A quick way to gain quality traffic to your online website through pay-per-click (PPC) ads is to target them on highly relevant sites. Placement-targeted campaigns in AdWords or with other ad networks are fairly simple to set-up. You can import the list of sites you’d like to target your ads on, set your daily budget and bids, and launch the campaign.
So why is online marketing a full time job if it’s so simple? Curating a valuable and lengthy list of publishers could take days or even weeks and will definitely slow down your ability to start scaling quickly. Here are the few ways you can generate a valuable and lengthy list of publishers:
- The Slow & Stagnant Way: Manually finding content sites that discuss topics aimed to your target market, often requiring several hours or days of your time, preventing you from scaling quickly
- The Expensive Method: Buying data by testing ad spend on different traffic sources to see how they perform with your campaigns. This method is often very expensive with minimal results, as you’ll see several unprofitable campaigns before seeing any return on investment (ROI)
- The Big Data Approach: Using a third-party tool that tracks similar ads to yours and their most profitable placements
This blog post will highlight the big data approach, showing you how to find thousands of profitable traffic sources within seconds. This efficient and cost-saving method involves the use of big data analytics solutions, like MixRank. MixRank is an intelligent search engine for ads, indexing millions of contextual and banner ads and their placements all over the web. The keyword search function allows marketers a rapid and free alternative to finding semantically related ads and their placements.
I’ll walk you through a simple use-case: say your ad contains the keyword “baby cribs.” Enter the keyword into the search bar to see semantically related ads.
Click on a compelling ad that is similar to the audience you’re trying to reach. In this example below, consumers who are interested in baby changing stations are likely to be in the same market as baby cribs.
Within the ad report, you’ll see a list of traffic sources that the ad has been displayed on. Since MixRank automatically sorts the placements based on Times Seen (the amount of times MixRank has seen an impression of the ad), you can easily comprehend which sites have been better performing over time for the ad and use this list of publishers to target your own PPC campaigns. You can keep doing this with as many as ads that you deem relevant in order to produce a lengthy list of profitable sites.
Since MixRank is free to register, it’s certainly worth trying out to scale your campaigns profitably and quickly. Do you really want to keep spending money testing the wrong sites, or wasting time manually trying to find the right ones? Register today for your free account here.
Have you used any third-party tools to help you scale your PPC marketing efforts? Tell us in the comments section below about your experience running PPC ads on different placements and the different strategies you used to see profitable returns.
About the Author
Jana Fung, guest author of this post, is the Marketing Manager of MixRank. She has managed successful demand generation programs for over 5 years. She is optimistic about the growth of online advertising and has a passion for helping online marketers with their campaigns. If you’re a MixRank fan or just want to say hi, she’s interested in connecting with you! Follow her on Twitter @jana_fung
About MixRank
MixRank.com is a spy tool for contextual and display ads. With MixRank you can see exactly where your competitors are buying traffic and which ad copy is performing best for them across over 100,000 sites. You can use MixRank to watch your competitors spend money testing different ads and traffic sources, see which ones worked best, and use that data to build your own campaign.
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