November, 2011 | Finch Sells

What Runs Where Review – 100% Verified Data Whoring Machine

Nov 18 2011

How do I even begin to review What Runs Where? This is the rabbit hole of all software releases for 2011.

I’ll start by giving you the basics. What Runs Where is a competitive intelligence service for online media buyers. The hook is to discover new traffic sources, to become more efficient at monetizing your existing campaigns, and to open your eyes to a simply mind-boggling data dump of what your competitors are up to.

Spying on competition seems to be one of 2011’s hottest angles for marketing products. I’ve already reviewed several other products, all aiming to make our ‘creative process’ less troublesome. The difference with What Runs Where is scale.

It all looked so simple when I first logged in.

A nicely tiled interface allowing me to search through the most popular (and most relevant) adverts on 18 of the largest display networks – as well as 6 text ad networks.

And then I clicked through to view some data. And then I clicked through to view some more data. Before you know it, I’ve clicked through about seven times and the What Runs Where software is tracing everything from the entire banner portfolio of True.com, to the exact eye colour of the bastard who keeps outbidding me on TribalFusion.

This thing is a well oiled data whoring machine. And there lies it’s greatest strength and biggest weakness. To get the most out of What Runs Where, you have to be able to handle lots of data. You have to practically thrive on it like some kind of sick perverted numbers freak. There’s a lot to take in, and I can see how the fledgling baby affiliate could be swept under within minutes.

Let’s take a look at what you can analyse…

If you’re short on inspiration, you can use the What Runs Where system as a means of researching the most popular banner ads by strength, relevancy or recency on any of the following platforms:

Google Image Ads, 247 Real Media, ContextWeb, ValueClick, Tribal Fusion, Blue Lithium, BuySellAds, Rubicon Project, Adbrite, Technorati Media, Burst Media, Advertising.com, Interclick, Zedo, XTend Media, Undertone Ads, Specific Media and Harren Media.

And then you have your popular text ad platforms:

Adwords Content Network, MSN Content Network, Adside, Pulse360, AdBlade, Adsonar.

I know many affiliates feel naked and lost if they’re forced out of their comfort zone (Facebook and Plentyoffish), but these traffic sources are where the big money is made – particularly if you’re dabbling in rebills.

If you’re in research mode, you can use What Runs Where to assess the ads that are likely to work on each of those traffic sources. But that would be purely skimming the surface. The real value, in my opinion, is in the ability to perform searches for particular advertisers and to see the most popular placements on any given site.

If I run a search for True.com, I can uncover a huge number of banners that have been used to promote the site. Here’s a tiny sample:

What Runs Where Review 1

Fair enough, it’s nice to see which banners are popular. But what I really want to see is the traffic sources and specific placements that have proven to be the most successful over time.

What Runs Where Review 2

What Runs Where 3

This information gives me some food for thought over suitable placements in a similar campaign. Christ, if I was running PPV, I’d have more than enough targets to keep myself busy. But it’s not quite giving me the complete picture. How do I know which ads are most suitable for each placement?

Now where the data really gets interesting is when you start cross-checking ads that have appeared in a particular placement. Let’s say I want to buy some banner space on TheFreeSite.com, I can use What Runs Where to perform a seperate placement analysis.

What Runs Where Review 4

(I’ve purposefully chosen a very broad target…)

This gives me the breakdown of just about every advertiser that has been spotted on the site. If I want to see more recent placements, I can adjust the slider. I can also view the top banner ads on this single placement, as well as the strongest ad texts. Has one banner been hogging 50% of the impressions? What traffic source does it come from? All this data is at my fingertips, and it’s enough to make me slightly nauseous.

The data pool is truly gigantic. You can easily lose a couple of hours sifting through it.

So what can be improved?

The software currently tracks ads in four countries: United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. This should keep most of you happy. But for advertisers like myself – those who have departed the popular English speaking regions in favour of dirty Eurotrash campaigns and the odd cheeky Brazilian – I would definitely like to see some Euro inventory added.

I also think the interface could be given a once-over and sprinkled with some explanations of how scores are calculated. Strength is annotated as a number, and while I’m sure the tech guys have perfectly valid logic in ranking the ads as they do, it could be made clearer.

Much of the data meaning has to be assessed relatively by looking at more data. If the team could find a way of leading lambs such as myself to the ‘opportunities’ rather than more numbers, it would open up the software to a whole new realm of buyers. They have a hell of a lot of features, it’s just rebranding a few of them as benefits that will convert this thing in to an unslayable savage donkey beast.

What Runs Where isn’t going to turn a bad affiliate marketer in to a rich affiliate marketer. You’re kidding yourself if you buy this thing expecting it to churn out profitable campaigns while you swing lackadaisically in the hammock.

And while it is by far the most sophisticated ad spying software I’ve yet to come across, it’s also tied to the same limitations as it’s many rivals – you, the user, have to turn that data in to a competitive advantage. It won’t appear by magic.

If I had to pull a metaphor out of my arse, I would compare the software to a very deep bucket full of jigsaw pieces. Inside, you will find just about every component of that one lucrative campaign you’ve always dreamed of. But to put the pieces together, you’re going to have to insert yourself balls-deep in to a matrix of data – some of which will take you a few days to properly understand.

If you’re a regular media buyer, or looking to venture that way, What Runs Where is a must-have. I’d recommend it to intermediate affiliates, and anybody with an interest in display advertising.

The Good News…

Now, you may have already heard, but What Runs Where has just opened up a special $1 trial package. If you have any doubts, or simply want to take the software for a test spin, quit reading my drivel and go see it for yourself. Best of British to you, have a good weekend!

Recommended This Week

For those of you who advertise on Facebook, Premium Posts Volume 2 splurges over 70 pages of my tips, techniques and strategies for conquering Zuckerberg’s monster. I’m confident you’ll get a lot out of it, including some much better traffic sources for our gaming offer example above!
If you’re a new reader, please add me to your RSS. Also follow me on Twitter. Thanks for reading.

How The 80/20 Rule Applies To You

Nov 16 2011

It’s not rare to find that 80% of your sales are generated by 20% of your customers, or that 80% of your time is spent handling 20% of your chores.

This skewed outlook on life and business was first observed by the great Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who lent his name to the theory.

Pareto established, in the early twentieth century, that 80% of Italian land was owned by just 20% of the population. He later famously observed that 80% of the peas in his garden came from 20% of the pods. Spurred on by the unusual correlation, his work continued and the Pareto Principle became lodged not just in economic folklore, but in business minds alike.

By running a business that is effectively a one man show, I have become a great believer in the Pareto Principle.

I’m convinced it can be applied to productivity. The principle is a great marker for ensuring I don’t become bogged down in tasks that waste my limited time.

I don’t think I’m alone in confessing that when I look at my to-do list, I can easily find tasks that satisfy my need to appear busy; tasks that contribute very little to my bottom line.

As an Internet Marketer, I often find myself profiting from one particularly lucrative advertising campaign. On a good day, it makes my other efforts look like a complete waste of time. If the lucrative campaign earns more than the rest of my work combined, why would I insist on wasting 80% of my time chasing those dead ends?

Probably because seeing the skewed reality is one thing. Acting on it is completely another.

The desire to appear busy is something that has been ingrained in us since childhood. Can you imagine the uproar at school had you refused to go to 80% of your classes? Or the backlash from your employer if you only worked 2 hours of your contracted 8?

Where our productivity is concerned, we are highly trained animals. To stay busy is better than to look lazy, even if the results are not always as we’d expect in doing so.

Sometimes it’s a welcome relief to step back and analyse where your success is coming from. What work is bringing in the bacon? Which tasks are you splurging blood, sweat and tears over for little reward?

These may seem like stupid questions. But I believe there’s much more potential in becoming a specialist, somebody who plays to his strengths, than a jack of all trades who couldn’t see his skill-set if it slapped him in the tits.

Recommended This Week:

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Stupidly Obvious Facebook Tip: Do The Maths

Nov 14 2011

Affiliate marketing is pretty simple when you boil it down to the basic mathematics. We want to sell a lead for more than it costs us to generate the traffic. Simple logic, right?

You could be forgiven for questioning this wisdom when so many affiliates are busy creating campaigns that have zero hope of scaling.

Before you launch any affiliate campaign, you can save yourself a lot of time by doing the maths required to establish your likely profitability. And not just profitability, but profitability that is worth your time.

A tramp can beg for change and make a profit, but so what? You don’t see ‘get homeless get paid’ splashed across the industry blogs. Profitability is worth jack shit if the energy you’re exerting makes the tramp look like a connoisseur of passive income.

This is especially the case on Facebook where rising click costs have pushed certain niches in to the abyss.

So let’s say you’re going to promote a gaming offer on Facebook. Let’s also say you’re a reckless optimistic son of a gun who refuses to venture out of the American market.

We’ll assume you have an offer paying out $2, and a clean slate to target it as you wish. Before you even think about creative angles for promoting the game, you need to take a step back. Take a deep breath and ask yourself the following questions.

1. Have I established with my affiliate manager a baseline EPC for promoting this offer on Facebook?

If the answer is no, you should probably do so at the next opportunity. I’m saying this not just because the EPC will form a cornerstone of your profitability equation, but because many networks take on so many offers that they sometimes forget to remove the duds from your control panel.

Networks: I’ve never understood why you try to win me over with thousands of different offers. I’d rather you had a smaller pool of advertisers that were closely maintained. Sometimes I find an awesome looking offer, but when it’s buried beneath 3000 others, there’s a part of me that is skeptical about the likelihood of it being desirable to run.

2. If the EPC is lower than $0.15, am I going to be able to generate a CTR of 0.3+% to reduce my CPC costs accordingly?

This is a rough estimate that I apply to Facebook campaigns in America. If the best you can hope for is an EPC of <$0.15, you know straight off the bat that you can't target super broadly. You need laser targeted keyword groups hitting a CTR around the 0.3% mark.If you can't visualise a method of generating this kind of CTR for the offer, the maths don’t work! There’s no need to throw a hissy fit when, actually, you’ve saved yourself a lot of time.

3. Assuming I can strike the high CTR, is the demographic large enough to maintain it over a long enough period to make good money?

Some creative angles are brilliant. But the consequence of laser targeting is the reduction of the demographic size. If the demographic is too small, banner blindness will kick in within days. In this situation, you need to evaluate: is my ROI sufficiently high to justify the campaign’s rapid demise?

If your ROI is low, the maths hinge on your volume.

Low volume scenario: 200 leads at 25% ROI on a $2 payout ($320 spend) = $80 profit
Mid volume scenario: 2000 leads at 25% ROI on a $2 payout ($3200 spend) = $800 profit

The first scenario, the ‘crash and burner’ as I like to call it, wouldn’t be worth my time. That’s less than my hourly rate, and just not worth the investment. The second scenario is worth it, even if it doesn’t make you rich.

If, however, the low volume scenario could be countered by a high ROI:

Low volume scenario: 200 leads at 100% ROI on a $2 payout ($200 spend) = $200 profit

This scenario would be more appealing to me not for the higher profit, but because of the potential in scaling sideways. Any campaign producing 100% ROI is worth exploring, but most of the time, you will need to scale sideways (using similar keywords, doing further demographic research etc) to keep it growing.

4. Does my offer accept under 18 traffic?

Any offer that accepts under 18 traffic reduces the strain on your CPCs. You will generally get cheaper clicks when advertising to kids, so the pressure to deliver a stunningly high CTR is reduced.

5. Can I generate enough volume to get a payout increase?

Sometimes it’s worth running on skinny margins and high revenue if you know that there’s a reward for generating the extra volume. When evaluating your CPCs vs EPCs, take this in to account.

6. Can I buy a payout increase with high quality traffic?

Another strategy for those thinking long term is to seek out the best quality leads and strive to break even. Drive just enough volume to get the advertiser to take notice. Assuming your leads are twice as good as the average affiliate, the raised payout could see you profiting comfortably.

The maths in this case hinge on isolating the advertiser’s favourite type of customers and following the same procedure. What will they cost to reach? Is the demographic large enough to sustain the campaign beyond the payout raise? Can you come up with enough angles to fight off the banner blindness?

7. Am I being an idiot by not considering international markets?

After you’ve evaluated the equations above, you will invariably be left with a pounding headache.

“The maths don’t work, they just make it worse, but I…”

The sad reality is that for most Facebook campaigns in 2011, the maths just don’t work. Where they do, the volume is shot to such a low ebb that your reward for finding profitability is some pocket money and the mild disconnected satisfaction that you ‘beat the system’.

However, taking your ideas to less saturated international markets is a great leveler. From my experience, it can tip the equations of profitability from ‘squeaking a quick buck’, to ‘laughing all the way to the bank’.

Many affiliates just refuse to see the light. Most of them are blinded by the false allure of revenue. Revenue, revenue, look how ballin’ I am, here’s some more revenue!

When you look through your network’s newsletter and see the American version of an offer paying out twice as much as the Euro version, do you actually stop to do the maths?

Reduced click costs + higher CTR + less banner blindness + less competition + greater chances of a payout increase = why the hell are you still advertising to America?

Now I’m not saying that going international is a shortcut to profit, and I’m not saying that advertising to America is a recipe for failure. My advice is simply to do your maths.

Before throwing a hundred campaign ideas at the wall, it helps to grab a pen and some paper, and to actually write down your equations.

What is the average EPC? How can I improve this?
What is my required CTR? How will it affect my volume?
What ROI can I expect? For how long? How about in different countries?

I know affiliate marketers don’t naturally gravitate towards the dark art of actually having to plan shit, but it helps to have some numbers in your head. Nail down the figures before you go image hunting on Bing.

Recommended This Week

For those of you who advertise on Facebook, Premium Posts Volume 2 splurges over 70 pages of my tips, techniques and strategies for conquering Zuckerberg’s monster. I’m confident you’ll get a lot out of it, including some much better traffic sources for our gaming offer example above!
If you’re a new reader, please add me to your RSS. Also follow me on Twitter. Thanks for reading.