Andrew:	This course is about profitable media buying. It's led by Max Teitelbaum. He's the co-founder of WhatRunsWhere which help customers buy display media more intelligently and profitably for their campaigns. 

I'm Andrew Warner, founder of Mixergy.com where proven founders like Max teach. Max, can you tell the audience where you were before you discovered what you're about to teach us?

Max:	Sure. I was doing affiliate marketing or performance marketing, and I was making a bit of money, but it was until I learned how to media buy where I really started to make a lot of money, I mean, a lot of money. It seems like a lot of money, but a good day would have been . . . before this would have been $500, $1000, maybe. And after this, a bad day was $7, 8, 9,000. It would be craps. It would be a terrible day. 

Andrew:	So, a bad day was $7-8,000 in revenue.

Max:	Yeah, at the height of it. If you had a day where you would made $7,000 in revenue, you'd be like, that's not great because you were used to making [audio break].

Andrew:	Right. That's how we met. You came to Mixergy to do an interview about how you built this up. The audience was so interested in the story that it actually became, not just the top interview for the month, but it surpassed the number two interview by three times because people wanted to hear your story. 

Now, I have you here. You're going to teach people how they can buy media intelligently the way that you did so that they can generate revenue from it. 

Max:	Absolutely.

Andrew:	All right. What's the first step? What's the first thing that people need to do? 

Max:	When you asked me to come put together this course, I put together a quickie little eight step thing.

Andrew:	OK.

Max:	How I would buy media if I was going to buy it for a performance campaign. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go through this with you, and then I thought, well, I'm not going to make it a performance campaign because if I do that, people will a) try to copy it and then they'll go over saturate it or be highly critical of it.

I thought, why don't I do some good with this interview at the same time? What I'm going to do is I'm going to go through and build a campaign, a hypothetical campaign for CharityWater which is a charity in New York that provides clean drinking water to mainly Africa by building wells there. And then, after this interview we're going to contact them and give them the actual campaign that we built, and they can use it for whatever they want as well as [??]. 

Andrew:	Wow. All right. 

Max:	You can see my string of eight quick steps. 

Andrew:	OK.

Max:	We'll run through them really quickly, and then we'll go step-by-step in order.

Andrew:	OK. Let's give it a moment to come up, and then after this session we will give people this document that you have that you're using as your outline for this session. We'll give it to them in the course tool box. 

Max:	Step one would be look up headers. It could be a [??] search or a direct URL search. What this means is we [??] WhatRunsWhere.com which allows you to get media buying intelligence, and this is using WhatRunsWhere to look up your competitors. That being said, people will be critical and say, "This is just a plug for WhatRunsWhere. He was trying to sell product and such and trying to teach." So, I'm also going to go through when we do this and show you how you can do it without WhatRunsWhere and how you can do it manually.

Andrew:	OK. 

Max:	Step two would be to record all the places you find and compare. I have included a quick link to duplicate filtering technique for Excel for Microsoft users which allows you to reduce duplicates. So you don't need to worry if there's duplicates. You can get filter them out after that. 

Step three would be to create a composite demographic profile. Step four would be to look at the banners and what they have in common. Step five is [audio break]. Step five point five is sort of an intermediate step.

Andrew:	I'm sorry. We missed that. Step five, you were saying create your own banner set to start, and then you said step five point five is what?

Max:	Step five point five is there are two ways to media buy. One is through networks, and the other one is directly on a website. If you're buying on a direct site, plug-in placement reports using WhatRunsWhere or look on the website to see what is being advertised. 

Step six would be to set up a task campaign at [??] or AdBuyer.com. Step seven would be to compare as all of them go direct to network or website, and step eight would be to cut the losers, keep the winners. And then, scale by doing it all over again. Make it more profitable and do it again. 

Why don't we just start at step one and then break it down really, really easily. 

Andrew:	Perfect. In this exact process, you're going to show us, using CharityWater as an example, what anyone else who's watching this will be able to apply to their business and buy customers cheaply, too.

Max:	Oh absolutely. I mean it works phenomenally with performance campaigns and if you're doing tests and you find something that works that makes you money. So with Charity Water, they have a couple different competitors that I did some footwork for. So TapProject.org, PlanetCanada.ca, [??].org, Worldvision. What would I do? Well what I would do with What Runs Where is I go in and we offer two things. We offer a keyword search that allows you to search a keyword. So we can search Charity Water and we'll see if they're advertising anything. And then we also show an advertiser search where you can look up direct advertiser URL's and see if they're the running anything and what they're running.

So you know we search Charity Water and we got all these banners for Charity Water, which give us a baseline as to what they're advertising. Here I'm pretending a client or a company I'm working with, so I can see they're baseline and what they're doing.

Andrew:	OK.

Max:	Looking for it.

Andrew:	Of course, if I was doing this for myself, I wouldn't need to do this search for my own ads. I would know what my ads were. I would know what my ad performance was.

Max:	But you can do it for people within the same industry. So you can see if you, say own a diet product. If you're Jenny Craig you can see what South Beach Diet is doing or P90X is doing by searching "diet" and seeing where that comes up.

Andrew:	I see.

Max:	The more important search here for me, because I already know what it is. I said TapProject.org. I can just type in TapProject.org.

Andrew:	And this is one of Charity Water's competitors and what you're doing now is competitive intelligence?

Max:	Yeah. Pro-bono competitive with charities. They all try to do the same thing.

Andrew:	Right.

Max:	But competitors for funding and we can quickly see all the different places that we found TapProject.org on. All the banners that they're using, the flash banners they're using, all that stuff. Now this is the part where I'm going to tell you how to do it without What Runs Where.

Andrew:	OK. But before you tell me how to do it without, let me just make sure that I understand what we're trying to do here. First write down our competitors and then we see where our competitors are advertising and what kind of ads they're running in those spots, right?

Max:	Yeah. This is just a preliminary search and with that list of traffic sources, I copied and pasted that to an Excel document and I'll show you the results of that in a second.

Andrew:	OK. All right and what you're about to do is say, look Andrew I know you've got some skeptics in your audience, I'm going to show the skeptics how they can do this without What Runs Where so they trust me and they trust this course to not be a sales process for What Runs Where.

Max:	Exactly and also if they just don't want to buy What Runs Where they can do it that way to. Well obviously getting people to come into What Runs Where is good, but we're also just trying to help people.

Andrew:	Right.

Max:	The way that What Runs Where works is it goes to websites and it records advertisements, it stores and categorizes them, and allows you to search them. The way that you can find this information is you'd have to browse around the web and you'd have to ask friends to browse around the web and every time you see an ad for one of these companies you have to quickly write it down where you've seen it and where it's coming from. 

The other thing that you can do is go to Alexa.com or something like that and they have something called a clickstream. I have this CBC for another name, but it tells you where did people go before they came to this site and where did they go after they came to the website. There you can identify, if they're doing a large media buy, it'll show up in their clickstream. So that's also useful if you're just trying to identify stuff quickly and you're trying to look for places they might be showing.

Andrew:	I see. OK. What we want to see is where they're traffic is coming from to figure out where they're buying ads, right?

Max:	Yeah. Where they're buying ads. So where the ad is showing up on, because if they're buying there and it's profitable, why can't you buy there and you buy better than them?

Andrew:	OK.

Max:	Or if it's working through them, why can't you take some [??] and make it work for you as well.

Andrew:	OK. 

Max:	So I went through Tap Project, Planet Canada, Water.org, and Worldvision. I recorded all the placements and I came up with a document like this.

Andrew:	OK. Let's give that Excel spreadsheet a chance to come up. And do you still do it now in an Excel spreadsheet? That's where you keep track of competitive ads?

Max:	Yeah.

Andrew:	Can you give this document to the person who's taking our course right now? So that they can see what a sample Excel spreadsheet would look like for this kind of project?

Max:	Yeah.

Andrew:	OK. Great.

Max:	Absolutely. I'm also really, really old school in terms of how I build. So there's definitely software and stuff out there. So what we did is we took all the placements for all the direct competitors and we just mashed them into one profile. We have, there's so many placements here, between all of them we have 633 placements. 

Andrew:	Let me see if I understand this. What you've don here is on the left you have the website where the ad ran for the competitor. On column B as source, meaning is it a media buy where they bought an ad directly from the site or is it Google AdWords, where they bought the ad through Google, right?

Max:	Yeah.

Andrew:	OK. And then, times seen is how many times was that . . . 

Max:	Times seen is how many days it's going to run.

Andrew:	OK. Got it. How many times is the ad seen and how many days has it been running.

Max:	Those are internal measures from What Runs Where and they just give me an idea of which ones I should be focusing on. Because what I'm going to show you, I'm going to show you how to get demographics on them and I'll explain why that's important later.

Andrew:	OK.

Max:	So I went through and I found those and I copied and pasted them on, I filtered duplicates and I got 633 different placements. Obviously, if you're doing it manually, your list is going to be much smaller just because you can't get that kind of scale. You don't have that kind of time, but you can do exactly the same process manually.

So I have all my placements in Excel and now I need to create a composite demographic profile for site targeting. What does this mean? Simple, who are they trying to reach with their advertising? We can tell this fairly easily because there are tools like Alexa and Quantcast where the first thing here is a media buy on CBC.ca, which is a Canadian news website. It's been running for a bit. So I pull up CBC.ca here and I can see it's very popular with people 45 to 65 with college. Pretty gender neutral, without children, and they're browsing at home. That's from Alexa, which is free. Google has an ad planner too, which is also great. It was the same information so I melded all three together. Quantcast provides similar information so I can see here it's slightly male. It's telling me what I saw before, it's still 35 to 50 plus, mostly white people, but that doesn't really matter. There's an above average percent that have college or grad school and 60% of them don't have kids. 

Now these aren't real solid stats. They're just rough estimates, but they're really useful for helping you figure out demographics and where you want to be buying. So what we can do is we can go through the top ones in each network and then we can identify what the general target they're going for, is.

Andrew:	I see.

Max:	So what we did is we went through a couple different networks here. I believe I actually have it here as well. So here are the websites we went through. For Value Click we went through these four websites and this is where we used the time series [??] ones that have been running the longest and been seen the most. We went through those to get a rough estimate.

Andrew:	I'm sorry, before you continue, Max. What were you doing with Value Click? Value Click does the same thing, gives the same demographic information as Alexa and that's how you got the Value Click info there?

Max:	No, Value Click is a media buy sort.

Andrew:	Right.

Max:	It's a network you can go buy media at and these are placements on the Value Click network. 

Andrew:	Oh so when they bought ads on the Value Click network, this is who they reached?

Max:	Exactly. We ran these placements to see who we think they're trying to target. It's not who they're exactly trying, but we're just trying to get a general idea of who they're trying to target.

Andrew:	Did you run the ad there in order to find out the demographics?

Max:	No. No, no, no. We saw the ad show up using their ad server tagging. It was classified that way. We saw the ad show up on this type of site and we, therefore, even plugged it into Alexa and Quantcast and created this profile.

Andrew:	I'm sorry. I'm still not understanding. Are they buying on Value Click or are they buying ads within the Value Click network?

Max:	They're buying ads within the Value Click network.

Andrew:	OK. And if they buy ads in the Value Click network, any stranger can go and see which demographics they're reaching with those ads?

Max:	Yeah.

Andrew:	I didn't know that.

Max:	Well they can see what websites they're reaching and they can look up the demographics of those websites.

Andrew:	OK.

Max:	And then you can get a general idea of who they're trying to target. I'll explain. So we went through all these different networks and here's sort of the base demographics we got pulled up. For Value Click we saw that overall was male oriented with their main demographic was 35 plus. For Technorati it was sort of in between males and females, but the main demographic was under 18. For Advertising.com media buys, for direct site buys, and AdWords it was all male oriented and 35 plus. And we used podcasts to get this information.

Andrew:	OK.

Max:	Why is this important. Couple reasons. In a rough way, the [??] hit people that are 35 plus that are also men and it makes logical sense. If you're trying to raise money you need people with disposable income and people over 30, 35 have more disposable income and give more to charity. The gender thing is because it's a really easy targeting option with a lot of networks. They just plug in gender so we keep a note of that. The income stuff and all that doesn't really matter that much. 

We're not really worried about it, but what this shows us is we can see that Technorati is reaching the wrong audience. So that sends up alarm bells in my mind that says maybe I don't want to buy there or if I'm already buying there I can use this to analyze my own business and what I'm already buying on. I need to go back to them and say what's actually happening, why are you doing this, why are you sending traffic from these websites, and how do we cut them out because they might not be converting for us. So if we look with Technorati, I mean, Famous DC, and Wonder How, too are all under 18 websites.

Andrew:	Max, I don't want to interrupt your flow and I hope I'm not being obtuse here, but I'm not seeing how you got. How did you get the information for Technorati and Advertising.com and Media Buy? Can you show us how you get one of those?

Max:	[??] Yeah you go to CBC.ca here and you pull up the profiles. All these Advertising.com and Technorati and Value Click, they're all just media buy networks. They own networks of sites that you buy on and then you can go to those networks and buy media through them.

Andrew:	OK.

Max:	So we categorized them using What Runs Where and if you look through their ad server tags manually, you can usually tell where it's being served from if you know . . . 

Andrew:	Oh, so What Runs Where told you that on Value Click they were reaching this audience and on Technorati they were . . . 

Max:	It told me on Value Click they were reaching these websites and then I went and looked up these demographics.

Andrew:	Oh I see. So when you say that you, actually can you show me how you did Value Click?

Max:	Yes.

Andrew:	Or how you do Advertising.com? Can you bring up a new tab and show that or is that going to take too long?

Max:	It's not going to take that long. I'm giving examples, here CBC.ca is a media buy.

Andrew:	Right.

Max:	So what I did is I pulled CBC.ca into these, too, and I looked at the demographics and I recorded it.

Andrew:	OK, but what . . . 

Max:	For CBC.ca I recorded it.

Andrew:	OK. And where does Value Click come in then? Would you type in Value Click into Quantcast?

Max:	No. Value Click is just a categorization. It's a network they bought the media off.

Andrew:	OK. So how did you know that? That they were buying ads on Value Click?

Max:	WhatRunsWhere categorized that for me.

Andrew:	OK.

Max:	So if we look at traffic sources for [??] source right here. But if I was to see this ad from Netflix right here. I can see the tag right here. Google ads DG Doubleclick.net.

Andrew:	Right.

Max:	That's an ad being served through the Doubleclick exchange.

Andrew:	OK. I can see through that, that's an ad that's run through the Doubleclick exchange. But how would I then go and find out where, what demographics they're reaching with that Doubleclick, Google ad?

Max:	Because I'm seeing this Netflix on Alexa. I would go in and I would type in Alexa.com into Alexa and Quantcast.

Andrew:	Oh I see. So if you're doing it manually. What you're saying is you have to say Value Click is serving up this ad on a website on CBC.ca. There's a Value Click ad there for Parody Water's competitor. Then you go back and you do a search on CBC.ca. I see, OK. And on Alexa, that's where you get the demographic. So it's just really manual. What you're saying is you go in, you get a list of all the websites where they're running. Either you do it manually, where you and your friends are searching for where traffic is coming to your competitor's sites and then you search for the demographics of their sites. Or you go to What Runs Where, which will do it for you.

Max:	Exactly, exactly.

Andrew:	OK.

Max:	And we're actually working on building this demographic profiling that I'm showing you. We're actually building this into What Runs Where.

Andrew:	Ok.

Max:	As I'm talking, our engineers are actually building this in. So we'll take that step out. That's one of our main products.

Andrew:	OK. All right. I don't want to get too hung up on the process to collect the demographics. I do understand big picture. 

We collect demographics on the sites where our competitor's ads are running.

A:	This is why you don't want to get hung up. It takes a lot of time which is why we only took the top couple websites from each network and only ran those just [??]. 

General overview.

Andrew:	OK. 

Max:	What we're doing here is we are limiting our risk. We're trying to get a bunch of facts when we go buy we can try bad sites without spending a dime on them.

Andrew:	OK.

Max:	Head yourself for success. Once we have this list the next thing that we're going to do is we are going to look at the banners.

What do they have in common? We go back to What Runs Where. 

I'll give you a different example. 

Andrew:	Let's give it a moment to come up on my screen. What Runs Where will show people the banners they are using.

Max:	Yeah. Otherwise you can do it manually as well. When you see a banner for Netflix right click, save as and put it in a folder. 

You can compare all of them when it comes time.

Andrew:	OK. I've seen entrepreneurs do this where they create a folder with all their competitor's ads and they just keep saving them whenever they come across them and their friends and family do it.

Max:	Exactly. 

Andrew:	I've also seen some who create Grape scripts which will go in and scrape it. Anyway you can get it the bottom line you're telling us is see what ads your competitors are running.

Collect them somehow.

Max:	You have to. More information is never a bad thing.

Andrew:	OK. All right. This is now for a similar site to Charity Water. It's World Vision. We're seeing the kinds of ads that they run.

Max:	Exactly. We can look at all these ads and we can say what do they have in common? Just off the top of my head they have people.

I see a lot of eyes looking at me. Instead of just a picture of somebody I see somebody literally staring at me from the ad.

Other things are it shows the direct impact or it says what you need to give so $20 provides a family with water. It appeals to help save a life today, help disaster victims. 

I would go and I would start to make a list. What do these banners have in common? For a tack project they were using celebrity bottles.

For Water.org it was just a clear direct message. It was just saying give money it will help bring clean water.

For World Vision it used current events so it used Haiti, Japan, the tsunami and black Friday. 

It uses current things that are happening to keep the banners relevant. 

Andrew:	I see.

Max:	The people are actually looking at you in the ads.

Andrew:	I also see they have a call to action button on all of their ads.

Max:	Oh absolutely. You need a call to action on any ad. That's sort of a given. 

Andrew:	There's look just like a button like I'm meant to press it.

Max:	Yeah.

Andrew:	OK. All right so what you're saying is now collect all the banners and look for what they might have in common.

Max:	[??]

Andrew:	Sorry?

Max:	Yeah. Then we plan in Canada for the same thing as Show Children. Looking at here for the impact of the product for the good impact of the project and show the problems.

It showed me millions of people don't have clean drinking water or something like that.

Andrew:	OK.

Max:	From there we can go and say what we want to try and put on our banner. We can try to combine them.

We can test to see if it might be worth it. Here just looking at it I would say we are going to use children and choices. 

We're going to have a child looking at somebody and we're going to show the direct impact and what the project actually does.

What we actually did for Charity Water is we actually built two different banners.

Andrew:	Well wait. You had your designers create banners based on what you just saw all these ads had in common?

Max:	Exactly. 

Andrew:	OK.

Max:	Exactly. We didn't rip the banners or anything.

Andrew:	Right.

Max:	We took elements of them and combined them into our own banners to try seeing if that would work. We created two very different banners to try and test different ends of the spectrum to see if we could identify something that's working.

Andrew:	OK. Let's take a look at them.

Max:	Here's our first one.

Andrew:	While you bring them up I'll say this is just for this session you put this together. You had your designers . . .

Max:	Yeah.

Andrew:	. . . create these just for this session. Just so the audience can learn how you would work through this.

Max:	Yeah.

Andrew:	OK. 

Max:	We're going to give them to Charity Water as well. 

Andrew:	Let's take a look. It's not we; you are going to give this to Charity Water because you're the guy who put in all this effort.

I should not get any of the credit. All I get is the benefit of being the audience. 

Max:	We can put your name on it if you want.

Andrew:	OK. Talk to me about what these banners have in common, how you use these banners.

Max:	OK. So it's a rotating GIF. The first thing. I'm going to wait until it gets back to the first song and I'm going to talk about, because it will keep going. 

Andrew:	Can you hit escape on the first slide or something just so it could freeze on it? Or you know what, we'll see them. You can keep describing them. If it moves away as you talk it's fine.

Max:	The first one shows a child by a dirty river. It says, "Millions of children drink dirty water every day." So that's showing the problem and the child's actually looking at you. We've combined both of these. The next thing is a dirty water bottle and it says, "Would you give this to your thirsty children?" So it's sort of a provocative thing that we came up with saying this is dirty water, would you give your kids this? Because if you remember, the demographics we're trying to hit are 35 plus. These people are much more likely to have children than somebody that's 20 or 18. Or be thinking about kids. Then we say you have the power to help people and there's a call to action on the top right that says, 'Help Now.' So we've sort of combined all these different elements into one thing.

Andrew:	I see.

Max:	That's one of the banners we built and the other one is a different size. It says, "Everyday millions of children living around the world are drinking dirty water. You can change that and have a positive impact." And then we have pictures of all these kids and, you know, they're looking at you and this banner is just going and going and going. There's no real call to action on this banner and since you said that, maybe that's something that we test. If we saw that it was doing easily, but it's just sort of an impact banner. There definitely should be a call to action on that.

Andrew:	OK. Interesting that I've noticed something, too, that's useful. So what I'm learning is, if you do see all the banners all at once. Certain things will pop out.

Max:	Exactly.

Andrew:	I don't have any experience looking for banners that work. I have experience hiding banners from my browser using ad blocking software. But I don't have experience figuring out what works and I think I picked out a couple of things that are worth testing and it's interesting to see how easy it is to do.

Max:	Yeah, the call to action. The call to action is one of the most important things. Obviously, I didn't realize it wasn't on there. To be honest it's completely my fault. It prompts the user to actually [??].

Andrew:	We're seeing how the process works.

Max:	Exactly. 

Andrew:	Go for it.

Max:	I think you've proved the point perfectly that you're showing, you know, you can just look at it and you start picking out stuff. You start seeing everyone has sort of a [??]. The call to action has an actual button on it. And I mean I just see eyes everywhere. That's just me.

Andrew:	OK. I wouldn't have noticed the eyes, actually, but now that you pointed it out, they do just stare at me. Very haunting, it captures my attention instantly. Especially that little girl with her finger in her mouth. I can't stop looking at that photo.

Max:	Exactly. That's sort of what you want. You want something that gets to somebody's heart. You want something that's in the browser and you want something that makes stop and go wait a second, I need to read this, I need to click on this, I need to do something. That's definitely important.

The next thing that we do. We're going into the actual buying process now. So right now we have a general idea of demographics and we have some banners that we built. Great start. This will almost save you thousands and thousands of dollars testing because you don't need to start from scratch. So you're already using something that's already working and you have an idea of [??].

Andrew:	So I've heard of going to Odesk to look for designers. You're also suggesting going to online marketing forums and hiring people there?

Max:	Yeah. If you don't have a designer and you want to find a designer, you go to Odesk.com or an online marketing forum and there are designers that hang around there and do work for fairly cheaply. You can get a banner made for $10, $20 a banner. You don't need to pay some big agency hundreds of dollars a banner, thousands of dollars a banner. You're not Subway or anybody like that. You're not a big brand and you shouldn't have to pay like a big brand. Or you can make them yourself if you have any skills. I do not. I use Paint. I'm very good at Paint. [laughs]

So there are two ways to buy, in my mind. The first is direct site. So it's going directly to a website and say I want to place an ad on Mixergy.com. I go contact you. I say Andrew, I want to place an ad on your website, let's talk, and then we negotiate a buy. I give you some money, you put my ad on your website.

The other way is a network buy. So what this is, is it's a network like Value Click or Advertising.com that has hundreds upon thousands upon tens of thousands of websites like your website in their network, and they were managed by, so they put your ad across this network of websites, and manage the [??] through, so they know where it's doing well, and where it's not doing well, and they help you optimize it, and you give them money, and they take... That's how they do it. They pay their publishers what you give them, and they take a percentage.

Andrew:	OK.

Max:	I'm going to go through quickly the network side.

Andrew:	OK.

Max:	Because that's the easiest level. We'll go back a step, and then we'll go forward again.

Andrew:	All right. By the way, Max, how's our connection? It seems a little bit like it's a little laggy. You can hear me now, right?

Max:	Yeah. I can hear you.

Andrew:	Oh, great. Great. There was a little loss there in the conversation, but what I was trying to say earlier was that one of the things that I learned from the interview that you did with me on Mixergy was that ugly banners, amateurish, even, looking banners ended up doing better for you than the professional polished highly beautiful looking artwork type banners.

Max:	Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Ugly works. I'm going to give him another shout out, 'cause I know you love him. I was talking with Noah, the guy that was over at App Sumo, and we were talking about this, and they were saying that they saw something similar. I'm not sure of the exact story, or something, but they definitely agreed with that sentiment. I know that you think Noah's the market genius.

Andrew:	I think you called him my boyfriend, because I complimented him a few times.1

Max:	I did. He and I were talking yesterday. He said he loved you very much.

Andrew:	Good.

Max:	But yeah, ugly works. Everybody knows this. People are so used to seeing shiny branded banners that they get banner blindness to that concept alone, and ugly definitely works, and another thing that works that I didn't say in the interview that people need to jump on, as you know, not another sneaky trick, or something like that, but it's just good marketing online, is make it blend in with the actual website layout. I'll give you an example in this realm. Publisher's side. Publishers used to make a ton of money, and still do, by placing Google AdWords or Yahoo's actual platform on their website, and making it blend in to their menu bar, or their layout. It seems like a part of their website, so people are more apt to click it, because they think they're just clicking through the website.

Andrew:	Yeah.

Max:	Same thing with your advertising. If your website allows you to, why not make your advertising similar to their layout so people can sit there and say, "Oh. New section of the site. Oh, it's an ad? I've already read it. The message is already in my mind." That's definitely something...

Andrew:	I've seen that.

Max:	... if your website allows you to.

Andrew:	I've seen that, and I've seen people fall for it, and think that it's part of the website, and just click on the ad, and I say 'fall for it,' but as far as they're concerned, they seem pretty happy. They're completely oblivious to the fact that they clicked on what was an ad, and ended up on another site.

Max:	Yeah. It's just a way to get eyeballs to your ads, a way to increase your click-through rate. We used to do it with, I'm not going to say which traffic source, but we used to do it with a certain dating site, and we used to put a similar looking banner on a dating site for other dating websites. They were a free dating site, and that worked phenomenally, 'cause users thought that it was just somebody on their site, then they go to another dating site. It was a way to get them from one place to another. 

Andrew:	All right. What's next? You were about to take us through both ad buying processes.

Max:	Yeah. The network, as I said, is sort of a collection of websites you can buy on, but the problem with network buys is that they're going to ask you for 2.5, 5 to 10, $15,000, depending on the network as a prepay, just to say, 'You're worth my time,' actually. A staff member offers to optimize your campaign, and traffic it, and he goes, "I need some spend to do it." A lot of people don't have that. I didn't have that much money when I started buying. I wasn't ready to test ten networks and plop down $50 to $75,000 right away, so what did I do? 

I found this wonderful website called AdBuyer.com. And what AdBuyer allows you to do, is it allows you to buy. I took some screenshots. It allows you to buy on multiple networks with their random inventory, so the inventory they have leftover, so you can test and see what works on those networks. 

Here, we went to AdBuyer, we're setting up a rent media campaign for Charity Water, and then we can select here, we go to Manual Targeting, and we can select what network we want to target. I set it to All Networks, and if you think you have a network that does not perform well, you can take it out, and then after we run through it, we can do a publisher performance for it and see what networks are sending conversions and clicks and who's interested. So we can quickly go through and see what networks are really imported and what networks maybe show promise, and then I can go directly to those networks and say we want to buy there. So it's all about limiting risk. 

With media buying, you're never going to have something where you're going to go I'm (inaudible), I guarantee to make money. There's always risk. It's business. But it's about how do I limit that risk. So this is where the demographic stuff comes in use, because if we go back to the demographic stuff again, we can see all these networks, and we can see that some of them just aren't [hanging] with demographics on their network. And if we see that, we may not want to test those networks. We might want to keep a close eye on those networks when we're testing it to make sure we don't spend a lot of money, because maybe they're not going to perform. 

Once we see what's performing in terms of our banners, as well, we'll [??] the banners that are working, and we'll start building more variance of those banners to try to maximize performance from those banners. So we'd start creating more variations of them with different things, and we'd just start testing different of the banners. So, as you said, you have that call to action button, which has different words in the button. We test different colors of the button to see what gets people's eyes the most. The wonderful thing about AdBuyer is that it allows you to do all of this for $500. That's their minimum buy, so you can start buying for $500 versus having pop down (inaudible).

Andrew:	I see.

Max:	So that's one way, and that's really a high-level overview of that. The other way is something I like a lot more for people that are starting media buying, which is a Website called SiteScout.com. I mentioned it in my interview that they're an RTB real-time buying platform.

Andrew:	SiteScout.com.

Max:	Yep. And I put it into the notes, but I did not take screen shots. But what they do is something similar to AdBuyer, so they re-broker inventory from all these different exchanges. But instead of allowing you to target by network, they allow you target by Website. So you can go and you can say I want to buy on CBC, and if they have it in their network, you can select that exact Website, select the exact placement on the Website, so where you want to put that ad on that Website and test it. Same thing, it's $500 for testing them. 

Now, how do we figure out what Websites we want to target here? Because it's a really good way to test banners, it's a really good way to take out that black box from the network step. So instead of saying somebody else [go, man] just buy for me, you have complete control over where you're buying and how you cut Websites and what Websites you do. So one thing about SiteScout that I'm going to go back and say is you can up these Websites same as we look up targets. 

You can look up SiteScout's targets using a lot of the same (inaudible) to figure out if their demographics match what you're trying to hit, which is a good way to limit risk. Another important thing is when you're doing direct site buys, what's already running on that Website? You want to get an idea of who's already going to the place you're trying to buy. So it's really easy to do manually. You just go to Mixergy.com, and you can see what ads are running on Mixergy if you have advertising. WhatRunsWhere gives you a really easy way to do it, as well. We have a feature that allows you to search the same as you can search advertisers:	You can also search Websites.

Anyways, I'll show you in one second if I don't break something. But we allow you to search, point here, we allow you to search placements, as well. 

Andrew:	Let's give it a moment to come up. There it is, it just came up. But while you're doing that, let me see if I understand what you're saying so far. You're saying, Andrew, you've got the banner ads created, and you know the demographics that other sites that are similar to yours are targeting and are working for them. What I want you to do now is go to AdBuyer and look for sites that match those demographics, and run the ads that you just created on those sites and do small ad buys.

Max:	Exactly.

Andrew:	OK. All right.

Max:	So we can go to Wellness.com.

Andrew:	Right.

Max:	And you can see the ads that are showing up on Wellness.com manually. We can look at what ads are there. There should be an ad coming up here. There's an ad there, there's an ad there. We can see how we can keep refreshing. We can go back every couple of days. That seems like a waste of time, but you can do it. 

Andrew:	Give it a moment to load up on my screen, also. It's almost coming in. If you go to the top there, I see now. So, the ads on their site right now are for American Express Gold. Actually, two American Express Gold ads on the same page. Great. All right.

Max:	And some Google ads. What we do also is with this we can go in the past 30 days. We can go in the past 100 days on this wellness.com. We can go in 24 hours a day and we can say on wellness.com, who are the top advertisers? Who's actually advertising on wellness.com? We can see just answers, the top one and then answers list is the second. And we can see:	what are the top banner ads we're using? There's a Living Social ad at the top.

Right here on wellness.com this is really a random example I picked, but here is something. There is a charity thing right here to end muscular dystrophy.

Andrew:	Can you give that a moment to come up on the screen? And while it's coming up on the screen, help me understand what you're doing here. You're seeing which ads are running on this one website that you're considering buying an ad on, right?

Max:	Exactly.

Andrew:	And you're trying to see how often the ads run?

Max:	No. I'm just trying to see what the top ads are and who's advertising there because if I go to that website and I see a bunch of similar stuff, maybe not competitors, but I see charity stuff. I'm just making sure that's not completely off base. I'm making sure that if I go to the website I don't see like . . . You don't want your brand or your charity associated with something like bad. If I go to [??] I'm making sure I don't see like "meet your Russian wife". That's all. 

Andrew:	I see. 

Max:	Or I'm making sure that I don't see a lot of games for young kids because that tells me that young kids are going to that website. The same way, we can see the top text ads. We can see the ad types on that website. We can see it's mostly text ads so this website may not be for us. Almost about 3% of their ads are actual banners. 

Andrew:	I see.

Max:	We can still try and buy on it, but we do that or we go and do it manually. And then, we plug the site in to [??] or we go into wellness.com, and we get some details and we look into the audience. Oh, it's looking like, the gender thing isn't but the age thing, it's looking like it's the right age for us. It's looking like it's 45+. It's looking like it's heavily female, but it's still something that's worth testing. I'd probably test it.

Andrew:	You would still test it.

Max:	If I was trying to buy it.

Andrew:	Why? What is it about this? I see clearly that it doesn't have the gender breakdown that you like. You like to see more male than female.

Max:	Like I said, gender breakdown is really secondary. To me, it's more age at the very beginning.

Andrew:	I see.

Max:	Here, it matters what you're buying for. If you're buying for a diet product, obviously you want more women than men. If you're buying for a jewelry product, you want more women than men. If you're buying for a "build muscle, get ripped". I'm not trying to sound stereotypical or anything, but if you're bass pro shops you're probably going to go for more men just because of the demographic of your actual customers.

That's when it comes here to charity. Both people get it. It's really age for me that's important.

Andrew:	I see. You want people who are old enough to get it and have enough money to spend. 

Max:	Yeah. And then, in the same way [??] that's the thing. You figure out what's working, where I'm seeing what's working, and then I contact them out. I go directly to that website, and I will try to contact that webmaster and say, "I want to buy here. We're already buying inventory from you, but we want to go direct with you. We want to get more of your inventory. We want to try and lock this down. We want to create a barrier to entry for other people trying to buy similar stuff."

That's really where you're going to start to make good money. You can make really good money using these other [??], but when you go direct that's really where I make money. I know my good friend, and you know him as well, Ilya Lichtenstein. Actually, I don't know how to pronounce his name. Anyways . . .

Andrew:	You got it right. It's Lichtenstein.

Max:	He did a course with you, and I agree with him 100%. You want a middleman wherever possible, and this strategy gives you a way to do it. The real meat of the strategy, what's really important, is it gives you a way to limit your risks, and that's what is really important because, as I said, media buying is never something that you're going to throw up something and you'll make a ton of money. It's about how do I limit risk? So, instead of how do I stop myself from spending $5,000 and getting nothing back, like I did on Bleacher Report when I was starting media buying. I filled up a media buy on Bleacher Report, didn't really do any of this research. I just thought and said hey this is a sports website, do well with a bunch of products that I was working with. Threw it up, lost $4,500, no 4.8 out of the $5,000 and terrible.

Andrew:	Because you bought an ad on the wrong spot?

Max:	Exactly, exactly.

Andrew:	Yep.

Max:	And if I had done all of this and tried to pre-qualify stuff, I probably wouldn't have bought on Bleacher Report and would have saved that money. Because I would have seen that there were certain discrepancies with that website with what I was trying to advertise and who I was actually hitting. I didn't do that. I was brand new. I was like, OK, cool, throw down $5,000 and see what happens. That was really, really bad idea.

Andrew:	OK. And by the way, let me say this, too. For anyone who didn't take the Ilya Lichtenstein course, what Max is referring to is, what he taught is, that you should just buy directly from websites. That you shouldn't go to a network that's going to be middle man, that's going to take a piece of the action before it gives it to the publisher. Go directly to the publisher and make a deal. Max, what you're showing us is how to find the right publisher, based on the demographics, that people in your space are already advertising to. Because if they're spending money . . . 

Max:	Exactly.

Andrew:	. . . they've taken the risk and they've done the experiments to figure out who the right audience is to target. You want to piggyback off their experiences and their losses.

Max:	Exactly, exactly. 100% correct.

Andrew:	Yep.

Max:	And then the other thing, you know, step eight, just to finish up quickly, step eight is our last step. 

Andrew:	Yep.

Max:	It's rinse and repeat. It's the simplest step. Once you figure out what's working, you go back, you start again, you use this knowledge that you already have and you go see how you can scale. You see how you can find more placements, more networks that have similar types of traffic that you can go test on. You go and test them out and then you actually scale the campaign up.

Andrew:	I see.

Max:	And that's where I'm a big fan of [??] space metrics. I don't really think branding has its place, but I think you can do both. So any business, even if you're just trying to do a branding campaign, you should definitely have result based metrics on the backend.

Andrew:	Result based metrics is what you're saying? Result based metrics.

Max:	Exactly, so you have something. You have an action that you want done. You want people to come to your website. You can't just say you want to throw these ads on there. I just want 100,000 people to see them. Those are the type of people that when you're marketing or if you run an agency or all these other [??] people, because they'll just give you money. It's as easy as money, you can put it anywhere. They don't really care. They just want people to see them. That's pretty much, but if we have time, I'll be extra nice. I'll give you a couple extra goodies about media buying.

Andrew:	Yeah. Tell me.

Max:	I'll give you some bonus stuff that, off the top of my head, your audience would probably find useful.

Andrew:	OK.

Max:	So a couple things. There's something called a frequency cap and when you're buying. I'm going to let this come up. So a frequency cap is how many times the ad is served to the user per day. No matter where you're buying, you need to set a frequency cap. My favorite frequency cap is two or three per day. It really depends what you're trying to achieve, but I found that that works best. That's just so that a user, if you're on a website that user goes to a ton. Let's say they're on Myspace or something. I don't know who uses Myspace anymore, but let's say somebody hypothetically used Myspace instead. They were on Myspace and they kept clicking through profiles and they saw ads, they wouldn't see your ad 700 times a day, because you're paying on a CPM, which is cost per thousand impressions. So you're not paying them per click, you're paying per thousand impressions. You don't want to waste these impressions on one person if they've already seen your ad and they're just not going to click on it.

Andrew:	I see.

Max:	That's tip number one. Tip number two. When you actually go directly to a network or a website, you're going to have to do something called an insertion order or an IO. What this is, is this is the actual agreement that says I'm going to put down this money for a media buy, here are the terms of our buy. Read it. That's the first tip, because that's where the Bleacher Report, one of the reasons I got into so much trouble is I didn't actually read the thing. 

There was a lot of legal print and I was like, OK cool. And we spent half our money of something and saw it was losing maybe $2,000 and we really made back nothing and we went back to get the money back. And they were like well in your insertion order it says you have to sign, you have to spend all this money and you signed it. 

So if we had read that, we never would have actually signed it. So that's another tip. On the insertion order you should be able to demographic target, which is where this sort of comes in handy again. On websites, you can ask them to exclude certain demographics. So the first with anything to do with a credit card, you exclude anybody 18 and under, because they just don't have credit cards. The demographic targeting is really, really important. [??] the frequency capping, your out-clause. 

One out-clause is how quick can you stop the buy. If you decide it's not working out, how quickly you can say, I want this to stop, or I want to change something, or I want to get out of it. The standard is 24 to 48 hours and anything more than that I would be really, really wary about. Let's say your ramping into buying, you're spending $1000 a day. It stops working and you go to them and you say, I need to get out. They are, like, cool, we'll stop you in three days. You just spent $3000 more that you didn't need to spend. It will cost you thousands and thousands of dollars. That's important on the assertion order, as well. That's off the top of my head about [??].

Andrew:	OK.

Max:	Going back to banners, I'll give you a couple tips about banner bindness.

Andrew:	OK.

Max:	It's chalk full of goodies. What banner bindness is, you, as a user, start seeing ads, and you see so much you start ignoring them. It's sort of like an ad burnout. You see this on all ads. You throw up an ad and it will do great. It will have a phenomenal click rate. Over time this click rate will go down as more and more people see the ad. How do you revitalize your ads? 

There's a couple ways. One, you could build completely new ads and you could go back to testing them. There are little things that you can do with your ad to help prolong the life of it. One thing that we found is putting a different color border around the outside of the ad so it stands out from the page it's in. Putting a red or a bright green border or something around the edge really catches people's attention. That's really great for your ad. Putting a flashing arrow or something on the ad. If you have a static area, make it flash. Just change the little parts of the ad that you think will stand out and test it. Once your ad performance start going down, start rotating these in. If you're keeping the same ads, you're going to still have the same baseline but your click rate will go up on certain ads. You're going to extend the life of that ad over time.

Andrew:	OK.

Max:	The person that are seeing the ad, it's just getting them to notice it again.

Andrew:	I see. I hadn't heard of that. What else? One more.

Max:	One more. I'll just think quickly then.

Andrew:	How about this?

Max:	You're asking me for one bit about a huge field, I'm trying to think of the most useful tip.

Andrew:	All right. Let me ask a follow-up question to something you said earlier. What we've talked about is, how to look at the demographics that you're competitors are advertising to. We've talked about male versus female, 35 and older versus 18 and under, or 35 and under. Beyond that, what else should we be looking for when we're trying to look for patterns in our competitor's ad buying, beyond gender and age?

Max:	Beyond gender and age. Those are the two main things for me in this case. Another type of thing is the type of website that they are showing up on. What we really like to do when we want to identify ad targets, we go where we're trying to find something. We go to [??], and they have related websites, so what websites are related to this website.

Andrew:	I see.

Max:	[??] has that as well. I'll give you a different example than cherry water, because it's easier off the top of my head. If I can see that Groupon is advertising a deal for a sports equipment store. They are advertising on NFL.com, NBA,com, NHL.com, Goal.com's sports store, whatever.com. I start to see a trend between the types of sites they're advertising on. I can start to see, not only the demographics that match up, I can also see the type of website I should be looking for. When I actually go to some place like [??], or I go to a network, I can say we've seen this doing really well on sports sites, can you put this up on your sports site. Or I can go find sports sites and go put it on there and hedge my risk there. You lost your mic there.

Andrew:	I keep muting the mic whenever I hear any noise in the background here to keep it off mic, or whenever I see that your audio is bleeding into my mic. All right. That makes a lot of sense. Tell you what, let's bring up the website and I'll ask you one final question. Bring up your website so people can see it. I still see Alexa but your side is coming up whatrunswhere.com. The question, while that's coming up, that I wanted to ask you is, what's on your t-shirt?

Max:	What's on my t-shirt?

Andrew:	Yeah.

Max:	I was up until four last night working.

Andrew:	OK.

Max:	I got up this morning, jumped on meetings and calls, and I threw on the first thing that just happened to be, people are going to say I did it on purpose, but I didn't, happened to be our trade show t-shirt. It says, "I know what ads you're running." On the back it says, "whatrunswhere.com" That's really what we do. We provide competitive intelligence and show what ads everybody's running.

[Inaudible] Besides that, I did add another tab up here. I have my interview. You interviewed me (the post is on November 23rd) a couple weeks ago, talking to me about how I got started. It's turned into an extraordinarily controversial interview, but overwhelmingly something that got a lot of positive response that I'm very happy about. 

Andrew:	It got a huge positive response, and the few people who are negative I bet you are going to end up buying this. And most negative people are watching us right now because you paid for this, because you know that there's value here and you're curious. And you should be. We want to learn from guys who've done it. Max, I want to bring up your website one more time--I want people to see your site. They should know my website already, but I want to make sure that they're familiar with your website, because I want them to check this out. 

You've taken this course, you understand the value here behind buying ads intelligently. You know that Max has done it. No one's doubted that Max has done it. That's the interesting thing--no one has said "Hey, this guy is not for real." They've all said "He's for real" and then they've picked little things to have problems with. Other people in this industry, who've heard about you and known about you for a long time, thank me for doing this interview, the interview was up on the website. 

Max:	One person doubted me! 

Andrew:	What? 

Max:	You doubted me! You said, "Did you really make as much money as you said you did?" And you can attest that I came up after and showed you my financial statements. 

Andrew:	It's true. I did! I don't do it because I want to be a jerk, but because I want to make sure that the guests who are on the show are solid people. Really, to your credit--not only did you have the proof, but you had the proof like "that!" You said, "You know what, Andrew. I'm going to log into my website and I'll show you things that I don't ordinarily show people." Actually, what did you log into, the dashboards to what?

Max:	I logged into a bunch of affiliate networks, and then I also showed you my financial statements from my account. 

Andrew:	I think you even held up your financial statements up on the camera and you turned your desktop on so I could see you logging into your different services. In fact, between you and I, there were little things that you covered up with notepads on the screen and I still saw it. It's all stuff that we all expected. I'm not going to go blab about it. What I got out of it is that this business was hugely profitable for you. You were bringing in a lot of money just buying ads like this and then selling those ads to affiliate offers. 

I'm not doing this because I think that my audience is necessarily going to send traffic to affiliate offers. I think a lot of them are coming at this the way that I am, saying "I've got a great product. I want to find more customers for it. Where do I buy ads cheaply and not waste money on failed ideas?" And that's what we're coming into this for.
 
Max:	Absolutely. Using this strategy is how we did all of that buying. We've done buying for non-affiliate products, too, and it's worked phenomenally for them as well. The last comment I'll make is that you won't always succeed with media buying. You will lose money at some point. You can't win all the time. But what we're doing here--I've said it again and again, I'm really trying to stress this--is we're trying to hedge risk. We're trying to stop you from spending money and losing money needlessly, so that when you lose it's a small loss and, when you win, it's a huge win. And you make a ton of money. 

Andrew:	That's a great place to leave it. Thank you. And thank you all for watching. I hope you check out whatrunswhere.com. Thanks for doing the session. 

Max:	Thanks, Andrew.