Yesterday, I continued my Media Buying 101 series of posts talking about finding a good offer to promote besides a rebill (which have had a lot of trouble recently). With media buying, one of the most important things to keep in mind is your acquisition cost. This is pretty self explanatory, but sometimes overlooked by affiliates.

The acquisition cost to your media buy, is the amount you spend before receiving a conversion. Sometimes ad networks will abbreviate this as CPA (cost per acquisition). This is often tracked by placing a pixel on your offer provided by the ad network. It is completely normally to start off with a high acquisition cost as it takes some time to optimize out the sites that are spending but not converting. It’s very rare to have a campaign meet your CPA goal right off the bat.

This all plays a very important role when selecting your offer for your media buy. Believe it or not, I’ve known people that absolutely blow up email/zip submit offers on pay-per-click (a must before even thinking about a media buy) and are soon disappointed when it doesn’t work with a media buy. This boils down to the acquisition cost. Most ad networks/exchanges and sites are going to charge a CPM average anywhere $0.80 – $3.00 sometimes even more. Therefore a low paying offer to work (generally less than $5) you’re going to have to have one heck of a CTR (click through rate).

In conclusion, when selecting which winning offer (that’s already running successfully on PPC) to do a media buy with, keep the following in mind:

* How much does the offer pay?

* What is the CPM you’re paying for traffic?

* Given the conversion rate on your PPC campaign, what CTR is it going to take to work on a media buy?

* What is your acquisition goal (how much you’d like to spend before seeing a conversion)?

Once you are able to successfuly access these points, you’ll be well on your way to a successful media buy. Good luck!