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Learning to Infer Demographic Data
Posted by admin | Posted in Branding | Posted on 15-02-2010
I haven’t posted anything in awhile because I have been really busy and haven’t felt too inspired to share anything. However, I was sharing this story with someone the other week and thought it might be something other people would find useful. The actual campaign is also no longer relevant so I feel ok to share it.
A year ago, almost to the week, I was just starting to run this display campaign for Stretch Mark cream. As I used to do, the first thing I did was put up a Google content campaign related to stretch marks. Pretty much right off the bat it was doing a few hundred sales a day, so I knew the campaign had a lot of potential. A few days after the campaign launched I started digging into the stats only to see I was getting a lot of sales from articles talking about the news of Chris Brown beating Rhianna (I am really not kidding).
At first I laughed and thought it was odd, but then I thought there had to be a reason this was happening. After looking through all the articles related to the incident, most we’re coming from Hip-hop sites that I was not actively targeting. The majority of the people reading these sites were African Americans. I had never thought previously about actively targeting black women for this campaign, but it seemed like it could work.
Taking the idea of targeting Black Women specifically because of my referral data, I created a quick content campaign that was full of placements geared toward black women. I found a lot of sites that I didn’t know about (which is always great) and realized that many of them were a lot larger than I realized. After the first day or so it stood out that Black Planet could be a huge source for this campaign. Taking my Google content campaign data, I called Black Planet and signed an IO to target women ~25 and over (I don’t quite remember) and it did very well.
Point of the story is that if you pay attention to your traffic and really look for patterns, you can learn to infer demographic data about your sales patterns without forcing customers to give the data to you. As you’re scaling campaigns, look for patterns and ways your can use those patterns to scale the campaign even further.
Brandon, it’s funny you posted this. I ran into this exact thing on my first PPC campaign. I was running a site with some free baby stuff type of offers. Along with all the free baby stuff keywords I snuck in there WIC… that’s a state run program that helps struggling families with kids. This kw did the most volume and lead me to launching a whole site just targeted at WIC keywords with a host of baby freebies that did very well for over two years.
Good post man… Corey
Great post. Just a quick Q though. Stretch marks on google content? Cloaking? I’m not gonna run the campaign, just wondering is all.
Cool post — curious to why you gave out so much info on a successful campaign?
Awesome post man.
and oh yeah I made a killing with stretch mark too,
@Josh - Because I absolutely, in no way need it anymore
Great post. Do you still use the google content network to actively run or even test campaigns?
I have never had any luck getting volume when doing managed placements, personally. I heard it’s best to bid cpm when doing managed placements. Has this been your experience?
Brandon, good to see you a post from you. What did you use to find all the websites that were for black women?
@Jimmy Tang - The Adwords site placement tool will suggest network sites based on demographics you input, i.e. black females ages 25+.
@Brandon - Smart post! Finding patterns is the key!
I’m curious as to why your ads were served on that specific news article in the first place? What did the content of it have to do with stretch marks? Was it the reference to her using makeup to cover the bruises, or did you start with a broader demographic like all women 25+?
Cool post and it’s the way I find my winners. If you don’t mind sharing, are you just creating new Adwords accounts regularly or has running those offers not been an issue for you?