When it comes to online advertising, it’s all about the “click“! However, the dynamic of what makes the person click is what is really important. When you are promoting an offer on a pay per click basis, it’s extremely important to keep your quality at a higher rate, but the same results apply when pushing a cost per action based offer too. The bottom line is, you want to be providing quality traffic for your advertisers. The better traffic and leads you can send their way, the more likely they will increase their ad spending with you, and will have a much longer and successful relationship.

Let’s look at three different ways you can start increasing the quality of your click throughs and leads generated.

Stop Trying to Trick the User

Remember those banners that would flash non stop and say that you were the millionth visitor and were awarded a prize? Those banners were doing exactly the opposite of what we are talking about here. They were going after as much traffic as they could possibly get, then sending their visitors to an email/zip submit type of offer. The data provided usually has a very fast turn over rate, and is sold to multiple media/ad buyers.

Instead of trying to trick your audience into clicking on a link, think about the ways that you can relate to your audience and make them want to convert. While an insane blinking banner may bring in a lot of clicks, the conversions might be terrible. Spend more time on targeting the right audience and giving them banners they want to see and can relate to. Your cost per click may be higher, but you will also see higher conversions and provide the end advertiser with better quality leads.

Make the User WANT to Click

One of the best ways to find an audience of people who are anxious to click on your little blue text links, is to provide them with exactly what they are looking for. Let’s take review and coupon sites for example. How many times were you searching for a product or service to buy, and you were just looking for the right review or coupon code? Once you found the information you were looking for, you would gladly click on a link in their web site to go forward with the sale or purchase.

This is exactly why coupon and review sites do so well. When is the last time you did a search for “web hosting reviews” on Google? The web sites paying to rank for these terms are paying a lot of money for where they rank, but all of the traffic to these sites are high quality. Sure, the site owners are probably getting $100+ in commissions per sale, but they know they can convert their traffic because they are providing exactly what their site visitors are looking for.

Pre-Sell Your Audience: Withholding the Click!

Another excellent example of getting high quality click throughs is through the use of video marketing. We can relate to this method all too well. How many times have you received an email from another guru/marketer, and you have to wait and watch their annoying video before being able to click to the next page and/or place your order?

It’s annoying, but it works! By making the viewer not be able to click away from the page, it’s actually making them listen and watch your video, with is continually selling them on the dreams of what their product can do for you… further increasing the chances they will stick around and buy once that final “Click Here to Purchase” link becomes available.

What Type of Traffic Are Your Providing?

Don’t get me wrong, there will always be a market and business of cheap, dirty and crap leads… but when you are looking for long term and high end commissions, lead quality is where your focus should be. When promoting any ad campaign and pushing volume, it’s important to keep in touch with your ad network or the advertiser directly. If you are pushing quality leads that continue to convert on their backend, they will gladly send a few more dollars your way to increase the volume and reward you for your efforts!

Gone are the days when you simply throw up a bunch of affiliate offer banners and hope for the best. Well, you still can do that, but you are destined for failure, and why would you want to anyway? With all of the information and targeting that you now have right in your hands, how can you pass up on the extra due diligence to make sure your ad campaign succeeds.

A new pet affiliate network that I’m working with has a wide variety of affiliate offers that any pet lover, pet blog or resource web site would love. While looking through their selection of offers, I thought it would be a great idea to take one of these offers, then show how you can study what you know about the offer, then start promoting it through different sources.

One of the well branded offers on the network is PetCareRX, which is a discount pet supplies and medication web site. The offer pays $30 per signup and is only for email promotion, but there are plenty of other offers on the network which allow other methods such as banners, social and web site advertising. Since PetCareRX is a well known brand, let’s go through some of the different ways we can research the company/offer, then build a campaign around their site.

Quantcast User Demographics

First let’s run over to Quantcast.com and pull a demographics report on the type of visitors that are going to PetCareRX.com. Right away we can see some key figure in the chart below. The ones with blue have the majority of percentage for each demographic. At a quick glance it looks like we have mostly females, who are 35-50+, caucasian, have no kids and a mid range income. While the information may not be 100% accurate, it’s a great way to get a quick feel on the type of demographics that might perform best with your offers.

Plenty of Fish = Plenty of Pet Owners

Next let’s head over to ads.pof.com and create some ad campaigns to promote PetCareRX. We aren’t going to focus on ad copy right now, but instead how easy is it for you to take what you learned from Quantcast, then put it into action at POF.

Check out the screenshot below from within the POF ads manager. How cool is that? I just targeted all of the demographics that were pointed out above, but I was also able to go even a step further and target only pet owners!

Facebook Ads = 1 Million Pet Lovers

While Plenty of Fish doesn’t tell you exactly how many pet owners they have on the network, the next best thing is to head over to Facebook Ads and create a campaign targeted to people that already have an interest in “Dogs” and “Cats”… and by the way, just targeting those two terms in the US brings in over 1 MILLION users! You can even target “PetcareRX” on Facebook interests, and reach 6,000+ die hard fans. Think about all of the other popular pet web sites and interests that could be targeted.

Google Keyword / Site Search

Wouldn’t it be great if you knew what keywords and search terms PetCareRX were bidding on to bring people to their site, or what long tail keywords people are coming across in the search engines, and getting to their site? Sure enough, we can do that! Head over to the Google Keyword tool and run a report, but not under the keyword section, but instead for the petcarerx.com web site. Google will then pull up a massive report of relevant keywords that you can use to advertising your landing pages and search engine marketing.

Help, I Need More Banners & Ad Copy!

It’s a growing trend that affiliate networks are not providing as many banners and ad copies as they used to. For such a scenario, you can usually head over to Moat or MixRank and pull up a ton of banners and creatives that are running through out the web. Unfortunately neither of these sites had any banners or creatives for PetCareRX… what to do? Get old school and head over to Google Images and perform a search for the domain name / site you want to advertise, then use the “Exact Size” feature and you will probably find some banners that you were looking for, like the screenshot below.

Putting Everything You Know into Action

Woah, we just covered a mega ton of information on how to promote an offer. Best of all, this same process can be used to break down any affiliate offer or web site out there. In this example, PetCareRX was only available for email promotion, but imagine of how many other campaigns are out there for social networking, cpv, search and banner advertising… a ton! Never before has it been so easy to break down WHO is buying WHAT, and how you can TARGET their exact DEMOGRAPHICS in an ad campaign.

Since I’ve already laid out everything for you on how to make money with pet affiliate offers, why not head over to PetAffiliateNetwork.com and check out what other offers they have on the network.