The media buying process involves purchasing ad space, to put it simply. While media buys are still an important part of any paid media campaign, this process is getting harder for a number of reasons.
Fragmented channels, AI automation, privacy-safe targeting, CTV and OTT growth, retail media, social platforms, and measurement complexity are all making it a challenge to navigate media buying in advertising today. Because of this increasing complexity, media buying is no longer just about purchasing ad space; it requires planning, negotiating, activating, measuring, optimizing, and reallocating ad spend.
In this blog, our SVP of Paid Media, Meghan Parsons, will discuss what media buys entail and the benefits of working with a digital media buying agency to develop your next strategy.
What You’ll Learn:
- Why Media Buys Still Matter in the Era of Automation
- Types of Media Buying: From Direct to Programmatic
- Building an Effective Media Buying Strategy
- The Role of a Media Buyer in Digital Marketing
- Choosing a Media Buying Agency: What to Look for
What Are Media Buys?
Media buys entail buying paid ad inventory on a combination of digital and traditional channels. A media buy could include the following ad types:
- Search
- Social media
- Display
- Connected TV (CTV)
- Audio
- Retail media
- Digital out-of-home
- Radio
- TV
The media buying process is also very involved today, requiring negotiation, platform setup, bidding, trafficking, optimizing, and reporting, all of which we’ll get into more detail about below.
Why Media Buys Still Matter in the Era of Automation
In today’s online marketing landscape, it’s all about automating processes as much as possible, and media buying is no exception.
With the right approach to digital media ad buys, you can ensure your ads reach the right people on the right platforms and at the right time. You’ll make the most of available ad spend, hone your targeting efforts, and optimize overall cost-effectiveness and ROI.
With the development of innovations like programmatic buying, AI in advertising, and overall automation, this process is even more efficient in helping businesses land high-performing ad placements. These advancements allow for increasingly cost-effective and highly targeted ads that connect with audiences and drive conversions.
Google makes online media buying even easier with campaigns like Performance Max and AI Max, both of which can help you optimize your paid search, display, shopping, and video ads on Google and Google Partner platforms.
While marketing automation has evolved, AI within media buying platforms, dating back over a decade to Google’s smart bidding settings, has fundamentally transformed the landscape. Even with these powerful tools, an effective strategy remains essential. Media buyers must still expertly guide the key pillars of success: budgets, audiences, creative inputs, exclusions, brand safety, measurement, and optimization.
Media Buying & Planning: What’s the Difference?
Although they’re similar and work together to optimize ad campaigns, there are some nuances to each to keep in mind.
Media planning works to strategize the advertising approach. This process requires planners to decide on the specific channels to use based on audience insights and develop goals and an overarching strategy to achieve those goals.
From there, media buyers set about negotiating deals and actually purchasing the ad space on the designated channels.
Here is a little comparison to clarify the differences between media buying and media planning:
| Model | Purpose |
| Media Planning | Decides audience, budget, channel mix, timing, KPIs, creative strategy, forecasting, and flight planning to prepare ad campaigns. |
| Media Buying | Executes ad placements, negotiates costs, launches campaigns, monitors delivery, optimizes ad strategies, performs QA checks, and handles reporting. |
With a better idea of how media buying works, what are media buys that are worth investing in based on your campaign goals?
AI’s Role in Media Buying
AI can streamline the media buying process in several key ways:
- Bid Optimization: Algorithms can instantly analyze all of your existing conversion data, along with device types and search intent to optimize bids in real-time through programmatic buying, which can help maximize your return on ad spend (ROAS).
- Audience Modeling: AI uses first-party data, predictive modeling, and machine learning to develop accurate lookalike audiences, including their behaviors and predicted quality.
- Creative Testing: Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) uses AI to mix and experiment with different creative elements, including headlines, images, and calls to action to determine which combination yields the best performance.
- Forecasting: Based on historical data, AI predicts future campaign performance, with the ability to project metrics like cost per acquisition (CPA) and impressions, which can assist with planning.
- Budget Pacing: AI can perform continuous monitoring of ad spend on all channels for each campaign, automatically adjusting budgets based on which channels are underperforming and redirecting ad spend to the most worthwhile opportunities.
- Anomaly Detection: With the help of machine learning, AI determines what a “normal” campaign looks like and can identify and address any deviations, often by observing sudden changes in metrics like a drop in impressions.
- Media Planning Support: During the planning process, AI can recommend the most promising media mix using aggregate data, analyzing channels and formats to determine what media procurement strategy will help you achieve your goals.
However, to get the best results, you need to have a clear goal and use AI tools with clean conversion data led by human intelligence.
My Expert Opinion on Media Buys
In the old days of digital advertising, you would buy as much ad space as you could and see what worked. However, that old method of advertising just doesn’t cut it anymore, especially with today’s emphasis on precise targeting and personalization, which is where media buying comes in.
I find a solid media buying strategy to be essential to any ad campaign, whether for traditional or digital media. This process requires some real thought and entails measuring the results of your campaigns long after the initial buy.
There are also plenty of ways to approach media buys, with direct and programmatic options available in addition to social media ad buys and radio media buys. Ultimately, the right strategy will focus on the platforms and ad types that are most likely to resonate with your target audiences and optimize conversions, helping you stand apart from competitors taking a more generic approach to advertising.
A multi-channel approach is crucial here, as Marketing LTB found that these campaigns outperform single-channel ones by 20-45%. Frequent optimization of each campaign is equally important, with the same report finding that 57% of media buyers optimize every week, and 22% optimize daily.
Here, we’ll get into how to become a media buyer, the various types of media buying, and why it’s often best to leave media buyer jobs to an agency for optimum results.
The Role of a Media Buyer in Digital Marketing
A big component of successful campaigns is the involvement of experienced media buyers who know how to engineer them.
So, what is a media buyer, exactly? They can help you pinpoint the best channels, ad networks, deals, and bidding strategies to continually optimize performance.
For every campaign, a media buyer performs the following tasks:
- Strategy Execution: The media buyer works with your current media plan to determine how best to execute it, determining everything from the right audience segments and ad formats to the designated platforms that will get the best results.
- Negotiations: In traditional media buying, rates are negotiated directly with publishers, while in digital media buying there is no negotiation, pricing is determined through automated auctions, with media buyers focusing instead on bid strategy, targeting, and performance optimization to achieve the best CPM and cost per click (CPC).
- Platform Setup: Another key task involves translating your strategy into actual ad platforms like Meta Ads Manager and Google Ads, working to structure campaigns with geo-targeting and proper configuration, including the use of tracking pixels.
- Media Trafficking: Entails the technical delivery of ads, ensuring the use of the correct creative assets and destination URLs with proper tagging to minimize the risk of errors during upload.
- Quality Assurance (QA): In addition, media buyers check for any issues that can hinder ad campaigns, such as broken links and noncompliance with platform guidelines. They’ll also confirm that each media buy benefits from the right budgets and targeting constraints before launch.
- Optimization: Once the campaign is running, media buyers will continually optimize it to boost performance over time, taking steps like adjusting bids or reallocating budgets and refreshing creative as needed.
- Reporting: To consistently measure campaigns and determine what’s working and what needs improvement, media buyers implement Google Analytics 4 and other tracking tools for in-depth reporting and analytics. Insights gleaned from reports can then give more direction for your media buys.
- Budget Stewardship: Media buyers can help manage your budget across every campaign, ensuring that all ad spend drives meaningful revenue.
Types of Media Buying: From Direct to Programmatic
Depending on your objectives, your budget, and other factors, there are several types of media buying you can use, including direct buys, programmatic buys, social media ad buys, and radio media buys.
Let’s break down each and its unique benefits:
Direct Buys
This approach requires buyers to purchase ad space directly from publishers, whereas programmatic buys would use third-party platforms and middlemen to facilitate ad buys.
If you want to buy ad space from and build strong relationships with smaller publishers, this process is often the way to go. For instance, a franchise might want to advertise on an industry-related website like Entrepreneur.com, in which case it’d likely be best to buy directly from the site’s publisher.
The main advantages of direct buys include:
- The ability to effectively secure ad visibility on designated platforms
- Establish potentially long-lasting relationships with publishers that foster loyalty
- Fine-tune your contracts for more agreeable terms
When it comes to pricing for direct buys, negotiations typically involve flat rates, sponsorship deals, or cost per thousand impressions (CPM), often at a higher cost because of their more exclusive nature.
Programmatic Buys
If you want to expand your reach and automate the media buying process, you might opt for programmatic buying.
This process involves using algorithms and platforms to facilitate ad bidding and placement.
More specifically, programmatic buys use real-time bidding (RTB) or paying based on views (CPM) or clicks (CPC).
These ads can be bought through open ad exchanges or more exclusive private marketplaces (PMPs), based on changing audience behaviors.
Depending on the campaign, you might engage in programmatic bidding using demand-side platforms (DSPs), supply-side platforms (SSPs), or ad exchanges that connect both.
The main benefit of programmatic buying is its scalability, as you can push large quantities of ads and scale up or down as needed when your goals and budget change. It’s also capable of more precise targeting.
The cost for this approach tends to be a bit lower than direct buying, with most campaigns falling around $0.50 to $5 CPM, based on certain aspects such as ad format, network, and targeting.
Social Media Ad Buys
You can also purchase ad space on various social media platforms that your audiences use, typically by going directly through the designated platforms.
For example, you could develop and run ad campaigns using native tools on Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, TikTok, and other platforms. You can also fully tailor your ads based on interests, demographics, user behaviors, geofencing, and other parameters.
Like programmatic buying, social media ad buys are often cost-effective and highly scalable to help you get the most from your ad spend. CPC models often offer more flexibility when it comes to cost.
Audio Media Buys: Radio, Streaming, and Podcasts
You may also advertise with audio ads with the help of:
- Radio host ads
- Host-read podcast ads
- Programmatic audio ads that appear before, during, or after audio streams
- Ads on music streaming platforms like Spotify, iHeart, and SirusXM/Pandora
Some audio campaigns are easier to measure than others. For example, while radio can be difficult to track without designated URLs and localized promo codes, streaming audio gives you more direct insight into performance, allowing you to measure clicks, listens, and cost per mille, among other metrics.
In many cases, these media buys base their cost on cost per thousand listeners, which can often range from around $5 to $30. However, you may need to pay as much as thousands of dollars for placement on local and national radio stations, and you can expect to pay the most during peak listening hours.
Private Marketplace
A private marketplace, or PMP, is an invitation-only auction that involves premium publishers enabling a small group of buyers to bid on ad space.
One of the main benefits of using a PMP for online media buying is the ability to conduct real-time bidding while engaging in direct media buying through long-term relationships with publishers. In turn, you get consistent access to high-quality ad placements to reach the right people at the right time.
It’s best to use these media buys if you want superior inventory quality and better brand safety, elements you might not find with open web offers.
Preferred Deals
These types of media buying setups entail publishers offering premium ad space to a designated group of buyers at a fixed rate before open auctions occur.
However, media buyers don’t benefit from guaranteed ad inventory with this model.
You’ll want to use preferred deals if you want early access to high-quality ad spots with premium placements, but you also want to be able to pass on impressions that don’t align with your audience data.
Programmatic Guaranteed
This is a form of direct media buying where a publisher and a buyer make a deal on ad space with fixed rates and guaranteed inventory, unlike preferred deals.
These ads are ideal for brands preparing high-profile launches or campaigns with defined seasonality, helping ensure you get placements on brand-safe and high-quality websites.
CTV/OTT
A connected TV (CTV) or over-the-top (OTT) media buy puts your ads on video streaming services, whether through smart TVs and devices like Apple TV or Roku or via streaming platforms like Netflix and Hulu.
You can hypertarget these ads to reach audiences at specific times of day or in geographic areas for local advertising, such as car dealerships that want to advertise a particular dealership in the viewer’s region.
These placement strategies are great for reaching wider audiences and boosting brand recognition, with the ability to launch unskippable ads that hold people’s attention. They’re also much easier to track and measure than traditional TV commercials.
Retail Media Networks
Through a retail media network (RMN), media buyers can make a media purchase using a retailer’s dedicated digital platform, e.g., Amazon Ads and Walmart Connect.
The advantage here is the ability to connect with the retailer’s first-party data collected from its online customers. For example, a platform like Walmart might push an ad for a product that’s similar to what a customer previously purchased.
These ads are best-suited for ecommerce brands and companies offering consumer packaged goods, with ads that get directly in front of active, high-intent shoppers who are likely to buy.
Digital Out-of-Home
Digital out-of-home (DOOH) ads get your brand out into the world with digital signage in public areas. These placements can include digital billboards, transit hub screens, and many other types of digital displays.
Advertisers can purchase ad space for a specific time slot on these displays, helping connect with target audiences when they’re most likely to see them.
DOOH placements work best for increasing brand awareness and grabbing people’s attention in the real world, helping you stand apart from competitors that stick to online ads.
Influencer and Creator Media
Other types of media buying involve paid partnerships in a creator or influencer marketing strategy.
In these campaigns, advertisers collaborate with social media creators, influencers, and industry personalities to promote their products or services to highly engaged audiences. Partnerships may include sponsored content, product reviews, social media ads, or long-term brand ambassador relationships, with creators integrating promotions into their own voice and content style.
Content can range from personal endorsements and unboxing videos to detailed product demonstrations and exclusive offers, such as promo codes for followers. Brands can also leverage creator whitelisting, which allows them to run paid ads through a creator’s social media profile. This approach combines the targeting capabilities of paid media with the authenticity and trust associated with the creator’s brand.
Use this type of media buy when you want to build social proof, increase brand credibility, and reach audiences that may be more receptive to recommendations from trusted creators than traditional advertising.
Search Media Buys
Another option for media buying in advertising is paid search. These ads appear in text or visual shopping ads within search engine results, like those on Google or Bing.
High-quality search ads can appear similar to and rank higher than organic results, leading to more clicks, and shoppable search ads can shorten the customer journey from interest to purchase with little to no friction.
Try to use these ads in your media procurement strategy if you want to target high-intent audiences who are actively seeking your company, products, or services on search engines.
Building an Effective Media Buying Strategy
Ready to put together your own media buying strategy? Be sure to include the following key elements to succeed with your next approach:
1. Define Your Business Goal
As with any other type of campaign, media buying should also go off of clear and attainable goals you have in place.
Examples of potential goals could include brand awareness, increasing website visits, boosting conversions, or retargeting people who’ve visited your website previously.
The goals you put into place will subsequently determine which channels to use and how to use your ads on them. They’ll also indicate which metrics to use to measure your campaign results.
2. Identify Your Audience
Before developing any kind of media plan, it’s crucial to understand your target audience.
What platforms do they use? Where are they most likely to see and engage with your ads? What audience segments are you trying to reach? When are they most active on each platform?
In learning the ins and outs of your audience, look at aspects like age, income, interests, geographic location, and lifestyle. Not only will this data help with ad placement, but it will also give your ad messaging and visuals a clear direction.
3. Choose Your Channel Mix
When targeting your audiences, don’t put all of your ad spend into one or two channels. Instead, try to incorporate a mix of platforms to maximize your reach and brand recognition.
The more places you reach your audience, the more they’ll come to know and trust you over other competitors, especially if your ads speak to them.
You might have audiences that use a particular social media platform, while Google Ads can help connect with audiences across the web. Also, keep in mind that there are currently around 1.8 billion people who use video streaming services, making connected TV (CTV) and over-the-top (OTT) advertising potentially very lucrative.
4. Select the Buying Model
The goals you set and the platforms you use will also dictate the best kind of bidding strategy to use, whether it’s:
- Cost Per Mille (CPM): Ideal for brand awareness campaigns trying to maximize visibility.
- Cost Per Click (CPC): Suitable for lead generation campaigns and those in need of high-performing ads, including search, display, and social media ad buys.
- Cost Per Acquisition (CPA): With this setup, advertisers pay when people complete a particular action, such as completing contact forms or buying a product, making this strategy good for campaigns targeting high-value leads for maximum ROI.
- Cost Per View (CPV): Streaming ads frequently use this model, charging advertisers when viewers watch ads for a certain length of time.
- Real-Time Bidding (RTB): Great for campaigns that require scalability through programmatic advertising, utilizing dynamic price adjustments.
5. Set the Budget
Make sure you allocate sufficient ad spend for each channel.
The ones that generate the highest ROAS and overall ROI should ideally use the majority of your budget, while channels that don’t see as much engagement might be worth scaling down or dropping entirely, depending on performance.
If you notice that certain popular channels are underperforming, you may want to increase your ad spend for these.
Over time, you can adjust and scale your budget accordingly, which is particularly doable with programmatic buying.
6. Develop the Creative
Resonant ads, or ads that are meant to connect with your audience on an emotional, cultural, or personal level, will also incorporate the right creative assets based on the target demographic.
Contextual advertising, ads shown based on the content of a webpage and dynamic ads that change visuals and messaging according to audience and platform will maximize relevance across channels.
7. Implement Tracking
For both offline and online media buying, you need to set up proper tracking across platforms.
On your website, you’ll need to set up tracking scripts that are specific to each platform, e.g., base tracking code pixels for Meta Ads, TikTok Ads, and other sites.
Google Tags can also help you manage all marketing tags with a single solution to avoid the messiness of multiple scripts.
Also, set up UTM tracking parameters for destination URLs, which will help with attribution to tie your ads to analytics.
In configuring tracking, another critical step here is to establish what a successful interaction is, whether it’s downloading an app, making a purchase, or completing a lead form.
8. Launch With QA
Before launching your campaign, set up quality assurance checks to ensure success.
Consider whether ads are:
- Delivering impressions
- Reaching the right audience
- Using appropriate budget pacing to maximize ROAS
- Connected to the right metrics, such as clicks and conversions
With these preparations, including automated and manual checks, you can launch your media buys.
9. Optimize Continually
You can’t simply set and forget your strategy; always optimize with continuous monitoring.
Check to make sure budget pacing isn’t too slow or too fast, pause any underperforming audiences or content and reallocate your budget as needed, and try to avoid ad fatigue with the right frequency.
Over time, you’ll be able to perfect your strategy to get the best possible results.
10. Generate and Analyze Reports
At the end of each ad run, create a detailed report to help gauge performance.
This report may include the following:
- Planned vs. delivered ad spend
- Key performance indicators (KPIs) compared to actual performance
- Insights and wins to learn from
- Recommendations for future campaigns
11. Test Incrementality
Finally, you should also conduct incrementality testing to further confirm whether your strategy is getting the ideal results.
This aspect of the media buying process involves conducting A/B tests with two different audiences, including a test and control group.
The test group consists of audiences who see your ads, while the control group consists of those who don’t see your ads. In the process, you isolate your ads’ effect by eliminating other influences like seasonality and promotions, which will indicate just how effective your ads are on their own.
Based on which audience converts the most, you can calculate incremental lift to determine the real value of your ads.
Other Aspects
There are other elements to keep in mind with your media buys to get the best results.
- First Party Data: Collecting valuable information from your audiences through contact forms with their consent. This method of collecting data can build trust among your audiences while helping you better understand them.
- Performance Loops: Continuous measurement, optimization, and budget reallocation can keep your campaigns on the right track. Measure performance against your goals to determine what’s working and what needs improvement.
- Attribution Modeling: Tracking the right types of attributions can help figure out which ads at which touchpoints are responsible for conversions.
Choosing a Media Buying Agency: What to Look for
In seeking media buyers to help with your campaigns, you may opt for a media buying agency or a digital media buying agency.
If you don’t have the in-house resources or expertise to effectively handle media buying, it can pay to have the right agency behind your campaigns. In fact, having a reliable partner can maximize cost-effectiveness and help you reach your goals with a lot more efficiency.
The key is knowing how to vet a potential digital media buying agency partner. Look for qualities like transparency, in-depth and regular reporting to keep you updated on performance, and experience in your industry or a similar vertical.
Here are some specific criteria to help you find the ideal partner:
- Platform expertise, including familiarity with ad networks, direct media buying, and analytics tools
- Transparency of planning, executing, and reporting
- Reporting cadence
- Fee structure
- Data ownership and accessibility
- Brand safety controls
- Creative testing process
- Measurement plan
- Experience with your industry
- Contract terms
Optimize Media Buys With Ignite Visibility by Your Side
When looking for a compatible media buying agency to build your next strategy, Ignite Visibility is one of the most experienced companies out there. We know what it takes to build a fully tailored and optimized media buying strategy, with the resources, knowledge, and experience to help you dominate the competition with high-performance ads.
Here are just some of the aspects we can cover:
- In-depth audience research
- Channel selection based on where your audiences are
- Bid strategizing based on your unique goals
- Continual tracking and optimization
- Ad content development with tailored creatives
- And more!
Learn more about our PPC management services and how our media buying expertise can contribute to your next strategy.
