With great media buying comes great responsibility and all of that responsibility lies in making the right choices when targeting your traffic!
Once you start buying traffic from ad networks they’ll start giving you a lot of options about the type of users you want to send to your affiliate website.
The right targeting is key to making your campaign profitable. The more relevant ads you serve to your audience, the more conversions you will get.
How can you find out who is relevant?
This can be done through a simple process of trial and error. First you gather enough data to be able to make a decision and then you pick the most profitable placements for your ads.
When you start testing an offer you can get global traffic, which isn’t targeted, in order to see what sticks. The advantage of this approach is that price of your traffic will be low because you are not specifying particular traffic sources, so you get a mixed bag, which at this stage is ideal.
However, many offers have prescribed targeting which you need to follow. For example: offers which only accept mobile users from Germany.
NB: You should always ask your affiliate manager about traffic restrictions and which types of traffic are converting the best.
What are the most common targeting options?
Country – The most basic targeting you’ll start with. Usually defined by offer.
City – Too narrow for most of the offers but you can use it in Tier 2 countries to target wealthier people.
Region – A good compromise between Country and City.
Language – A good tool to filter native speakers in particular GEOs.
Device – What device are you targeting? – desktop, mobile, tablet?
Device Brand – Good for pin submit or mobile offers, e.g. Huawei users trying to win an iPhone. You can also filter people with bigger purchasing power according to price tag of their phones.
Device Model – Better to exclude people with old phones which might not be relevant to your offer.
Operating System – You can exclude the IT geeks with Linux and target only Windows users for example.
Operating System Version – Try to target old operating systems if you can’t target older people according to age.
Browser – Chrome is the biggest player here but, if you are promoting browser plugins or have a prelander with some content locking, this type of targeting can be really useful.
Day parting – You can decide which days you want to run your traffic and which you don’t. Some offers only require traffic during working days, especially ones related to call centre businesses. You can even be more specific by selecting the hours you wish to be targeted.
Carrier – A must for mobile offers. However, some offers only accept particular carriers, so always check the specifics with your affiliate manger.
Categories – Traffic sources usually have at least one basic category for their traffic. You can target people coming from websites related to hobbies, finance, cars etc.
Placements – Websites from which your users come from. Whilst you can’t see direct domains, as that would allow you to start buying directly from them, you will be able to see their unique reference numbers instead. For example: Instead of www.freepics.com you would see 45610. You can then whitelist or blacklist these placements in your campaign. There can be big differences between them, as every site has a different type of typical user.
TIP:
Be sure you are tracking as many variables as you can so that you have the choice to blacklist or whitelist them later on, according to the data in your tracking software.
Your winning campaign should look something like this:
Country: United Kingdom
Device: Mobile phone
Device Brand: iPhone
Day parting: Monday to Friday
Categories: Finance, Loans, News, Educational
Language: English
Make sure you don’t “overtarget” your campaigns, as the volume of traffic drops every time you restrict your targeting options. Targeting too specifically also means that your campaign will become more expensive, as you must compete with other advertisers to get the winning bid.
Target well and you will bring enough visitors with enough conversions to give yourself a healthy ROI.