, a Russian multinational IT company best known for its search engine and other online services. Yandex Ads is similar to Google Ads in that it allows advertisers to create and run pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns, targeting a Russian-speaking audience primarily. It provides a range of tools and options for businesses and advertisers to promote their products and services across Yandex’s network of websites and partner sites.

So now let’s delve into what you’ve come for – media buying pitfalls!

The Most Common Mistakes You May Want To Avoid 

1. Not setting up conversion tracking correctly or at all

Conversions are specific actions that you as a marketer want the audience to take, so you define them as valuable ones. Obviously, conversion tracking is crucial for any ads campaign, because it’s how you measure the effectiveness of your campaign, and that’s why having the most accurate conversion data is paramount.

Accurate conversion measurement is also extremely important for the success of your ad campaigns. All major ad networks like Google, Meta, Microsoft use A.I. machine learning to help your campaigns with automated biddings. 

An accurate conversion tracking of your campaigns will feed the data of all conversion actions, (i.e. add to cart”, “sign up”, “purchase” etc.) to the A.I. and thus improve the performance of your campaigns with optimized bidding.

Tips

Track the following actions of users depending on the type of your campaign:

• For eCommerce campaigns: “newsletter sign-up”, “app download”, “add to cart”, “purchase” and “purchase value” conversion actions. 
• For lead generation campaigns: “phone call”, “contact by email” and “form sign up” conversion actions. 
• For App campaigns: “app install”, “in-app actions” like add to cart or purchases. 
• For affiliate marketing landing page campaigns: “CTA button click” and postback conversion data from the advertiser whenever possible.

Pro tips

To accurately track your conversions from your ad campaigns, we recommend installing Google Tag Manager on your websites and apps. It helps you to install and manage conversion measurement tags required by different networks to measure the conversion actions accurately. 

Below are some of the major conversion tags that you can install with Google Tag Manager:

• Google Ads: Google Ads Conversion Linker, Google Ads Remarketing, Google Ads Enhanced Conversions, Google Analytics 4;
• Facebook Ads: Meta Pixel. To accurately measure conversions on iOS devices for your Facebook Ads, you will also need to install Meta Conversion API on your own server to use the server-side tracking of key events.
• Microsoft Ads: UET tags;
• LinkedIn Ads: LinkedIn Insight Tag;
• Yandex Ads: Yandex Metrica
• Affiliate marketing ad networks (PropellerAds, RichAds, etc.): you will need to add S2S postback URL obtained from your affiliate network like Indoleads to your campaigns.

2. Pausing ad campaigns too early

Surely, you want to stop any ad campaign that brings poor results, but… not too soon before the campaign brings enough stats on clicks and conversions. You will want to find out instead if the poor result is due to low budget, technical problem, time factor, algorithm factor, or time lag in conversion.

• Low budget

A campaign with a low daily budget may yield poor results as the auction bidding of your campaign will not be competitive enough to show visible ad impressions due to bad placements or low display ad position. 

Tip

It is important to forecast the budget of your campaign by using the budget estimation tool of your ad platform. On Google Ads, you can use Performance Planner to generate forecast as shown below:

• Technical issues

In some cases, the poor result of the early campaigns is due to the technical problem of your ad platform, your website or your app. The extreme example is when your ad campaigns keep running even though your website is down. However, it is very common that even a minor issue on the conversion page of your website or app will make or break an ad campaign. 

Tip

It is crucial that all your landing pages, website pages or apps are fully optimized before you launch your ad campaigns.

• Time factor

If your campaign is paused within 30 days, time or season of the campaign could be a major contributing factor. For example, it may be just a holiday season for your targeted business audience.

Tip

Instead of stopping the campaign right away, run it for more time to see if the initial poor results were just due to the wrong timing.

• Not riding out the learning period 

Some of the campaigns may have still not exited the learning stage after one week when you use automated bidding strategy for your campaigns due to the low number of conversions. For example, Facebook Ads needs around 50 conversions within a 7-day period for each ad set to exit the learning stage, and Google Ads campaigns may take up to 3 conversion cycles to exit the learning stage.

Tip

Instead of immediately stopping these campaigns, you will want to combine ad sets or campaigns or create more soft conversions (e.g product page view) to create more conversions for the campaigns to exit the learning stage.

• Conversion time is longer just because it naturally is

Conversions may be delayed due to the nature of the business that your campaign promotes. For some products, the time to conversion may be much longer than 30 days. One example could be a campaign promoting cars to the audience in the consideration stage. From consideration to actual buying a car could take months. 

Tip

The performance of such campaigns for businesses where time to conversion is traditionally longer, should be on other soft conversions like “newsletter sign up” or “test drive” instead of the actual action of buying a car.

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3. Not enough testing

You get initial poor results and here you’re stopping the campaign right away.

Tip 

You should still test more: conduct A/B test on ad variation (like changing the ad texts or ad creatives), landing page variation (like different CTA or color scheme), audience targeting variation (like different keywords, demographics or interests or wider audience), or even bidding strategy test (like max. conversions vs TROAS). 

A/B test is used to test only one variation of the campaign at any one time and the duration of the test should allow enough data to be collected (usually 14 days or more).

On Google Ads, for instance, you could create multiple A/B test experiments for your campaigns as below:

At the end of the experiment, you can decide to apply the experiment to the campaign or not, of course, if the improvements are statistically significant as shown below:

4. Too frequent tweaking

Testing is key to your campaigns’ success, but too frequent tweaking may hurt. During any test on your campaigns, you will want to see how the changes you made impact the campaigns. If you make too many changes too frequently, you will have a hard time analyzing the impact of your changes.

When you change keywords, ad groups, conversion actions, and bid strategy in Google Ads campaigns, the campaign will be in the learning stage. Tweaking too frequently in Google Ads will deprive your opportunity to see how your campaigns could perform steadily.

Tip

We recommend not to tweak your campaigns within 48 hours. This will help you to analyze your changes better.

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Wrapping It Up

Media buying is a critical component of any successful advertising campaign, and avoiding common mistakes is imperative for achieving desired results. Let’s list them here in a nutshell:

1. Setting up conversion tracking incorrectly or not setting up at all;
2. Pushing “Pause” button too early;
3. Miss out on testing;
4. Tweaking too much too often.

Media buying is an ever-evolving field, and learning from these mistakes can help you refine your approach, increase ROI, and make more informed decisions in the future. 

Stay tuned for more valuable tips from our team! 

And we know there are some aspiring affiliates among our readers, why wouldn’t you join us and level up your affiliate marketing game? You’re just one step away!