MixRank Blog

Just a few weeks ago, Google announced an incredible update to the Google Display Network.

 

1.  The Display Network Tab

First things first, over the next few weeks, Google will be rolling out a new Display Network Tab in AdWords. If you’re in the interface on a daily basis, you’ll find this news rather exciting. Display campaigns have always been managed in an interface that caters to search. Going forward, the Audiences, Topics and Networks tabs will now funnel into one place, allowing you to bid, target and optimize your display ads from a single location. Check out this screenshot of the interface provided by Google:

• Where to manage targeting for your ads, view your reports, and set bids: On the Display Network tab, you can find the Display Keywords, Placements,Topics, and Interests & Remarketing tabs, the necessary tools to manage your display campaigns.
• How to add or edit keywords for campaigns targeting search and display: If your campaign is targeting search and display, you can view display statistics on the Display Network tab. Similarly, the Keywords tab will show just search statistics. However, to add or edit keywords and bids, you must do so on the main Keywords tab.  Any changes you make to your keywords will affect both your search and display targeting.
• Where to add or edit your targeting: In the Display Network tab, there is a Change display targeting button right above the graph where you can view the different targeting methods available for your campaign. From there, click the edit link next to the method you want to add or edit.
• How to exclude a targeting method: Go to the Display Network tab, scroll down, and click the Exclusions link to where you can add exclusions to your ad group or campaign.

 

2.  The Revved-Up Contextual Engine

 Another update that deserves huge praise to Google is the “Revved-Up” Contextual Engine. This marvelous improvement takes targeting to the next level, using Next-Gen Keyword Contextual Targeting. This means you can now view data on a keyword by keyword basis on the display network, combining the reach of display with the precision of search. Say “Goodbye” to the old days of monitoring contextual campaigns at the ad group level and “Hello” to a better way to target and optimize your display campaigns.

Tips for using keywords for display ads:

• Monitor your keyword performance. Pause keywords that have high costs, but very few conversions or low traffic to your site.
• Increase bids on keywords that are performing well.
• Add keywords similar to the ones that are performing well.

 

Keep in mind:

• Any changes made to keywords in campaigns that target both Google search and the Display Network will also apply to search traffic. Before making any changes such as pausing keywords, make sure to check search performance.

3.  The Visualization Tool for Display Targeting

If that isn’t enough to inspire you, Google also introduces a new visualization tool that shows how reach is impacted from targeting across your display campaigns. Take a look:

 

 

With this nifty venn diagram, you can see how your targeting affects your reach. Targeting types include keywords, placements, topics, interests or remarketing.

• Use-case for targeting diagram: When adding or editing your Display Network targeting, you'll see a diagram that shows how your targeting methods, like keywords and placements, interact, and what method is used to target your ads.
• Tip for advertisers with niche target markets: With a niche target market, you’ll want to get the most quality traffic and the cheapest cost. We recommend you have several targeting types, drilling down to very specific keywords, managed placements, topics and interests.
• Tip for advertisers with large product catalogs: For large retail advertisers that want the most reach, we recommend using keyword targeting and automatic placements to start. Automatic placements are sites that your ads will appear on based on the keywords you’ve chosen. Over time, you’ll need to monitor the placements. Increase bids on placements that are performing well and exclude placements that are high in cost but generating low traffic or few conversions. However, keep in mind that if you exclude too many placements, you might significantly limit your traffic.

 

Whether you’re new at display advertising, or have been doing this for years, we can safely say that Google’s new and improved campaign management features for display means this much-needed change was brought on by a large amount of advertisers spending a lot of money on display ads and placements. Google would not invest so much time and resources to update the AdWords platform if it wasn’t already working perfectly for display advertisers. So, what’s this all mean? More advertisers today are investing ad dollars into display advertising. If you’re not already doing the same, you're behind in the curve and you may want to start with a few campaigns. To save you time and money, try uncovering what type of ads your competitors are running with MixRank’s free intelligence tool here.

Most paid traffic campaigns you launch will start off losing money; that's just a fact of marketing you will have to accept. The long term profits will come later, after you've optimized the campaign by removing poorly performing keywords and traffic sources, and increasing bids on high converting ones. But of course it's always painful to keep running a campaign that is losing money every day, even if you know it will become profitable eventually. So let's talk about ways to decrease costs as soon as possible and get closer to profitability without blowing through your budget.

Optimize for an Easier Conversion Target

As you know, you need to wait until you get to ~30 actions before you can get enough statistically significant data to make a decision. If you're selling physical products, you might have to wait a pretty long time before getting to 30 sales for every single ad. This goes directly against our prime objective of building many campaigns and learning fast. To get meaningful data faster, it might make sense to make your initial conversion goal something with a higher conversion rate, like an email opt-in on a squeeze page or even a click through to your shopping cart or sales page. It's a lot easier and cheaper to get 30 emails than 30 sales (or even long form leads). Optimize for those, and you'll be able to see what works and what doesn't much earlier. With me so far? How about optimizing for time on site or bounce rate? Very few advertisers do this, but the ones that can do this successfully are reaping the rewards. This is especially important for CPV/popup traffic, where even small differences in time on site may be a good leading indicator of conversions. If you're direct linking to an affiliate offer, it may be worth it to switch to a landing page, just so you can collect this type of data and optimize for clickthroughs. This kind of optimization becomes a lot easier if you have good numbers about your entire sales funnel. If you know that 10% of email opt-ins consistently convert into sales or that your EPC on clicks from your landing page is always around $0.50, you're not risking much by focusing on clicks instead of conversions.

Cut off Losers Fast

Earlier I said that you should always wait until you get to 30 actions before making a decision about a traffic source. This is true if you have an infinite budget in a market with perfect information. But since we don't, it may be worthwhile to cut a few corners. If a campaign you just launched isn't converting at all, it might make sense to kill it early, before you have spent lots of money testing, and move on to greener pastures. Sure, you'll miss out on a few good keywords due to random chance. But accepting a higher incidence of Type II errors may enable a good chunk of your budget to live to fight another day. This is especially important for traffic sources like Facebook Ads or RON campaigns anywhere, which can devour budgets very quickly if you let them.

Optimize Your Landing Pages with Cheaper Traffic Sources

It's certainly true that different landing pages convert differently with different traffic. But some factors, especially your headlines and calls to action should affect conversions in a somewhat consistent way, regardless of traffic source. When you're in the early stages of testing landing pages and collecting data for a campaign, try to do it as cheaply as possible. That means getting traffic from Bing/Yahoo through AdCenter, going to PPV networks with lower minimum bids, targeting a country with cheaper traffic like Canada, and so on. Then, when your landing pages have been split tested and optimized as much as possible, you can move over to a more expensive but higher volume traffic source like AdWords. See also this excellent post by Finch on fighting back against rising click costs.

This is part 2 of a series of indeterminate length about succeeding in a crowded market. You can read the first part here. Entrepreneurs are simply those who understand that there is little difference between obstacle and opportunity and are able to turn both to their advantage. -Niccolo Machiavelli If you're in any decently-sized marketplace, you're going to come up against at least a few significant competitors. Let's face it, at this point, pretty much all demand in any market is being met by...something at least. Some of your competitors, even if you think they have an inferior product, are probably better-funded, have stronger brand value, or have well-developed inbound marketing campaigns (or all three). They're probably running numerous successful, established campaigns across multiple channels. If you go up against them directly, on their turf, they will destroy you. But, if you take a tactical, tightly focused, agile approach, you can defeat even the most entrenched behemoths. Here's how you can run circles around your biggest competitors, no matter how much money they throw at stopping you:

Watch as Stability Turns into Stagnation

Like it or not, in the fast-moving Internet marketing world, being an established player that has been around for a while confers tremendous advantages. These benefits can manifest directly in the significant organic ranking and quality score boost Google gives to aged domains (those that have been registered for more than a few years without a change in Whois). This is presumably because, unlike, say, keyword density, domain age is much harder to game. But the effects of age can also manifest themselves in other, subtler ways. An affiliate who has been running an offer for a while has demonstrated that he is capable of consistently delivering high quality traffic. As a result, he is probably getting a higher payout than you and can afford to outbid everyone else. And of course, any performance advertisers running traffic for some time have had time to collect lots of data, optimize their campaigns, and remove low-performing ads and keywords. But consistent stability also breeds complacency. And as any affiliate who has watched his earnings from a previously stable campaign dwindle into nothingness over time, in this business, complacency is death. Leverage your competitors' complacency and turn it against them. Where are they getting weak, fat, and lazy? Look at the highest converting keywords you covet most. Do you see your competitors rotating different headlines and landing pages or are they using the same ones? Is their ad position changing a lot (implying that they are actively managing their bids) or is it holding steady? If you're seeing a lot of stagnation in your competitors' campaigns, that's when you know it's time to strike. Start bidding aggressively, using a variety of diverse headlines and landing pages. The more completely diverse appeals you try, the higher the chances you will stumble on a combination of medium and message that produces significant lift in conversions or CTR, thus negating their established history and higher bids. Most advertisers lack the ability to monitor changes in their ad position and performance for every keyword. Once something is profitable, more often than not, they will fall asleep at the wheel and let the campaign run on autopilot as they move on to optimizing different market segments or traffic sources. This is especially true with contextual (cost per view) and display campaigns, and of course SEO. Most advertisers will optimize a campaign to the point of profitability and then leave it alone, opting to move on to completely different channels. For you, this means that when you go up against big advertisers, on keywords and placements they are not actively optimizing, you'll be able to capture some traffic and market share without engaging in a bidding war with them. A big ad budget isn't worth much if you aren't actively using it. This method can be hugely profitable, especially on the long tail and at the fringes. There's no need to fight a losing battle with a big advertiser over traffic they're actively seeking. Instead, slowly but steadily sap the traffic they don't even remember they have.

Exploit Their Testing Budget by Scaling Horizontally Into New Channels

By running a large campaign, your competitors are releasing lots of data into the wild. Thousands of headlines, keywords, banner ads, etc are all publically available for you to study and learn from. Remember, Internet marketing isn't magic. It's simply scientific testing and the application of a few fundamental principles. When you see large, well-funded competitors extend their tendrils into thousands of sites and keywords(you know, when you get the sense that you're seeing their ads everywhere), it's easy to feel frightened and overwhelmed. "How could I ever compete with them?" you think. "Their brand is so...established". But they're not doing anything special. They just have a bigger testing budget than you. And a bigger testing budget simply means they can afford to make more mistakes. So let them make mistakes and spend their money testing. Then, once they've figured out what works, and started scaling it, when you've seen many ad variations replaced by one or two they are running consistently, it's fairly easy to figure out what the most effective way to reach that particular target market is. You probably shouldn't copy their ads exactly. But there's nothing wrong with taking the fundamentals of their campaign, like their main appeal(is it a price appeal? a particular benefit appeal?), main keywords, the types of images they use in their banners, and scaling them horizontally to other, very related traffic sources and demographics. Do you think every single Google advertiser is also on Yahoo/Bing? Is every Pulse360 advertiser also running the same ads on AdSonar? Is every single PPV advertiser distributing campaigns evenly between TrafficVance, LeadImpact, and MediaTraffic? One of the most effective ways to easily generate new revenue is taking an existing campaign and porting it over to a related traffic source. Why not do the same with your competitors' campaigns? There are plenty of keyword research tools out there that will show you competitors' exact ads and keywords. (I recommend SEMRush). Learn from those campaigns, and scale them up. Wait for your large competitors to optimize their campaigns, learn the fundamentals that make them effective, and port them over to related traffic sources. Remember when I posted some of the most effective Facebook ad images? Thousands of people downloaded those images. Most simply put them, unchanged, into new Facebook campaigns. Those campaigns faltered, because Facebook users had already developed banner blindness for those images. But a few clever people looked at those images, which were the result of many different advertisers spending millions of dollars testing, and figured out which specific patterns, like a picture of a crying baby, were most effective. Then, they used those tried and tested patterns to build out campaigns on alternative, less saturated, yet technically similar traffic sources like Plenty of Fish, and got profitable very quickly. Let your competitors spend money testing and optimizing. The bigger they are, the easier it will be for you to quickly learn what works best. Then learn what works, adapt it to your own campaigns, and scale. tl;dr Summary: Having strong, well-funded direct competitors with large paid traffic campaigns gives you two advantages you probably weren't aware of:

1. Their campaigns are so large that they are not actively optimizing/managing bidding on all of their keywords and media buys, especially towards the long tail, leaving an opportunity for you to come in and take over.
2. The wide reach of their ads makes it easy to collect lots of data on what works best. You can effectively hijack their massive marketing budget for your own benefit. Large marketing spend means you can collect lots of accurate data from keyword tools, demographic research tools like Quantcast, as well as old-fashioned manual competitor research.

---

As you may have guessed, the upcoming release of insight.io will automate and scale many of these data collection and optimization tasks for you...but that's some time away. It won't hurt to put your email on the beta list though :)

Let's talk about long tail keywords. Whether you're doing SEO for a content site or building out a PPC campaign for an ecommerce site, you're going to be focused almost exclusively on long tail keywords, because the shorter keywords are either too competitive or too expensive. You need to remember this about long-tail keywords: Getting a little bit of traffic from random long-tail keywords is relatively easy. Getting lots of high-converting traffic from long-tail keywords is hard. Very hard. It's so hard that Demand Media has built a billion dollar company largely on their ability to find good long-tail keywords, and Yahoo paid a lot of money for Associated Content to try to do the same. Plugging in your main keywords into keyword tools is a losing strategy; You will probably have dozens of competitors using the same keyword tool, targeting the same exact cheaper keywords. Racking your brain for synonyms and misspellings may give you a few golden, uncompetitive, profitable keywords, that will result in 1-2 sales a day, but we're not really interested in that here at insight.io. We're interested in rapidly delivering lots of traffic. We don't want the piddling 10 visits a day from people who can't spell. We want a server-melting avalanche of traffic that will catapult your business and revenues to a level you never thought possible. And in order to accomplish that, your keywords need to be scalable.

Scalable Long Tail Keywords Lead To Big Profits

Let's say you're selling hard drive data recovery software. Here are two hypothetical long tail keywords you might use: download data recovery software seagate data recovery software Let's assume for the sake of argument that both keywords are equally competitive, have the same traffic volume, and convert exactly the same. If you could only pick one for a new campaign, which one would you pick? Don't think it matters? One of these keywords could be 10 times more valuable for your business. What other keywords naturally come to mind first to expand this list further? How about: seagate data recovery software hitachi data recovery software toshiba data recovery software The secret is that one of these keywords has a specific and easily varied modifier that can be changed to quickly scale the campaign with equally relevant yet diverse keywords. This means that you can rapidly and easily build out highly relevant ad groups without using keyword tools or worrying about synonyms or misspellings. It took me about 5 seconds to find a list of hard drive manufacturers I can use as the backbone of my campaign structure. This technique isn't limited to brands or types of products. We can try this for dating(ages): singles over 30 singles over 40 singles over 50 or weight loss( list of food): low fat salad dressing low fat soup low fat cake No matter what you're advertising, if you start by thinking of a single specific keyword containing an easily varied modifier, it will only take a few minutes to build a campaign that contains only cheap long-tail keywords but still delivers significant traffic volume. This is one of the secrets top marketers use to build multi-million dollar campaigns: start with an easy to modify long tail keyword, and scale.

If there's one thing affiliate marketing teaches you, it's how to survive in the face of fierce compatition. As an affiliate marketer, I frequently found myself competing against hundreds if not thousands of affiliates, all of them promoting the same product to the same customers on the same traffic sources. All of the fundamental principles of traditional marketing, like differentiation, a USP, price testing, etc mean nothing, because everyone is running the same ads for the same exact product, linking to that same landing page. There is no fluff like branding or engagement. This is raw, pure performance marketing, where the only things that matter are clicks and conversions. Even the most successful affiliate campaigns are fleeting- blink, and someone with a slightly more optimized campaign will destroy you. Affiliate marketing in a competitive niche is something of a trial by fire. Words like "traction" or "angel funding" are unknown. You either convert enough of your traffic into sales to turn a profit immediately, or you die and a hundred marketers who are hungrier than you vie to take your place. If you can build a profitable business in that space, you can do it anywhere. This is the business environment I cut my teeth on marketing in, so you could say I know a thing or two about succeeding in the face of stiff competition. It may seem impossible to succeed in a space that already has established, better funded competitors. But, as a newcomer, you have several incredibly powerful advantages over your competition. Utilize them, and you will be able to outmaneuver the most determined competitors every single time. Here's exactly how I was able to enter the most saturated verticals out there- dating, insurance, fitness- and build $1000-a-day campaigns despite the presence of sophisticated, entrenched competitors.

Don't Educate The Market: Capture Traffic at a Later Stage of the Buying Process

You probably know that customers go through several distinct phases when researching a product and committing to buy. Remember Glengarry Glen Ross: The stages of the buying process are:

1. Attention
2. Interest
3. Desire
4. Action

If you're in a competitive market, you will have competitors advertising to customers at every stage of the buying process. Many of your competitors, particularly big brands, are spending a lot of money to educate the market - to show potential customers that they have a problem their product or service can solve. Before committing to a purchase they will research all the alternatives, especially if they are B2B customers. While these people are doing research, they're costing your competitors serious money in ad clicks and impressions, but are not converting into sales, because they're still in the research phase of the sales cycle. Don't bother trying to educate the market- let your competitors spend money convince customers they need a product or service in your industry. Then, when they're finally ready to buy, when they're finally at that ACTION stage, swoop in and get the sale. Here's exactly how you can do this:

• Consider buyer intent Bid on keywords that demonstrate strong intent to buy- "buy voip service" vs "voip service provider comparison". Generally, the later you get into the sales cycle, the more expensive keywords become, but the jump in conversion rate usually makes up for this.
• Don't bid for top position There are many reasons why you shouldn't bid for the #1 position in a group of ads, and this is one of them. Frequently, consumers will click on the top 2-3 ads for a search result as part of their research process, just to understand the marketplace. Then they will click on another, lower position, ad and actually make the purchase. For this reason, many more sophisticated advertisers test how bids and ad position affect conversion rates. Many find that position 3-4 is the "sweet spot" that actually converts better than being in position #1.

Next week, I discuss how to convert your rivals' greatest strengths into unbeatable competitive advantages you can use to dominate the market.

A few years ago, when I was still getting my feet wet in internet marketing and not making very much money, I had a conversation with an incredibly successful affiliate marketer. This man had come from humble beginnings, starting with little seed money and no marketing knowledge to generating millions of dollars in commissions for himself in less than a year. And he did this by promoting lead-gen offers in the financial space, one the most fiercely competitive and difficult to break into niches out there. Of course, I was dying to learn the secret of his success. I knew he worked very hard, but lots of people work hard without approaching his level of success. So I pressed him to tell me exactly what he was doing to be wildly successful where so many of his competitors failed. And he told me. He said....

"I track everything down to the individual ad level from impression to conversion"

He was advertising on AdWords in the highly contested finance niche, where clicks could easily cost $4-$10 each. His competitors were experienced affiliates and PPC managers for major performance advertisers, so they knew what they were doing. They all carefully tracked each keyword via a unique subid, so they knew exactly which keywords were converting well for their offer. But they weren't tracking everything. When building a PPC campaign, most advertisers, even experienced search marketers, take two parallel paths in optimizing their campaign:

1. They look at every keyword's CTR and conversion rate, and eliminate poorly performing keywords that either have a high CPC(because of low CTR) or a low EPC(because of low conversion rate)
2. Simultaneously, they test different headlines on their ads to see which one gets more clicks, keeping the ads that have a higher CTR

Do you see what they're missing????

After finding keywords, the advertisers in this niche would spend most of their efforts on writing enticing ads, using words like FREE! and Try It Now! that would get a lot of clicks, thus lowering their cost per click. This clever affiliate wasn't doing that, because he knew better. And the reason he knew better is that he wasn't just tracking how every keyword was converting like everyone else...he was also tracking how every single ad he wrote was converting. For every ad he wrote, he appended a unique tracking ID to the destination URL, which would get passed through as part of the subid to that offer. He had a huge spreadsheet listing thousands of these ID numbers and the unique ad variation and ad group it corresponded to. The meticulous record keeping paid off. By tracking how every single ad converted, he soon realized that his most profitable and successful ads were not the ones with the highest CTR. In fact, some of the ads that got less clicks were responsible for the majority of conversions. Those clicks cost more, but they brought in much higher quality traffic. Instead of trying to get as many people as possible to click on his ad, he pre-qualified potential customers through the ad text, so only the most motivated and profitable customers clicked through to his landing page. When all of his competitors were losing money trying to get a high click through rate and getting cheaper clicks, he optimized his campaign at the individual ad level, went for targeted clicks over cheap clicks and was incredibly successful. Had this affiliate not been tracking every ad, he would have continued to put up high-CTR but low converting ads, lost money on the campaign, and missed out on millions of dollars in revenue for his business. Track every single headline, body, display URL, image, anything and everything. Follow the user from the specific ad all the way to the conversion. If you're not tracking every little bit of data possible, I guarantee you're losing money. Don't make that mistake.

I recently had the pleasure of assisting over 150 Hacker News members with marketing their startups. I was surprised to learn that I was giving the same advice over and over again. I’m collecting the most specific, actionable and useful marketing advice for startups in a 3 part series. This is part 3. If you haven't already, read part 1 and part 2, as this post builds on the advice given in preceding posts. I know what you're going through, fellow startup founder. You've already gotten pretty far with your startup. You've already launched, and maybe even developed what you think is a solid, scalable business model. You've set up tracking and analytics, optimized your landing pages and customer acquisition funnels, tried some PR, and maybe even set up and AdWords campaign. You're getting a few signups a day, mainly through word of mouth, but not even close to the amount you're expecting. AdWords is expensive, your CTR is abnormally low, and you're not getting very many clicks anyway on your $20/day budget. What you need now is traction, but you're not sure just how to get traction, for it is fleeting and capricious and lost more easily than gained. But don't worry, I can help. This post is all about quickly getting traction, customers, and profits. More specifically, it's about leveraging the vast amounts of traffic available out there into rapid, sustainable growth for your startup. So, after you how do you make the leap from piddling along at a few signups a day to consistent, rapid growth?

Test Lots of Traffic Sources

Any successful business uses multiple customer acquisition channels, constantly adapting to shifting trends in the market . Gabriel Weinberg calls them traction verticals, and he has a pretty good list. But you can go much deeper than that list. Are you advertising on AdWords search? With a little excel skill(or some commonly available tools) it would take almost no effort to export a campaign from AdWords and convert it to AdCenter, which covers Yahoo and Bing. Do that, and you suddenly have as much as 50% more search traffic, probably at much lower cost. And, following my last post, don't neglect media buys on industry blogs. They're cheaper and easier than you think, and they can do wonders if you're trying to reach small, high targeted niche audiences- like customers for your B2B software.

Go Beyond Search and Banners

What about PPV(popup ads) networks like Trafficvance and MediaTraffic? You just enter a list of URLs and keywords, and whenever a member of these networks visits one of your targets, your ad comes up. You pay between $10-$15 per 1000 visits. If, for example, you're trying to promote an iPhone app, popping up an ad for your app over reviews of competitors' apps is a very cost-effective and underutilized way to get targeted, engaged prospects. I know you think popup ads are so 90s and don't work, but the success of these ad networks speaks to the contrary. For certain segments of the population(IE users) they can be effective and unobtrusive without damaging your brand. If toolbar traffic is good enough for Ask.com and Zwinky, it's good enough for your entertainment/gaming startup too.

Leverage Your SEO Efforts

If you're already getting conversions from SEO, but you're struggling to get to the #1 position for every single one of your keywords, you can use what you've learned from SEO to get a lot more traffic. Running paid ad campaigns is all about testing; you're essentially paying to collect data about what works and what doesn't. [pullshow] You've collected that data for free(or cheap) from SEO. Use it. [pullthis]Take your top converting keywords from SEO, and put them into a new paid search campaign.[/pullthis] You already know these keywords convert, so it shouldn't hurt to start paying for them. Even if you're #1 for a keyword, like your product name, consider bidding on it in PPC anyway. Rand Fishkin says 12% of clicks go to paid results. If your only search strategy is SEO, you're leaving that traffic on the table. How about keywords your competitors are optimizing for? If you see them moving up in the SERPS for a certain keyword, get the jump on them with a paid search campaign targeting it.

Learn Customer Demographics, Reach Out To Them In Social Ads

The biggest thing you can do to rapidly scale your business is to stop thinking in terms of keywords and develop an in-depth understanding of who your ideal customers really are. Start thinking not just about demographics, but also psychographics. What are their interests? Where do they work or go to school? The more detailed the better. Then take those specific keywords and create highly relevant ad campaigns targeting them on Facebook Ads. You can now target the entire social graph with incredible precision on Facebook- every like, group membership, interest, and so on. Use this data. If you create an ad campaign on Facebook targeting everyone ages 18-30, unless you have an incredibly compelling ad....You.Will.Fail. If you take the time to think creatively about who your customers really are, and microtarget their interests, you will get virtually limitless, highly relevant traffic for pennies a click. Keyword targeting on Facebook is the best kept secret in social advertising. Very few people use this strategy in their social ads, and the ones that do are making absurd amounts of money with very little competition. Did you know that you can target people who have "liked" a specific website? Wow! Imagine the possibilities now that you can show your ads only to people who not only visit but actively engage with specific domains, brands, etc. If you use MailChimp to manage your email lists, they offer a cool free feature where they will link the email addresses in your list to Facebook profiles(courtesy of Rapleaf). Browse through some of your customers' profiles. Do they share a common interest? Belong to a certain demographic? Try targeting those on Facebook Ads and see how they convert.

---

I didn't hit even 20% of what I wanted to cover in this post, and it's already too long. I'll flesh out the details and specific tactics for scaling traffic in subsequent posts. For now, remember this: Learn everything you can about your customers, find out where they go online, and target those sites from every angle possible.

I recently had the pleasure of assisting over 150 Hacker News members with marketing their startups. I was surprised to learn that I was giving the same advice over and over again. I'm collecting the most specific, actionable and useful marketing advice for startups in a 3 part series. This is part 2. Last time, we discussed marketing fundamentals you needed to get right before beginning to drive traffic to your project. I hope you've implemented some of those suggestions into your product marketing. I don't want this blog to consist solely of vague textbook marketing advice. This week, we're going deeper and diving right into specific methods you can use right now to generate a stream of interested customers for your startup. Let's get started.

Test and Track Everything

...advertising is traced down to the fraction of a penny. The cost per reply and cost per dollar of sale show up with utter exactness. One ad is compared with another, one method with another. Headlines, settings, sizes, arguments and pictures are compared. To reduce the cost of results even one percent means much in some mail order advertising. So no guesswork is permitted. One must know what is best.

Can you guess which AdWords guru wrote the words above? That quote is from the seminal work Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins, written in the 1920s. You would think that, 80 years later, people would realize the importance of tracking, especially with how easy modern analytics software makes it. And yet, startup after startup is creating ads that link to their homepage, without any tracking variables appended. They can only guess if their ads are effective, and they're collecting exactly zero data. Any ad campaign, even if it's set up by an expert, will probably start out losing money. When you launch an ad campaign, you're not just paying for customers, you're paying for data about what works and what doesn't, tested in the marketplace. As you collect data and optimize, the campaign will eventually pull into the black. But if you're not collecting click and conversion data, you'll never know what you need to optimize, and you'll continue bleeding money forever. Don't just track based on which campaign gets the highest CTR. You need to drill down to the individual ad and keyword level, and track both CTR and conversion rate for each ad. This is done by appending a unique id to the URL of each ad variation. If you can't tell me exactly which headline is bringing you the most loyal customers, you're doing it wrong. If you track everything down to the ad level, you'll be able to know exactly where your most profitable customers are coming from. This is especially critical for recurring billing/subscription services, which many startups are. Again, optimize for CLV. Setting up tracking is super easy. Google Analytics has a simple URL Builder you can use to append tracking variables to any link. You'll want to focus on the utm_term and utm_campaign variables. If you want even better, more customizable, real-time data, my friends at MixPanel are happy to help. If you remember nothing else from this post, remember this: Track Everything Now. Every second you're not tracking, you're losing money.

Search Is Just The Tip of the Iceberg

Here's an example of what the typical startup founder told me about their marketing campaign:

Out startup sells time tracking software for dog walkers. We're already advertising online. We're bidding on "dog walker time tracking" on Google Search and getting 3 clicks and 0 conversions a day. How do we get more traffic?

It's not surprising that you're not getting lots of traffic, because you're stuck in a search-only mindset. You can thank Google's excellent branding for that, because they would love to have you believe that the only way to get customers online is through buying search keywords. Here's the truth about advertising online: most of your traffic and customers will not come from search. They will come from social networks(more on that soon) and other sites- and I don't mean just the Google Content Network. Want to know a cheap, high volume traffic source your competitors aren't using? Two words: media buys. Yes, I'm talking about banner ads and yes, they still work. You don't have to have a big budget to start buying banner ad space. Start approaching smaller blogs in your niche, and offer to pay them a fixed amount to paste your ad code into their site for a month. Again, track everything. When you do a simple media buy, you don't have to worry about maintaining a high CTR or relevance between ads and landing pages, you just need to get enough clicks and conversions to stay profitable. I'll have a post exclusively about media buying coming soon, but for now, start looking around and negotiating. You'll be amazed at the great deals and cheap traffic you can find.

Competitor Bidding Works, Take it To The Next Level

Bidding on the names of competitors on search is an effective tactic. You're reaching customers who are at a later stage of the buying cycle. They already know they need your product or service, and now they're just comparing the alternatives and reading reviews before committing to a purchase. Let your competitors spend money educating the market and finding qualified prospects, then snatch the customer from their grasp when he's about to buy.[pullshow] Competitor bidding is a good start, but it's only a start. Here's how you can easily and inexpensively outfox your competitors on most traffic sources: [pullthis]Don't stop at search. Follow competitors' ads around the web.[/pullthis] Search for competitor names, features, products, etc, or get their keywords from a keyword research tool. Look at the search results for their name and main keywords. Are there any sites there that have AdSense? Any blogs that have written reviews of a competitor's product? Those are all prime advertising opportunities. Approach them directly and offer to buy banner space, either on the whole blog or just on that specific post. Prospective customers searching for information about competitors will instead come across ads for your product, and some will inevitably convert. If you see a competitor's ads on an AdSense block on a page, you've found a fantastic traffic source. Approach the webmaster and offer to buy a banner ad to replace the AdSense. You'll be able to pay the webmaster more for the space because Google isn't taking their 30% cut, so it should be a no brainer for them to accept your offer. Now not only have you cut off a competitor from a lucrative traffic source, but you've also uncovered a proven source of converting traffic. Repeat this enough, and you'll be able to completely dominate your competitors outside of search while spending less than them.

Start Retargeting Right Away

Retargeting is the practice of showing ads to people who have already visited your site(but probably didn't convert). Retargeting is very cost effective, and delivers incredibly high-converting traffic, because you're only paying for impressions shown to people who have expressed an interest in your product. When building a retargeting campaign, create banners that prominently feature your name, logo, and color scheme. People who have seen that design before will notice and click. There are two easy ways you can use retargeting right away: AdWords has a retargeting option you can turn on for a campaign. Or, for greater reach, AdRoll has an easy self-serve retargeting system that ties into major ad networks. You just add their pixel to your site, they leave a cookie, and show banner ads that follow your visitors around the web, gently yet firmly reminding them to sign up for your site. There is so much involved in getting traffic online. I've only begun to scratch the surface of what's possible. If nothing else, I hope this post has inspired you to explore other traffic sources with tracked, tested, creative campaigns. Next week: I show you how to easily increase your current traffic tenfold, discuss advanced optimization tactics to squeeze more out of your current campaigns, and finish with a little-known traffic tip I've never told anyone before.