How to make efficient media plan?
When you see a media plan, you’ll probably think ‘oh, this is so easy to do’. But is it really? When you do media plans, you have to have a few things in mind: your target audience, market, budget, objectives, who is your client and how to track your campaign. If you want to make a media plan which will meet your goals, keep on reading.
When I started working as a media planner and saw all those media plans, my thoughts were like ‘well, this is easy’ and ‘why would someone make these when we have programmatic and better ways to reach our audience’? The thing is, you must understand your market and advertising possibilities within it. Read your clients brief and ask yourself these questions:
1. How does programmatic work for my market
3. On which placement I want to show my ad?
2. Do portals have Adwords placements in a right position and how to they usually perform
Here’s my story. On my market programmatic does not perform well — we had some problems such as showing 4–5 same ads to the same user at the same time. This counted as 5 impressions and even if a user would click on an ad, it would result with a poor CTR (which clients still don’t like, no matter how much conversions you have). Second, portals on which I want for the ad to be shown usually have Adwords placement on the bottom of the page, which doesn’t help me a lot (or they do not have them at all).
Now, when we have these answers, you’ll need:
1. Data about portals visitors (their demography, interests, etc.)
2. Excel
3. Creative agency (or someone who will design banners)
4. Third-party tracker (optional, but preferable)
Let’s start
First of all, think about your target audience, what is their age, interests etc. and find an app which provides data about publishers and audience which reads their sites. These apps collect data through surveys, but they are not precise. Still, they can help you to see which portal has higher affinity index of your target audience. Pick publishers which seem to be a right fit (you can also look at the reports of an older media plans and see which portals performed well, but be aware because performance depends on a lot of indicators). Also consider Google Adwords and Facebook, because we still want to target users based on their interests and demography (and we all know that those two do a great job).
I have a list of preferred portals. What now?
Now is the time for your Excel skills to shine. You’ll need to have this rows:
• Portal / Media
• Campaign duration (start / end dates)
• Placement name (You need to look ask publisher for available formats: e.g. Half page, PR article, Instagram story)
• Ad dimensions (e.g. 300x600px, text + jpg…)
• Impressions (How many impressions you want to buy? e.g. 100.000 impressions)
• CPM / CPC / CPD (e.g. CPM 20$)
• Discounts (some publishers give extra discount for agencies)
• Total cost
• Lading page with UTM
After you’ve done this, send it to your client. When the client approves it, send an excel with ad placements, dimensions, other specifications and deadlines to designers. When you get banners, the client must approve them too.
At this moment we have media plan and banners. Now we have two choices:
a) send it to a third party tracker
b) send it directly to a publisher
What is the difference? Well, the third-party tracker will send you a tracking script which you send to your publisher (with materials and media plan — make sure that media plan which you send to your publisher includes only information for their portal). Over third-party tracker you’ll see metrics like impressions, clicks, in screen rate etc. whenever you want and it will give you more control over the campaign.
If you send media plan and banners directly to a publisher, you’ll have to ask them for results all the time. The numbers of third-party tracker and publisher can and will be slightly different — but that is completely normal because each of them is using different algorithms.
While your campaign is on and you notice that some of your placements are not performing well (not delivering enough impressions, low CTR or in-screen rate) feel free to contact the publisher. They should optimize it by moving your ad to a more visible placement or showing it all over the site(for free).
Finally, when your campaign is over, make a report and some important conclusions to your client. See what performed the best and what didn’t — it may help you with planning your next campaign.
Making a media plan is not so easy as it sounds. It requires a lot of thinking — what are advertising possibilities on a target market, who is my audience and what do they read, how much money do I have, what performed well in the past and why etc. But at the end, you will reach a lot of people and raise the awareness of your brand. How do you make media plans? Did you learn something new?
