How to increase the performance of the media buying team

My colleague from Mobio, Alexey Pisarevsky, has already talked about the concept of Run and Change, which we use in planning our processes and teams. This concept has best taken root within the media buying team.

I want to go deeper into the details of how this approach is applied and how it helps us scale our business. Over the last two years, our buying team has grown from zero to 30 people. It all started with acquiring users on mobile apps in myTarget, an advertising platform, includes all the major social networks on the Russian-speaking Internet. Now we’re buying traffic in myTarget, Facebook, Cheetah Mobile, and more than 20 other mobile ad networks on different verticals, including mobile apps, subscriptions, e-commerce, dating sites, gambling, wow products, and more. Russian traffic is now less than 45% of the total.

Run and Change is a concept for team design, but independent affiliates can adapt this approach to improve their productivity.

This article will tell you how.

Why is Run & Change necessary in business?

People are different. Some of us have perfectionist tendencies or creative personalities, while others are idea generators, bureaucrats, techies, managerial types, and the list goes on. None of this is good or bad — it’s just reality. Each specific task requires a specific skill set.

Some tasks are best handled by perfectionists who like to make processes as ideal as possible, with others should be given to creative minds, and yet others are best assigned to managerial or administrative types of people.

It’s pretty rare for one person to embody several different qualities, and most people tend toward a single role. Any area of business consists of a variety of tasks that require different skills.

In marketing, you need to write and edit articles, organize activities, think up creative ideas, calculate estimates and approve budgets.

In sales, you need to call customers in the funnel, add contacts and update the CRM status, search for new business directions, prepare presentations, and meet with people.

Any business involves both creative tasks and routine tasks. Most often, all of it is assigned to the same employee with expectations of good results. And naturally, expectations aren’t always met. You need to make sure that each employee is performing the tasks that come naturally to them and that they enjoy.

The basics of the Run & Change approach

You can divide your business tasks into two groups, the Run tasks, and the Change tasks.

Run tasks involve standard processes that must be performed well and brought to perfection. These processes are described in scripts or instructions. For example, this could be instructions for a sales manager about how to call customers in the database and how to use the CRM.

Change tasks are non-standard tasks that require a fresh view of the marketplace and new solutions. They don’t have any instructions yet. And these tasks aren’t very clearly defined, in general. Examples are tasks to analyze the market or a new direction, develop and automate a new report, or launch a project. Depending on the type of business activity, some parts have more Run tasks and some have more Change tasks.

At the same time, these tasks require completely different, even opposite, abilities from employees. Someone who performs really well on Run tasks is likely to be slow and reluctant when given Change tasks, and vice versa.

The main idea behind this approach is to separate the processes and the people who perform them.

How we apply Run & Change to media buying

Affiliate marketing is not a typical business, and it involves a wide range of different activities. This industry is a mix of technology, mathematics, statistics, and marketing. An affiliate is a combination of three professions.

1. The advertising specialist, who conducts marketing analysis, studies the product’s target audience and comes up with creative ideas.
2. The math analyst, who understands how an ad auction works and knows how to calculate CPC, CTR, and CR in ad campaigns. They understand the statistical significance and sufficient statistics. They can work with a large set of data and identify dependencies and correlations.
3. The techie programmer who can get the server up, configure the tracker, VDS, DNS, CDN, and FTP access, set up a landing and optimize it for mobile traffic, and write scripts to collect statistics, manage bids, and create a list of blacklisted sites, a simple TDS cloak, or an ad parser.

Superheroes like this just don’t exist. An affiliate is only good at certain tasks, which can be divided into Run and Change.

Examples of Run tasks

1. Create 10 new display ads for a travel app.
2. Set up new advertising campaigns in the familiar myTarget, divide targetings into men and women, run a test budget, and then keep just the profitable setups.

Examples of Change tasks

1. Figure out how MGid, native advertising marketplace, works and try to make an offer profitable.
2. Try running a familiar dating offer, but using prelandings.
3. Create fake accounts on Facebook, figure out how to fill them in so that you don’t get banned, and run ads on mobile subscriptions.

For a long time, we tried to combine these processes within the department and assign both Change and Run tasks to the same employees. This is inefficient and unscalable. Moreover, the entire system of employee motivation breaks down.

When buyers are motivated by a percentage of profits, it’s very difficult to get them to test new unexplored strategies that are likely to bring losses.

At some point, after analyzing the results of the past year’s growth, we realized that we needed to completely separate the Run and Change processes. To define the main processes, we created a business model and broke it down into parts. The main goal of the media buying team, like any business, is to make a profit, which can be defined as a formula:

Total Profit = Number of “mastered” niches * Profit from an area

Let’s look at the parts of the formula. An area is any new niche, vertical, or approach that you don’t know how to work with yet, and that can potentially generate additional revenue.

Examples of these areas can be very different:

1. New geo locations and markets (this is obvious enough).
2. New sources of traffic: redirects, DSPs, teasers and native ads, contextual advertising
3. New offer verticals: mobile apps, mobile subscriptions, dating sites, wow products, gambling.
4. New strategies and new ad formats in familiar traffic sources: video ads, carousels
5. New creative ideas and approaches: prelandings vs. direct, clickbait on a generic ad
6. Technical solutions:

— tricks and hacks for traffic sources,

— retargeting,

— forming target audiences and narrow targetings,

— gray hat techniques (cloaking, link schemes, sneaky redirects, and others).

Profit for an area is calculated by the following formula:

Profit for an area = Average buyer’s profit in this area * Number of buyers

We can influence the average buyer’s profit by introducing various business processes:

1. Training for new employees.
2. Scripts, instructions, recommended techniques and methods.
3. Ready-made working ideas and templates for various verticals.
4. Automation, systems for analyzing advertising campaigns, bid management, and optimizers.
5. Dashboards, regular reports, and analytics.

The number of buyers is the metric that we’re influencing when we recruit new employees.

The more streamlined the processes of the entire media buying team, the easier it is to introduce new people to the team. As a result, the business is divided into three areas that we can improve:

— the number of areas mastered

— the average buyer profit

— the number of buyers

The number of areas is the bottleneck for the entire system, which allows you to multiply the profit. Your team might be very productive and maximize the profit from current sources and verticals, but it can’t grow without new ideas.

Affiliate marketing is not a stable market, and what produces profit now is not going to work tomorrow. A continual search for new niches makes it possible to diversify your business and grow steadily.

Change team

We created a separate Change team within the media buying team. The Change team has its own metrics, KPIs, and motivation program.

Their task is to find new setups that will bring in revenue. The buyers who work on Change tasks are constantly testing something new, studying the market independently, and digging up new setups.

It’s hard for them to work on a single traffic source and on routine tasks. The main KPI and metric for the Change department is the total profit and revenue, so the buyers’ motivation program is focused on these indicators.

Run team

In the Run team, the buyers focus on what they already handle well:

— familiar traffic sources,

— familiar offers and verticals ,

— tests and experiments in familiar traffic sources

Run tasks don’t keep the buyers always doing monotonous work. They also continue to perform Change tasks, but only inside their familiar niches. The Run team doesn’t lose focus by exploring new and unclear ideas.

When new schemes have been tested, the Change team passes them to the Run team, which makes it possible to earn even more profit. In the Run team, this approach has allowed us to focus on the various processes that increase the profit of each buyer and the team as a whole — training, a knowledge base and methodology, automation, and so on.

How to use Run & Change if you work alone

This concept can be applied everywhere.

We use it not only to test new verticals or traffic sources, but also to build our creative department. We’ve identified familiar and understandable offers, templates of creatives, headlines, techniques for generating approaches, and creative ideas. These are Run tasks.

And Change tasks involve testing new ad formats: videos, prelandings, and advertising on newsbreaks.

If you don’t have a team and you work alone, this concept is still applicable. To grow your profit and diversify, you need to develop new areas. Spend 80% of your time on Run tasks that generate the primary income, and invest 20% of your time in Change projects. It is usually hard to switch to new verticals on your own, and it’s especially hard when you’re trying to do both Run and Change at the same time. Most often, if you switch to a new project, you start losing profit from your primary source or campaign, so you go back to it.

From my experience, many affiliates sit on the same verticals or traffic sources for years until they collapse, and then when they’re left with nothing they finally start looking for a new source of income.

Conclusion

You can use the concept of Run & Change in your own work. Set the right priorities and schedule time for different tasks. This will keep the new ideas flowing in, without compromising the main profit.

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