MixRank Blog

Say you have a campaign that's been moderately successful for some time. Your creatives and targeting are relevant to your audience, and you're getting a steady flow of conversions profitably. But, after some time, your campaign will invariably being to saturate the market. You'll see conversion rates begin to drop and costs slowly rise, while traffic remains flat. This happens to everyone. Online marketing wouldn't be much fun if we could just throw up a single successful campaign and sit on our asses collecting checks for the rest of our dats.

How do you scale the campaign up to more traffic and stop the regression to lower profits? 

One way might be to expand your ad groups or targeting and find more keywords that will do as well as your existing ad groups.

Finding lateral keywords(keywords that describe the same term in a different way)  has been a well documented and successful strategy, especially in the early days of search marketing, when a marketer armed with a thesaurus and a good imagination could build massive campaigns.

But adding more keywords to a campaign is merely a band-aid, a short term fix that won't solve the core problem of an audience that has gotten tired of what you're selling. 

I'd like to describe a new strategy that I have used very successfully to grow new campaigns as well as breathe new life into stagnant old ones. I call this strategy scaling to lateral audiences. 

Just as lateral keywords are closely semantically related to the original keyword (i.e "meet single women" and "online dating sites"), lateral audiences are closely related based on their core attributes- their fundamental needs, desires, and problems.

In other words, if your product solves a problem for a specific group of people, thinking in terms of laterally related audiences would help you find more people like them, that also have a need for your product.

To illustrate the power of lateral audiences, we're going to walk through an example using a free MixRank account.

Just to take a random example I made up, let's pretend we're a company selling gold coins- a growing industry in this economy. This is a very competitive space with lots of advertisers, so we're going to have to get creative if we want to take some of their traffic for ourselves.

Google's Traffic Estimator shows that the keyword "buy gold coins" has a very high average CPC for position 1 of $10.10. To get this data, I set the average CPC in the Traffic Estimator to an absurdly high number like $1000 to make sure I get the absolute highest bid for this keyword.

Let's find a way to get a similar audience, one who's interested in buying gold, less expensively. All we have to do to start is initiate a search from the MixRank home page and find a relevant advertiser whose strategies we can study. Let's just search for our keyword and click on the first suggestion:

The search results will show us a few ads that are highly relevant to the keyword we searched for. I can already see one lateral audience here- several of the ads say "Buy silver coins".

It's important to be mindful of the distinction between keywords and audiences here. Lateral keywords for this theme would be phrases like "buy gold bullion" or "buy gold bars". In other words, they describe the same product in a different way. "Buy silver coins" describes a different product but targets a lateral audience that has similar fundamental desires- in this case the desire to own precious metal. This desire could further be reduced to a core drive for security, financial stability, greed, etc.

The keyword "buy silver coins" has an average CPC of $4.92. Still high, but a significant improvement in targeting the same audience.

Let's find out which core desire it is based on the current advertising strategies of the market's leaders. From the search results page, I'm going to pick what looks to be the current leader in this space, "goldine.com". I can see more data about them by clicking on that domain in the "Advertiser" column on the far right.

The Advertiser Report for goldine.com will show me their highest performing ads and traffic sources. You can also reach this report simply by typing their domain, "goldline.com" into any search box. 

Looking through their text ads, I'm noticing a common phrase that's consistent across all of their split tests: "Free Investor Kit":

They've probably tested many different positioning strategies and found that presenting gold as an investment is the strongest appeal. Here's another lateral niche audience: people who are looking to buy gold as an investment (as opposed to collectors seeking gold for numismatic purposes, etc). Google Traffic Estimator shows that the keyword "invest in gold" has a max CPC of $8.87. This high number is encouraging, because it means that this is a valuable, high converting audience.

$8.87 is a bit rich for us- if we were running a campaign targeting this theme, I would probably see my margins plummet as I get squeezed out by competitors with bigger budgets.

But remember our other, related audience of silver buyers? "buy silver coins" was significantly cheaper than "buy gold coins", so I would expect this pattern to hold across other, related keywords centered around buying silver. 

Indeed, "invest in silver" has a maximum CPC of $3.71, which is a huge 58% discount from the gold keyword, yet targeting an audience that's closely related to the original keyword, and one we can be reasonably sure will convert just as well, because they're interested in buying precious metals as an investment.

But let's keep going and see if we can cut our traffic costs even further using MixRank's database of millions of ads. 

MixRank's ad search uses sophisticated matching algorithms that go beyond simply looking for the appearance of keywords in ad copy or landing pages and identifies campaigns that are thematically relevant to the query. For a great example of this, let's search for our new keyword that we derived from the ad copy we saw goldline.com running- "investing in gold".

Our goal with these searches is to identify keywords and audiences that don't match our search query exactly, but are somehow related.

There's one result that jumps out at me immediately. 

Of course! Some people that are interested in investing in gold are part of the small, but lucrative niche audience of people stocking up for an impending economic collapse. The Ron Paul audience, if you will. Analyzing the ads of advertisers like this one will give us great insight into this market. Let's make the assumption that people anticipating an economic collapse are highly motivated to turn their paper dollars into gold, which we will be happy to sell to them.

The keyword "economic collapse", which features prominently in these ads, has a suggested max CPC of $1.02, a 90% discount on our original keyword of "buy gold coins", which cost over $10 a click.

An inexperienced marketer will suggest that "economic collapse" is a bad keyword to target, because it doesn't show intent and is not a "buying keyword", so it will not convert as well. But remember, we're getting this traffic 10 times cheaper!

Let's say you have a stagnant campaign based around the "buy gold coins" theme that's barely breaking even. If you target the "economic collapse" keyword, all you have to do is achieve 1/10th your current conversion rate from this audience to get a huge bump in traffic and profits.

"Prepare for impending economic collapse- buy gold!". The ads practically write themselves. 

No thesaurus or keyword tool will tell us that new main keyword, "economic collapse", is strongly correlated with the keyword we started with, "buy gold coins". But by using MixRank to pull relevant keywords out of ad copy and searching for thematically relevant ads matching those new keywords, we can quickly identify pockets of opportunity that advertisers without the benefit of this data will miss.

In a later post, I'll show you how to delve even deeper to identify even less expensive, high converting audiences and leveraging them for a flood of massive traffic. But following the strategy outlined above should be enough to get you started scaling your campaigns across lateral audiences very quickly.

I dispense a lot of marketing advice on this blog. Most of it is backed up by data, or my own experience, or the conventional wisdom accumulated by thousands of marketers. But it's important to remember that, in marketing, there are no hard and fast rules or surefire strategies for success. Here's an example of a project that eschewed conventional wisdom, broke all of the rules, and managed to generate explosive, viral growth through somewhat more unconventional channels. On the surface, ThatHigh is a site that should have never gotten any traction. The primary paradigm of the site is derivative of FMyLife and not particularly unique. It falls into an incredibly competitive and increasingly fragmented humor site for college kids niche. It's aimed at a fickle, disloyal, and shall we say...forgetful audience. And, worst of all, it faced the chicken-and-egg problem that plagues most user generated content sites- it needs content to attract users, but it needs users to generate that content. Given how stacked the odds were against it, the meteoric growth of ThatHigh to over 1 million pageviews a month is all the more impressive. I recently spoke to the founder of ThatHigh to learn exactly how he was able to bring in significant traffic without doing SEO or spending lots of money on advertising. In his own words:

Getting the Idea for ThatHigh

While I don't consider myself to be a stoner, I have always thought that the web lacked a place for smokers of all types (casual or frequent) to discuss ideas and share hilarious or amusing thoughts. These places exist but they lack the brand and business-drive that often makes such sites successful. Most of them aren't well known. When a friend suggested I make a site like this and call it "That High" (very much a ripoff of FML), I thought the idea was too good to pass up. So I registered the domain name, and built the site with two other people over the course of one night. It was started as an experiment, more than anything.

It seems that more than a few successful sites began as a half-formed idea built during a frenzied hackathon. If you think something might have a chance of succeeding and you can get at least something out quickly...just throw it up and see what happens.

Struggling to Retain Traffic

The first thing I tried was submitting the site to reddit, digg, and a few other private forums. This went very poorly because the site didn't have much content. I figured putting a few stories up would be enough, but it wasn't. Most of the feedback was very good, but the site didn't retain any traffic because of the lack of content.

The vast majority of users are consumers of content, not producers. If you don't offer some value to a casual surfer immediately...They.Will.Bounce.

Seeding The Site With Content

So I made a bunch of fake accounts, mined the web, and posted as much as I could find to the site under different accounts. Then I went into the database and manually created a ton of votes for each of the stories, to make it look like there was as much activity as I could. I even posted some fake conversations in the comment sections.

This is exactly how reddit got initial traction too. The fact is that if you're building a content site, you need to think about getting content first, before getting users. There are two ways to do this. You can bring in high-value content producers users want to see for your site(FunnyorDie, Huffington Post, etc) or seed the site with content other users can engage with(by writing it yourself, hiring forum posters, getting interns to write blog posts, etc).

Identifying and Reaching the Target Audience

I have no idea where I got the idea, but I decided that College Humor would share much of my target audience, so I found the "submit link" section of their website and submitted ThatHigh.com. About a week later, they accepted our submission (it's all moderated) and we got a TINY little link in their sidebar for a few days. They had changed the text to "This is your FML. This is your FML on drugs." That first day, our site got something like 20k visits. This was an absolutely enormous spike and I had certainly never run a website with that much traffic. The traffic from CH eventually trailed off (after just a few days). At that point, we had a definite userbase. Users were registering, submitting, and voting. I no longer had to fake activity, which was awesome.

The CollegeHumor traffic spike may seem like sheer luck, but it's anything but. It's actually the result of identifying the most highly targeted and relevant audience for the site, finding the specific microtargeted segment of that audience most likely to convert into regular visitors and engage with the site (people who frequent humor sites, for example) and identifying the places they gather online.

Growing Without SEO

I've done almost zero SEO. I don't know enough about it to spend lots of time in that area. I changed the title tags to match each page's content, I submitted a site map to Google Webmaster Tools, and I added the relevant meta tags. I think my site's pagerank is something like 2 / 10, so not that great. But it turns out, for a site like this, that doesn't matter. At least not yet. I fully admit this is an area where I might see some increased traffic and revenue if I spend some time on it, but there are only so many hours in the day. My search traffic basically consists of users searching for "that high" or the standard variants.

SEO is not the only way to get traffic for free. Instead of pandering to the caprice of search engines, your time could be better spent with on-site optimization for retention and engagement, working on increasing the amount of pageviews per user, time on site, and so on. The reason ThatHigh can grow without SEO is that it's a naturally, pardon the pun, sticky site. The constant flow of new content in short, easy to digest bits means that some users will come back multiple times to check what's new on the site. Also, note how the site is carefully engineered to minimize friction whenever possible. Voting and submitting are incredibly easy to do, and don't even require registration. Minimizing the amount of mental energy required to interact with a site is key to keeping users engaged and coming back to create content.

Testing Paid Traffic Sources

I've tried advertising with AdWords, Project Wonderful, StumbleUpon, Facebook, Reddit, and a few others. By far the most effective is StumbleUpon. I put $5-$10 many months ago, and when the initial stumbles gained a good rating from the users, the site just exploded on SU. This was many months ago, and I still see a significant amount of traffic from SU daily. I think I got lucky and struck a chord with some of SU's users, and maintaining a high rating on the site ensures that it gets stumbled more often. Win! Reddit ads are probably the next best thing. I tend to stay away from CPC advertising because it doesn't give me a good return on the money. Reddit allows you to target to specific subreddits (if you like), and I've been experimenting with this again very recently to find a good strategy there.

It's incredibly hard to justify paid advertising to promote a content site that isn't selling anything. You're essentially trying to pay for the ads through simple traffic arbitrage, a strategy that has not been very effective for quite a few years. The common theme of the traffic sources that did work for ThatHigh, and probably work for other content sites, is that paid traffic is used only for the initial push- the first few stumbles, a little bit of awareness on reddit. After that, the traffic starts coming in organically and takes off without further action from the advertiser. Consistently paying for stumbles is a foolish endeavor- but buying a few stumbles to get initial momentum can be tremendously powerful.

Hustling and Doing Whatever it Takes to Get Traffic

The hardest part, I think, was getting the initial traffic. Online ads were good, but I also spammed the hell out of my college campus (months ago). Most people want to build a site like this and then stop, wait for users, and get rich. It doesn't work that way. Every 2 days or so, I'd go to my school's quad and chalk every vertical surface I could find. Then I'd do the same thing in town. I even went to one of the dorm's and used dry-erase marker on the mirrors and windows on each floor and in each bathroom. This was pretty tedious, but it worked very well. Within days the site's traffic had doubled. This is the kind of thing that most people won't do.

Sometimes, driving traffic simply demands ingenuity, creativity, and hustle. Be more creative than your competitors, work harder than them, and test faster than them. Go where your competitors dare not because they are too complacent, too conventional, too risk-averse. There are literally thousands of diverse traffic sources out there...go explore them!