Targeting Campaigns By Demographic

A popular technique is to target your campaigns with demographics. This is easy to do on Facebook, and it can be done on PPV as well with a little bit more work. Here is a basic strategy to get you started.

1. Go to Quantcast.com

2. Enter the url of the offer that you are promoting (such as “match.com”)

3. Click the Demographics tab from the left hand menu

Now if you are doing Facebook marketing, you can take this info and put it directly into your targeting for the campaign. Age, sex, etc. For PPV, you need to figure out what kind of sites that people in your target demographic also like to visit, then you bid on those urls. Here are the steps for that.

Quantcast Planner

Quantcast Planner

4. Go to Quantcast.com/Planner (this will require you to register a free account if you don’t have one already)

5. On the left menu, under “Audience Definition”, put in the demographic info that we learned from the previous steps.

6. Under “Filters”, click the empty box labeled “By Category” and then choose a relevant category from the list. (You must do this or else you will end up with a bunch of junk urls like google.com and facebook.com)

7. Click “Download”.

Now you have got a list of demographically targeted urls that you can use in your PPV campaign. Keep in mind that targeting demographically is not quite as accurate as targeting by keyword, but there can be a lot more volume. If you know that you campaign appeals to people within the demographic, it’s just a matter of building the right kind of landing page and/or finding the right offer that appeals to them. The good news is that if you get one of these to work, the rewards can be huge.

Clean Up Those URLs

If you are running PPV, you are most likely scraping URLs. If you are scraping URLs, then you have probably wasted money on bad targets.  I certainly have.  Here’s a money-saving tip that will keep you from blowing through your testing budget bidding on google.com or answers.yahoo.com:

Go through your scraped URLs before you launch the campaign!

Scrubbing Bubbles

Nobody has cleaner URLs than this dude...

Yes, I understand that if you are targeting thousands of URLs, it can be time consuming to go through them one-by-one.  But here’s the trick: you don’t have to!  If you have your list loaded up in Excel, just press Ctrl + F to open up the Find menu, and then search for the usual culprits:

google.com, facebook.com, yahoo.com, wikipedia.org, etc.

Alternatively, if you are using AffExpert, you can filter these domains during the scraping process.  Just click the “Show/Hide Domain Filter” button on the URL Scraper tool, and it will open up a second box where you can put in the URLs you want to filter out.  Done and done.

So there you go, a simple tip that can easily save you $20 a campaign or more.