What are your favorite Traffic Sources?

[Silverhawk851]

I'm working on learning Display Networks fully, still green at it.

Question to all the guys living the Internet Marketing dream what is your favorite method of identifying traffic sources?

I.e. How do you find out where your target demographic is hanging out online?

 

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[JasonR]

Do some searching around here a bit.

1) Facebook

2) Google Display - if you can make money here, and your offer is broad enough, you can scale to the moon

Go read/buy/watch Traffic Blackbook 2.0.

 

[Silverhawk851]

Do some searching around here a bit.
1) Facebook
2) Google Display - if you can make money here, and your offer is broad enough, you can scale to the moon
Go read/buy/watch Traffic Blackbook 2.0.

Bought, read and watched TB 2.0, great stuff

I did enough reading to know JasonR is the man for FB

My main concern is I'm just running low on ideas on how to identify where my target market hangs out on the web.
Just wondering what the other big boys are playing with in the sandbox

 

[JasonR]

Who is your target market?

They are likely hanging out EVERYWHERE.

Hard for us to tell you when we don't know what you're selling. After reading Traffic 2.0 - it's time for you to start buying traffic.

PS > I'm launching on Google display in less than 7 days.

 

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[Silverhawk851]

Who is your target market?

Diet Supplement to Women about to get married. Will have a running campaign towards the end of the week. Creating the banners, ads, got 4 offers I have picked out, will choose one tomorrow, get on that shiiii asap.

Any recommendations?

 

[eqttrdr]

I can never get my banner ads approved on google display... only text.

Seems like they keep making up different reasons each time for disapproving my banner ads :-(

 

[Silverhawk851]

PS > I'm launching on Google display in less than 7 days.

Kill it bro, after the FB should be cake for you Let me know if you get sick of creating ads, copy whatever. I'll write some up for you

 

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[Silverhawk851]

I can never get my banner ads approved on google display... only text.
Seems like they keep making up different reasons each time for disapproving my banner ads :-(

Porn is not allowed on Google Display.

 

[Gale4rc]

I'm w/ silverhawk... I would just like to see where other big players are focusing their marketing efforts on

My product is not filling a 'need' but, women who see the watch, love the watch. So i'm trying to figure out best places to put it and gain traffic that will convert.

 

[eqttrdr]

Porn is not allowed on Google Display.

sorry.. its supplement ads that they keep disapproving

 

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[Silverhawk851]

sorry.. its supplement ads that they keep disapproving

hahah, just playing. Might be your image?

 

[Gsuz]

Depends on the offer. I like Google and Bing, search network in both cases and FB. Also, don't run affiliate offers without a cloaker on these networks.

 

[JasonR]

Diet Supplement to Women about to get married.

Hmm. That is interesting.

Sign up for trials here: www.whatrunswhere.com
and https://www.adbeat.com/trial

Start doing some research. However, know that a majority of the diet guys have to cloak (trial guys), and use other methods to sell.

 

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[Silverhawk851]

Sign up for trials here: www.whatrunswhere.com
and https://www.adbeat.com/trial
Start doing some research. However, know that a majority of the diet guys have to cloak (trial guys), and use other methods to sell.

Thanks. I have adBeat, Mike Colella is the man. Is there a specific way you use both of them?

So I believe one method of cloaking is redirecting to a different page than the offer, then directing the traffic to the required affiliate landing page.

I know it's a problem on Google Display, but I've also seen other networks be more open. On what networks will I be needing to do this, and more importantly why? Why do the networks hate the diet guys?

 

[Gsuz]

Thanks. I have adBeat, Mike Colella is the man. Is there a specific way you use both of them?

So I believe one method of cloaking is redirecting to a different page than the offer, then directing the traffic to the required affiliate landing page.

I know it's a problem on Google Display, but I've also seen other networks be more open. On what networks will I be needing to do this, and more importantly why? Why do the networks hate the diet guys?

That way of cloaking will get you banned 99%.

You'll need to do this at FB, Google and Bing. Bing being the easiest to cloak from those 3.

They don't hate diet guys in general, but there are strict guidelines for each of these networks, starting from substances that are banned, to keyword and ad copy guidelines etc. Then, these networks also hate affiliates in general, because many guys were pushing rebill diet offers and bizopp offers, generally speaking shadier things, with the potential of jeopardizing Google's reputation in the long term.

What working cloakers do, is hosting a script on a site you own, where you'll send all your PPC traffic. Once the traffic arrives they decide if the traffic is a legit user or a bot/Google reviewer and redirect accordingly to a money page on your site where the offer resides or a "fake" page that has no offer at all, apart from maybe a newsletter signup form, as a sign to them why you're buying traffic. They do this by running the visitor against a huge database of IPs and various other footprints.

If you've taken that hurdle, you're up for another challenge. Which is that many diet guys are using fake news sites to push their offers. It's basically a presell looking like a legit online news site which converts good as it's deceiving, but banned by the FTC. Still a lot of people are using these sites, because they don't give a F*ck or are living in India etc. Also, you're up against guys with deep pockets spending thousands a day.

Not saying you can't make money, just sharing my experience. Good luck!

 

[MyDuckets]

From your "Learnt Copywriting" thread:

Sign up for any of these Display Networks, listed on this site:
http://www.warriorforum.com/ad-netw...43-huge-list-ad-networks-traffic-sources.html

and figure out a demographic with a need.

What am I missing between the process you lay out there and the guidance you're asking for here?

Am I correct that you don't find out "where a group is hanging out" via the ad network traffic sources you linked to? Is that a completely different process?

 

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[Silverhawk851]

Am I correct that you don't find out "where a group is hanging out" via the ad network traffic sources you linked to? Is that a completely different process?

Those are networks which have websites that you can advertise on. These networks are able to help target to the demographic.
Process is the same, just there are a million ways to get to the target demographic.

You can buy directly a site, go through networks, do mobile, PPC, Google Display, PPV.

Here I am asking what method the people on fastlane take for their ventures.

 

[MyDuckets]

understood - as you can tell i'm starting from ground zero on it so just trying to clarify, not badger!

 

[Silverhawk851]

understood - as you can tell i'm starting from ground zero on it so just trying to clarify, not badger!

No problem man. Download the Traffic Blackbook 2.0 by Chad Hamzeh. Study it, and within a month It will completely change the way you think.

 

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[3things]

Start out with Google display, its probably about the most forgiving in terms of a learning curve, good quality traffic, relatively well policed for fraud, controllable budget-wise and also a reasonable level of demographic targeting available beyond just placements [gender, age group, interests]. Place their conversion pixel from the outset to build data and down the road you can start bidding on a target CPA rather than just CPC (then you can really let the $ flow). Test with site placements rather than keywords in the beginning, as at least you have more control over the actual sites your ads are appearing on. If you use keywords you've kind of got two variables keyword+site the ad was shown on. Keep it as simple as you can to test with. Always throw in a text ad to your adgroup, a lot of placements are set to show text only.

If you start out on general RTB exchanges you're going to lose your $ fast, they're pretty ruthless places to learn the ropes. Start with google and once you have good data [cpa, conversion rate etc] you then have benchmarks you can use to somewhat judge other traffic platforms with.

Assuming you targeted by gender, age group you already have a bit of a head start in terms of showing your ad to the right audience. You know your audience is female, and can target female only so start by trying to build a list of likely placements [gossip sites, health related sites, wedding related based on your previous comments etc]. Target 25+ age group and exclude 'unknown'. Run some traffic and start getting some data. See which placements convert, and which age groups, pause or exclude any that don't get clicks, low ctr, high CPA etc. The idea is simply to start pretty broad, run some traffic, weed out the crap and scale up all you can on the remaining good placements. [This applies to pretty much all display networks really not just google].

You can also go super broad and just target age/gender demo RON and optimize from there if you have a good $ized testing budget to play with. [I'd start with the above instead personally]

I'd also place the google retargeting pixel from the word go, and build a retargeting list. Even if you don't plan to use it initially, at least you have it if you want it down the line [set it to something like 180 or 360 days cookie lifespan]. Run an adgroup that only targets this list, and you'll see just how broad a spectrum of sites your audience visits.

If you need tools to help build your initial seed list of placements, the the adwords adplanner is a good place to start, as is quantcast.

Also bear in mind that google doesn't allow you to specifically exclude mobile traffic any more - you have to manually set your bid to -x% for mobile if you don't want it. Work on the basis you're going to get mobile traffic one way or other and so make your purchase path responsive. Use common sense in both your landing page and product sales page [don't run a fake news lander, no ridiculous claims, correct disclaimers etc, lander and product sales path all on the same yoursite.com url] and you -should- be absolutely fine. [Yes, even on a rebill. It's affiliates they don't like not the product or the billing model]. If it's your own product and you're trying to build a business, do not go down the cloaking road, it won't end well. Open a google MCC [my client center] account, and then open a 'client' account for your product. If something goes south, at least you may not lose your entire adwords account then. It's a bitch if they ban you. Pay attention to what other legit advertisers are doing and how.

Do not flit around traffic sources chasing your audience - your audience are everywhere - focus on one platform, and learn its rules, foibles and tricks inside out. Learn the types of sites, devices, demographic, ad sizes etc that convert to a sale. Once you have a good foundation, and good consistent data/sales you can then move on to other ad networks.

For a bit of ad snooping, moat.com is actually pretty good [and free]. It's not hard to find this stuff anyway, just a case of patience and paying attention. Notice ads, follow them down the rabbit hole.

That's my ramble over for today anyway