Arbitrage for Success, Part 1

“Good quality traffic,” is always every advertiser’s end goal.   That’s really the key isn’t it?  It’s such a challenge, particularly these days in our performance marketing driven world to really hone in on and pair down on the most relevant traffic sources for the advertiser. While staying true to the yield needs of our publishers.  This is the fine line we as a network must walk every day.   Too many times we as performance marketing networks are limited within our own scope of buying on a performance basis, when our advertisers are also selling on a performance basis.  The downside to this, mainly, is concern for quality, site validity, as well as the potential for fraud, which has a greater tendency to surface as a result.  I suggest that its time for a paradigm shift.  In order to achieve the diversity, quality and ultimately relevancy for our precious clients, we must do our part as networks to think outside of CPA buying.  By avoiding non CPA based buying, and focusing more on CPC, CPM and CPV buying  we will open the market up to other media types, including search, display, email, contextual, blogs, etc.  Its critical to develop a strategy, maintain a plan and execute on action items as it relates to non CPA based buying.  If our goal is to sustain our advertiser / client relationships for the long term as well as secure an expanding budget, this is the best solution for both respective businesses to grow.  In the following series of posts, I will cover various media buying strategies for non CPA based buying including the most basic to the more advanced.