I run online campaigns, and made many tests, with pay per click text ads, pop-unders, banner delivered on a cost per mile basis, sponsored links in search engines, and the one conclusion in making effective online marketing is not how you deliver the message, but where you deliver it.

For those that want to run or already run an online campaign, loosing the “where” point of your site will conclude in a very expensive campaign with no results. Therefore, for many media planners keeping those expenses as low as possible and reaching the goals they set, is imperative. No one can afford to blow their marketing budget on mediocre results.

Online marketing is not so different from regular marketing. There is a goal that have to be achieved using some limited expenses. The key here is targeting.

Establishing a goal (bringing interested visitors to your website, making a number of sales, promoting a product / service…) is the first step to make. You need to have clear in mind what you want to achieve by the end of the campaign, and what costs are you willing to accept.

Once you have that, you have to decide who is your target. Running a campaign with no target is like trying to shoot a duck 300 m away with your eyes closed. Imagine in this case what are your chances to actually hit that duck, and the same is with reaching your customers in the campaign. Running an untargeted campaign might look cheaper than using a targeted one. The more targeted the campaign is, the more expensive it will be, but you have too keep in mind that you get to have 90% chances to hit your audience, while with an untargeted one you will have (if you’re lucky) no more than 1%.

So, you will have to look for your “ducks”,where are they, what are they doing and why would they be interested in your message. Once having these answers, you can get developing your online campaign by targeting. Advertising networks offer more targeting methods that can be used individually or in combination.

Contextual targeting

Contextual targeting is using the placement of your message based on some keywords. Something similar with the search engine sponsored link. You ad message will appear on a website / page only if it has related content with your message, and there have been identified some keywords that you have chosen in advance. Let’s say that your message would sound like this: “Best rates for air travel in Europe”, than some of your keywords should sound like this: air tickets, cheap airline, fly Europe, London Berlin flight, and other keywords like that.

When compiling your list of keywords I recommend splitting them into two categories: general keywords and specific keywords. For the general list you can choose: 1. general keywords related to your activity / service / product (ex: travel, flight, Europe, air tickets, cheap…), 2. keywords related to your competition (see who your competition is and steal their traffic by placing your message to articles/content related to them; ex: Expedia, SkyScanner, EuroFlights, …). For the second category, the specific keywords list, you should use some words like destinations, airline names (ex: Berlin London flight, Paris Rome, Rome Bucharest, AirFrance, British Airways, VolareWeb, BlueSky…). Having these categories compiled you can start making endless combinations for use in your campaign.

Geo targeting

Geo targeting helps you send the message to a specific geographic area: world, continent, country, region or city. Setting the geo targeting depends on your services/products and who are they meant for. For example, if you are just a Fitness Club in London, than you should use as geo targeting London area. It would make no sense to deliver your ad message to people in Belfast or maybe New York, as they will never get to visit your Club.

Behavioral targeting

Behavioral targeting is used in accordance with some events (scheduled or unexpected) that can change the way people behave. Let’s take for example the recently unexpected Dean hurricane. It hit the Caribbean area. Now, if you would be a travel agent, you would use this in your own interest: advertise a travel package to a similar place, maybe Hawaii, as people intending to go to Caribbean Islands will surely be looking for something else after the area was hit and devastated by a hurricane. This is an example where an event changed the way some people behave.

Time targeting

Time targeting is a system that let’s you deliver your message only during some time intervals: each day between 19.00-23.00, only during one or more specific days of the week (ex: Saturdays and Sundays). How do you use this? It all depends on your targeted customers habits. If you offer some business services, well maybe a good way would be target online newspapers (business categories), in the morning, as that would the time when most people getting at the office start reading it (that if they don’t read a regular newspaper instead of an online one).

Channel targeting

All websites can be integrated into different categories and sub-categories, based on their main content. Example of categories would be Business, Art, Internet, Science, Travel, Sports and so on, while some sub-categories, for example for Sports, would be Baseball, Basketball, Boating, Golf, Football and other. Channel targeting it’s some kind of contextual targeting, but instead of using some keywords, you just select to what caterories or subcategories you get to target your message. Here again, if you would sell bikes, than it would be good to target primary websites from Bicycling channel.

Demographic targeting

Demographic targeting is somehow similar with channel targeting, but instead of having websites in categories related on content, we will have websites that have proven to target and have traffic from demographic categories based on sex (female, male), age (5-18, 18-24…), income, religion, marital status (married, singles) and other such categories. Now, if you are promoting a new women perfume, than you should target websites with female traffic, over 18 years old (so that they can place an order, but that depends from one country to another, in some other you could go even to over 15 years old), and maybe you could target women with a higher income if the perfume promoted is from an expensive category.

Website targeting

Website targeting or domain targeting as some other would say is probably the most simple way of targeting. You could choose to advertise on a comparison website for electronics if you sell any of those products. To do that, you have to contact that website and negotiate a deal (that if they are making in house advertising) or register with the ad network they use to serve their ads and have the target set to that domain.

In your campaign you can choose only one of these targeting methods, or any combination of these in order to reach your potential customers. As I said at the beginning of this article, using more targeting methods at once might be more expensive but if done properly the return on investment will be at the highest level.

Resources to use:

• Ad networks list
• Affiliate networks list