Media Buying from First Principles: The Principle of Underlying Media Quality

Today’s media buying strategies have become complex. Opaque campaign types and audience targeting strategies obscure the actual media that is being purchased. Post-click performance analysis is the default way of interpreting media quality. There is validity to this but it must be balanced against a first principles approach: we must buy good quality media to be successful.
Let’s describe this further, using Google Ads as our example platform. Supposing we have a lead generation objective. We run a Google Display campaign and build reasonable audience targets using features like demographics targeting, in-market audience data, and so on. We see our campaign is generating leads at a $10 CPA. Our post-click analysis shows this campaign to be a success.
However, when we review the actual placements report, the report that shows where the ads actually appeared, we see that most of the placements and conversions are from junk media on mobile apps, made-for-ads websites, and so on. We conclude that our leads must be junk, regardless of what the analytics platforms may report. There is no way that ads running on funny-kids-games-info.xyz have converted quality B2B SaaS leads. We have failed to buy quality media.
Another Google Ads example is search query analysis, and distinguishing between Google Search itself and the Google Search Partners Network. Google’s Search Partners network has come under heavy scrutiny lately. There is no transparency on what websites actually constitute the Search Partners placement. Therefore it is hard to believe that the underlying media is high quality. (Google SP is not the only media platform where some part of the distribution is opaque: this is an issue in Google PMAX campaigns, the Microsoft Advertising Network, LinkedIn’s Audience Network, and so on. A deeper exploration here is the subject for another post.)
Beyond Search Partners, if your ads are running on Google.com, you have some confidence at a baseline level of media quality. At least the root underlying placement is strong. The next layer of analysis is the search query. This is a commonplace point of Google Ads performance analysis so we will not explain it in great detail. The general point is to review the actual search queries, carefully and line-by-line, and determine if they match your target query that you wanted to buy.
A simple checklist for ensuring quality underlying media in search campaigns might include:
- Ads ran only on Google search
- Ads ran only to your target location
- Search query quality was high
- Audience targeting was applied sensibly
- Ad creative was sensible and matched the query
- Conversion tracking was working
- Bidding was intelligent
The above list stretches the general idea of media quality to include a few other best practices, but hopefully the idea remains intact. The media buyer must ask, before looking at performance data, before discussing strategy and features: Did this ad run in a good place? Is this good media? Do I even know where the ad was placed? Does the ad make sense? Did a human actually see this ad? Is this underlying media buy high in overall quality?
Here’s a good test which media buyers often fail: imagine the CEO of the advertiser sees the ad “in the wild.” (Any agency professional knows, such events often lead to dramatic critique!). Let’s think from this perspective, before we get caught with bad ads out in the open!
- Is the CEO impressed with the ad creative?
- Does it capture the main point of the business being advertised?
- Is it fresh, or tired? When’s the last time it was changed?
- Is it a proven winner, or an untested best-guess creative?
- Does it look right in the placement? Is it cut off, misshaped, hard to read?
- Is the placement good, is it brand safe, is it sensible?
- Has any ad platform tried to automatically resize, reshape, or tinker with the ads?
Though such questions may sound exhaustive they are actually basic, they are level one, they are first principles challenges to the underlying quality of the media buy.
We conclude with a simple set of points guiding principles for media buyers, which we at OpenMoves will adopt as well:
- Know where the ads ran with precision – know the placement
- Qualitatively assess this placement for good quality
- Review placements regularly – this is a routine task
- Ensure the creative matches the placement
- Ensure the creative passes simple criteria: relevant, tested, readable, smart
- Make sure the landing page works
- Make sure the tracking works
- Imagine a smart outsider sees the ad for the first time: are they impressed?
- Before we look at data – at an intuitive and qualitative level: Is this good media?
We summarize concisely: core to our success as media buyers, is the basic skill of buying good media.