Segmenting Your Traffic Sources, Things to Keep in Mind
Segmenting your various traffic sources is important if you want to deliver relevant, fully-optimized landing pages. This way you can market to customers on a granular level, rather than tackling everybody in the exact same way (and no two people are exactly the same).
We’ve posted some examples of how you shoud go about segmenting your traffic sources, and how you can deleve even further in order to maximize the effectiveness of your marketing efforts:
Paid Traffic
One major traffic source is going to be traffic that you’re currently paying for. It’s important to segment (and further segment) this source, as it’s probably the most significant in terms of volume and relevance - not to mention the most crucial, if you really want to get the best positive return on your investment.
Essentially all traffic is “paid for”, in that it requires time and investment to market to pretty much any group of people. But for the sake of clean segmentation, defining which traffic sources you are paying for directly - and then serving the most effective variation of your landing page to that particular audience - is the best way to optimize your marketing efforts.
1. Google AdWords
If you’re bidding on keywords via Google Adwords, then you really ought to be serving a dedicated landing page to the people clicking your ads on the Google SERP (Search engine results page). Think about the behaviour and motivation behind this particular traffic source; these are people who are actively searching for you via a set of specific key words/key phrases related to your industry and then clicking on your ad. They already know what they’re looking for, it’s your job to provide them with a landing page to fullfill that need:
- Specific keyword combinations - There’s really only one necessary method of further segmenting Google AdWords traffic, and that’s to break it down into specific keyword combinations. Of course, there are countless combinations that you can bid on, and even more ways to utilize keywords (will they just be in your headline, or scattered throughout your page?) and therefore countless landing page variations you should be serving each one. Some keyword combinations will be more focused than others, whilst some will be broader and targeted to a wider range of people.
2. Facebook Ads
When paying for traffic on Facebook, you’ve really got to think about the broad range of people you’re marketing to. No two people are exactly alike, and user behaviours and motivation will differ to those performing an active search via Google. This means you ought to be serving a dedicated landing page that will engage less-active Facebook users. They’ve clicked on your ad, perhaps out of curiosity, and now it’s your job to provide a landing page that will capture their attention by letting them know your product/service is relevant:
- Location - The geographical location of your Facebook audience can be a worthy segment to consider targeting. By optimizing landing pages to be location-specific, you’ll have far more luck engaging visitors in certain parts of the country, or even the world, if it appears as though you’re marketing to these groups of people specifically - while targeting Facebook traffic from the same location as your small business only can help prevent time and money being wasted on irrelevant marketing.
- Gender - Likewise, if a product/service is targeted towards males or females then it makes sense to segment Facebook traffic according to gender. But even if that’s not the case, serving male and female traffic an optimized variation of your landing page - using the most effective messaging and visuals for that audience - can also help increase conversions. It’s also helpful from a reporting standpoint, seeing who responds to Facebook marketing best, and then using that data to your advantage.
- Age - Once again, even if your product/service is not targeted towards a specific age group, serving an optimized landing page can certainly improve conversion rates. This allows you to speak to different groups of people on a more appropriate level, changing the style of your copy as you think will work best. Older users, for example, will have different priorities than younger audiences, and will respond better to certain forms of messaging and imagery.
- Employment, relationship status and education - Splitting Facebook traffic allows marketers to get right down into the nitty gritty of demographic factors. It’s this kind of advanced segmentation that makes marketing a “personal level” much easier. Moreover, it allows us to group certain segments together (such as ‘gender’, ‘location’ and ‘relationship status’) in order to take the guesswork out of content marketing, giving us a clearer idea of what kinds of landing pages people will respond to best.
3. Display Ads
Display ads published on websites are another form of paid traffic you’ll want to segment. Like a combination of Google ads and Facebook ads, you’ll want to serve a dedicated landing page that has been optimized according to known user metrics, and in relation to the ad itself:
- Ad placement - Depending on where your ads are being displayed, you might want to consider varying the content of your corresponding landing pages. For example, ads placed on news and blog orientated websites will probably drive traffic less-motivated to buy than, say, traffic coming from ecommerce sites. This will require a different tact in order to engage and sell to these people, whilst visitors who are already motivated will want a landing page that makes it easy to get what they want.
- Ad template - If you’re using more than one ad template, then you’ll definitely want to optimize various landing pages to correspond with each design, taking imagery, copy and use of color into account. This will make the transition from ad to landing page a much more seamless, cohesive experience - which in turn will lead to a better conversion rate.
Another significant traffic source is going to be any referrals coming from your outgoing email campaigns, provided you have a sufficient mailing list. Segmenting this source further will allow you to market more effectively.
1. Subscriber activity
Even though subscribers will have already agreed to receive emails from you, open and engagement rates will differ, which could be a reflection of people’s level of interest in being marketed to. You’ll want to split traffic in accordance with how active they are, and serve an appropriate version of your landing page to each one:
- First time recipients - Brand new recipients will have signed up to your mailing list for a reason (perhaps for more information, a free trial, competition) so you need to use that info and serve it to them with a dedicated landing page - giving them precisely what they signed up for to begin with.
- Not opened/clicked a link since certain date - If recipients haven’t opened your emails or clicked a link to your landing page in a while, then it may not be worth your time marketing to them. The best thing is to try and re-engage these people with an email dedicated to that purpose, and then sending them to a landing page which corresponds, perhaps personalizing content to be more engaging, message matching what you put in the email.
- Regularly active recipients - On the other end of the scale, regularly active recipients (or subscribers) will be showing much greater interest in being marketed to. You’ll want to identify these people and serve a no-fuss version of landing page that gets straight to the point.
Social Media
Having already spoken about Facebook (see ‘Paid Traffic’ above) you should have an idea how to segment social media traffic according to demographic. But you’ll also want to take user platforms into consideration, identifying traffic coming Facebook and Twitter, and then optimizing landing pages for each - perhaps including FB or TW widgets, depending on where traffic is coming from.
Remarketed Traffic
Without going into too much depth, remarking is another form of paying for traffic, using ads to re-engage site visitors and then serving a landing page based on known metrics. In order to produce those landing pages, you’re going to need to segment this source and apply the same further segmentations as described above (such as where ads are being placed and how long since visitors last engaged with your site).
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