How to optimize your media buying department

Media planning is a little bit of art and science. Investing in experienced people makes a huge difference to the performance of your campaign. These people bring their negotiation skills to strike pre-bid, exclusive deals with publishers for the most premium content that's relevant to your target audience. They also have the experience needed to determine how to best balance your media budgets to maximize performance, taking the whole picture into consideration. Upper funnel website traffic targeting tactics can't be expected to perform the same as lower funnel tactics, but they are just as necessary.

Once the media plan is finalized, the next step is to setup the campaign in the media buying platform. This stage can be time consuming and is most like data entry. The strategic thinking and planning that went into designing the perfect media plan is set aside for the tedious task of uploading creative, adding UTMs to the ends of URLs, and sometimes spending hours investigating a discrepancy in impressions or clicks between the ad server and the publisher.

An error in this campaign setup process could mean that your beautiful, perfectly placed display ads are reaching the right person and even getting clicks - but the next thing the user sees is a blank page due to an extra space in the URL that was introduced when the UTMs were added. This type of error is hard to catch and extremely costly. The publisher would be unlikely to give a make-good in this circumstance since it was user-error. So that valuable media planner time that went into the planning and setup of the campaign was wasted and you're not stuck starting from scratch.

To optimize the setup of your media buying department, consider an in-house resource for media planning and an outside vendor at a 3X lower cost to do the campaign setup portion of the task and always make sure QA is included.