Should ads be relative to your site, or to your audience?

by Sapphire (March 24, 2008)

From the start of my self-education in search engine optimization, I was told your ads need to be relevant to your content. It never made sense to me, and I’m starting to wonder if it wasn’t all part of the myth building process that made AdSense so huge. Consider this from Affiliate Marketing and Appealing to Different World Views:

For example, consider a trendy woman’s fashion merchant. Logic would dictate they this merchant would craft their message to their core customer segment, woman interested in trendy fashions. Now, suppose we have a webmaster who runs a blog with a community of married men who are computer enthusiasts (aka nerds) (note: I would definitely be a member of this community). Right before Christmas time, these men are desperate and searching for advice and tips on gifts to buy their wives/significant others. The blog owner signs up for the woman’s trendy fashion affiliate program, and offers this merchant up to his community. Just like that, the trendy woman’s fashion site gets exposed to a group of men who wouldn’t ordinarily be visiting this site, and who are looking for things to purchase.

Exactly. Why are we advised to give these opportunities a miss?

Granted, if you’re the site owner providing ad space, you need advertisers to come through with an ad that belongs on your side and takes your visitors to a landing page that makes sense to them. In the above example, you need:

An ad that speaks directly to male geeks looking for gifts for women,
An ad that promises them a great gift,
A landing page that delivers with suggestions.

This is where advertisers are failing us. Many of them don’t get that making a few pretty banners in different sizes at CJ does not an ad campaign make. Every advertiser should offer a “looking for a gift for the ______ in your life?” banner. Whoever they’re selling to, there are always people buying gifts for that person. Advertisers need to get more on the ball with seasonal offers, too. For example, I see clothing merchants completely miss the “back to school” opportunity every July/August. What’s up with that? People spend a lot of money on their kids’ clothes for school. I see online office supply shops miss that one too - here they are, one of the few places you can get school supplies without standing in line for three hours, and they don’t make a banner for the occasion.

But what about when you’re the advertiser, and it’s all up to you? When you’re promoting your sites, do you think about the “non-relevant” audiences that might want to buy what you’re offering? If you do, you may find it difficult to get site owners to understand what you’re doing. “Irrelevant links” are thought of as spam (no doubt because the porn/pills/gambling sites are so indiscriminate about seeking links from everything from your Aunt Mabel’s family blog to .edu sites). Try to show them that the ad is pitched to their audience, and the landing page is user-friendly for people who know diddly about what you’re selling.

When you’re the site owner considering whether to allow an ad on your site - or what affiliate ads to place on your site - consider the following:

Is this an ad that would interest my target audience right now?
If not, could I tweak it so it would pique their interest?
Is the product/site or its reputation good enough to be associated with my site?

That’s about it. The opinion of search engine bots is what’s not relevant to your visitors.

Category Posted in Affiliate Marketing
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