Scoop

Recently I started an affiliate case study. You can read about the strategy on that post. This post is going to discuss what I’ve done leading up to this point that is helping me laser target one aspect of my campaign.

The first part of my campaign will rely on a retargeting audience I’ve built over the last year. This may very well turn out to be the most profitable source of traffic for this case study. Now, don’t get me wrong. Assumptions in our business are most often wrong. But this one comes with a lot of data behind it. It’s that data / process you might find interesting.

Quick Retargeting Sidebar

What is retargeting? It’s a growing form of display advertising. It allows you to essentially tag visitors of your site and show them banner ads on other sites they visit around the web.

So they come to your site, leave, and visit another site that has a banner ad attracting them back to your site. It’s smart marketing and becoming smarter everyday.

The Audience

Currently I’m staring at a 1.875 million person audience list (people that visited my site and were tagged with my retargeting code). This list was built via a health based website receiving organic search traffic.

This is a great start. Since I know the site that the audience was built from I have a very good understanding of the visitor profile. I know what type of people visit, what types of products / ads that have converted, and on top of that – they’ve told me exactly what they want to know.

How is that possible? How could I know exactly what this group of people want to know more about? We ran a survey to the 150K double opt-in subscriber list built from this same exact traffic. And that is exactly the data I’m banking on to help me make this aspect of my case study profitable.

Mining Data From Your Audience

First of all, if you haven’t gathered by now I’ve been lucky enough to have access to some pretty incredible resources. Here’s the recap

#1 – A highly SEO’d top ranking website in the health market (great analytics data)
#2 – A 150K double opt in subscriber list (large pool of potential survey responders)
#3 – Survey data from thousands of responders via that email list (pure gold straight from the subscriber base)

I realize not everyone has that same level of resources to work with. But the concepts are still the same. This could work very well with a much smaller list. In fact it may work even better as it’s possible to cultivate a closer relationship with less people.

Back to the data.

Based on those resources I’ve got a pretty good picture of the type of “persona” I’m dealing with. On top of that we were able to pull 3 topics that were repeatedly requested within the survey.

The Survey

The survey was uber simple to setup. We went the low cost route and it worked well. No survey monkey here. Although in hindsight it might have cost more but that may have been worth it in the time spent going through the responses (oh well).

It was a simple process

#1 Created a Google Docs Form
- Kept it simple – 1 or 2 questions with a text box.
#2 Embedded the form onto a private, no-index page on the site
#3 Sent multiple emails to the list regarding the survey

If you have a site and a list you can do this too.

The Next Move

With my topics in hand I went out and found multiple products for each topic. The plan is to create multiple banner variations for each topic and rotate which offer they go to. Ideally this will lead me to decent CTR’s and a good handle on which products convert.

Sounds like easy money right?

Well as with anything there are potential pitfalls. As I see it those pitfalls look like this:

#1 Retargeting audiences dwindle over time.
My impressions may not be nearly as significant as the size of my audience right now. Less impressions equals less traffic. We’ll see.

#2 In general retargeting traffic does best going back to the original site they were built from

The traffic flow in an optimal retargeting campaign looks like this Site A to Site B back to Site A. In this case study our traffic flow will look like this – Site A to Site B to Site C.

#3 My data is Misleading
Sometimes people don’t really know what they want. Sometimes they think it’s one thing and it’s actually another. Sometimes your data set isn’t statistically significant enough (even though I think mine is).

Only time and traffic will tell the real story. A story which I know we’re all eager to see play out. As soon as I have more data I’ll update the case study and let you know.

If you’ve got any questions on what I’m working on – just let me know in the comments below.

The studies show that women “control purchasing power” in today’s online landscape. How big is the market? Apparently it’s pretty damn big.

Women represent the largest marketing opportunity in the world
- Harvard Business Review

Statistically this is true all over the world.

How long have you ignored marketing to women? If you haven’t ignored marketing to women how well are you doing?

Marketing to women isn’t just about selling lip stick and blush. That’s a seriously outdated thought process. Today’s intelligent marketers are figuring out how to connect with women in meaningful ways to sell computers, cars, and even tools.

When you sit down to build out your next affiliate campaign consider the women demographic. Consider building out a set of creative and landers to target women specifically. Speaking to specific demographic and psychographic audiences will help you improve conversions. Don’t forget the largest marketing opportunity in the world.

In celebration of Affiliate Summit here is a video of theirs discussing strategies for marketing to women. It’s smart and full of great angles for selling to women. It’s a bit long but well worth a look through.

I was putting together some campaigns yesterday where I needed to do some demographic targeting, and though it would be a great opportunity to walk you through the process I used.

The bottom line is that to make a lot of money with affiliate marketing (or really any kind of direct response marketing) is to simply get the right ad in front of the right people.  Don’t complicate it beyond that.  Right ad, in front of the right people = cash.

Once you have an ad that works, in order to scale massively and make the real money, all that you need to do next is to get in front of as many relevant eyeballs as possible.  In order to do this you need to know the demographic that you need to go after.

Once you know the demographic you simply need to stick your proven ad where those eyeballs will be, and BAM, you start stacking money.

I’ll break this up into a 2-part post so that I can get into more detail about exactly how I use the demographic information I gather and where I use it specifically in the next post.

I’m sure most of you are quite familiar with demographic targeting so I won’t go into great detail about what it is.  That info can be found everywhere.

Instead, I wanted to give you the process and tools that I use to get my demographic information.  There are LOTS of places that you can go to get this type of information but below is a list of the ones I’ve found to suit my needs best.  At the end I include a very little known source that many people seem to miss, but it’s quickly becoming one of my favorites.

I’m going to stick to the free services I use, but if you’re looking for premium demo-targeting services checkout www.compete.com

Quantcast

Quantcast is a fantastic place to gather demographic information and data and is usually where I’ll start.  The best way to get an overview of quantcast if you’re not familiar is to checkout the below video descriptions of their service.

http://www.quantcast.com/

What Is QuantCast

One great tool quantcast has is the lookalike feature.  Check it out here:

One of the great features of the lookalike option is that it allows you to use the information you gather directly with traffic sources.  So once you find the exact audience you can setup that demographic data directly in your traffic sources to make sure you’re buying the right eyeballs.

Google Ad Planner

Next I’ll typically head over to Google’s Ad Planner to gather more data.

www.google.com/adplanner/

Again, what better way to get an overview of ad planner than to checkout Google’s own video:

Alexa

Alex is the next tool that I’ll use to gather demographic data.  Similar to the other services, just a way to verify your data thus far and fish out another nugget or two.

http://www.alexa.com/

Plenty of Fish

So, Plentyoffish.com has a demographic tool not too many people know about or utilize and I love it.  Of course, if you haven’t used POF to get traffic…I highly recommend it.  Cheap quality clicks, go check it out.

http://www.pof.com/demographicInterests.aspx 

Anyway, their demographic tool can provide some really fantastic information even if you’re not going to buy POF traffic.  Of course, it more applies to POF and facebook advertising because of the demographic information it provides, but still a nice resource.  Quick, and easy.

From this data I start to put together a detailed demographic profile.  In the next post I’ll show you the process I use to put together an exact demographic profile that I can use to not only buy traffic, but to use for ad and landing page copy.  Stay tuned…