What does a publisher’s work consist of? There are traffic sources and there are offers. Then testing begins: ads, keywords, and targets. To understand which click brought a lead, you first need to know which traffic parameters to track and, second, have a tracking solution. I will write something about tracking solutions later.
What Can You Target, and Which Parts Should You Track?
When choosing targeting parameters, of course, follow your goals and knowledge of the audience. If you already know the audience and want high CTR, use narrow targeting by interests or workplaces and schools, if that fits. If you do not know the audience and are searching for suitable targeting, start with broad basic demographics such as age and gender. Track every parameter you target. If you selected by two parameters, track both. If you selected by ten, track all ten. These can include:
- The traffic source, whether Facebook, Google Ads, or a PPV system.
- Location parameters, at minimum country and language. Offers usually target one country or a limited set. Landing pages and ads can sometimes use several languages, as when working with Canada or Switzerland.
- Keywords for search traffic, or interests and likes for Facebook. These are probably the most important parameters after location, and sometimes even more important, especially in search. On Facebook, you may also choose not to target interests.
- The ad: headline, sometimes text, and image. Track everything if possible. Two identical ads with slightly different headlines can have CTRs several times apart and also convert completely differently.
- Demographics:
- Gender and age. Sometimes you make an amazing discovery after expanding the audience “just in case” and find that you were missing the most profitable demographic. On Facebook, I split an audience into blocks of 4-10 years, sometimes smaller or larger depending on its size.
- Relationship status. Completely irrelevant for some niches and very relevant for others. Loans and dating, for example, can be sensitive to it.
- Workplace or school. Not used very often, but these parameters can produce high CTR.
- Days of the week, time of day, weekends versus workdays. Especially with high traffic volume and a limited budget, running an ad for 2-3 hours a day or 1-2 times a week can produce several times more profit than running around the clock.
- Landing-page parameters:
- which landing page produces leads;
- the landing page’s bounce rate;
- if there are many ways to move from the landing page to the offer, which one the user takes.
- And of course, if you split-test offers, account for that in the analysis too.
There may be more parameters depending on the traffic-buying system. If you think changing a targeting parameter can affect conversion, try it. Nobody will ever tell you exactly which targeting set will work. Testing can produce a very profitable discovery. Several times, a completely unexpected audience worked best for me.