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Targeting Your Traffic
by James D. Brausch
http://www.TargetBlaster.com
Everyone keeps harping about how important "targeted
traffic" is to your site (and it is very important). I thought
it might be useful to take a moment to define "targeting" and
discuss how to do it. What is this "targeting" all about? Quite
simply, it is the process of finding the kind of people that
want your specific product/service.
Let's take an extreme example of "untargeted" traffic for
comparison. Let's say you own a joke site. It has hundreds of
jokes and you've built it up to 10,000 daily visitors. Now, let's
say you want to sell widgets on a new widget site. So, you place
a link on your joke site that says "Free Stuff" which links to
your new widget site. You figure that some percentage of your
10,000 daily visitors will be interested in "Free Stuff" (lots
of people are) and some percentage of those who click on the
"Free Stuff" link will want to buy your widgets. Right? Yep;
That actually is right. Some small percentage will click the
"Free Stuff" link and some small percentage will then buy a widget.
The extremely small percentage is a result of an extreme example
of not targeting your traffic well.
If you actually did own a joke site and had no other way to make
money from it, the above strategy might be just fine. There
really isn't anything wrong with "untargeted" traffic. It just
isn't very effective. If you can get it for free or extremely
cheap~ Go for it. Why not? One sale out of 100,000 visitors
is better than zero sales. If you do pay for untargeted traffic
though, you should be very careful to ensure that it really is
inexpensive. You will want to actually calculate your cost of
sales to make sure.
Most Internet marketers have found that targeted traffic is much
less expensive in the long run~ even though it may appear to
cost more up front. That's what we want to talk about here.
In the above example, we wanted to sell widgets, but we did
two things to sabotage our efforts to get targeted traffic.
First, we advertised in a place unlikely to have a high percentage
of people who wanted to buy widgets. Second, we further missed
an opportunity to help turn that untargeted traffic into targeted
traffic when we put "Free Stuff" for our link instead of "Widgets"
for our link.
Let's talk about the first mistake. We advertised on a joke
site for widgets. Obviously it would be better if we had advertised
on another widget site. That would have been a good example
of "topic targeting" or "keyword targeting". This is the most
common type of targeting used by Internet marketers and is probably
the most important. If you want to sell widgets, it is probably
easiest to target people interested in widgets. That's pretty
obvious; right?
It's not the whole story though. Let's say your site is in English
and you place an ad on a Spanish widget site. Even though you
did your topical keyword targeting properly, you will still have
only a tiny percentage of people who speak both Spanish and English
who can read your offer once they click-thru to your site. Let's
say you advertise on a "free widget" site. You might find that
a very small percentage click-thru to your $100 widget site.
In the marketing business, we refer to the factors that affect
targeting as "demographics".
Knowing the demographics of your target audience is extremely
important. It can actually allow you to bypass topical keyword
targeting entirely. Let's say you discover that 85% of people
who buy widgets also play golf. That opens up your opportunities.
You can now advertise on golf sites. Let's say you discover
that 90% of men want to buy widgets. Now you can target any
site appealing to men. The art of targeting is simply finding
the kinds of people who want your product/service and guiding
them to the right place.
Let's talk about the second mistake in our original example.
We placed a "Free Stuff" link on our joke site to guide people
to our widget site. It seems obvious that it would have been
better to place a "Buy Widgets" link instead. Why would we have
even considered a "Free Stuff" link? We might have considered
it to get a higher click-thru rate. Is that a good idea? Maybe~
If the only thing you can sell is widgets, you might as well
give it a shot at the very largest possible audience.
However, you may want to take a different tact. Why not turn
untargeted traffic into targeted traffic? By changing your link
from "free stuff" to "buy widgets", you have done just that.
Whatever percentage of your joke site visitors may have been
interested in buying widgets may click this link. That traffic
is now somewhat targeted.
Let's talk about how to target that traffic even more. There
are really two ways and they both have to do with choices. The
first way is to give your joke site visitors more choices. Let's
say that your home page has only two links; one is labeled "free
jokes" and the other is labeled "buy widgets". Some percentage
will click on the "buy widgets" link. That percentage will be
more interested in buying widgets than reading free jokes at
the moment that they click. That's good. Now let's compare
that to a home page that has links for "free jokes", "buy widgets",
"travel deals", "hot rods", "free stuff". Now, the percentage
that click on the "buy widgets" link are people who are more
interested in buying widgets than any of the other choices on
that page. Your traffic is now even more targeted then when
the only choices were "buy widgets" and "free jokes".
The other way to help turn untargeted traffic into targeted traffic
(or targeted traffic into more targeted traffic) is to offer
second choices. Let's say you change your link on the above
joke site to simply "widgets" instead of "buy widgets". The
traffic you receive will be less targeted than when you had "buy
widgets" as your link. It is a simple matter to refine the targeting
though. All you have to do is to offer a couple of choices on
the home page of your widget site. If you have links to "free
widgets", "buy widgets", "red widgets" and "blue widgets" on
your home page, you can refine your targeted traffic into groups
that are even more targeted.
I hope this article helps you see that targeting traffic is more
like a million shades of gray then just a black-and-white issue.
When you purchase targeted traffic, evaluate how targeted it
is compared to other sources of targeted traffic. When you purchase
untargeted traffic or less targeted traffic, you can help target
that traffic yourself.
The author, James D. Brausch, is the Vice President of Marketing
for Target Blaster, Inc., an Internet Marketing firm specializing
in targeted traffic.
http://www.TargetBlaster.com
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