Hello, community! Traffic segmentation is the division of traffic into separate groups based on certain characteristics: age, gender, financial status, etc. This is necessary to build better offers, experiment with ad campaign approaches, and create creatives.
Today we’ll talk about how to segment your audience and how to actually do it. This will help us in the future improve ROI by spending money only on targeted traffic.
What is audience segmentation?
Have you ever had a situation where lots of people click your ad but conversions are close to zero? Of course, many factors can influence this. But most likely, you simply missed the target.
The opposite situation is when no one clicks at all. Maybe your creative isn’t interesting for your target audience?
This is all about poor audience work, especially the lack of segmentation. For example, if you run ads for an anti-baldness product just on men in general, without segmenting them by age or even by GEO — that’s already a mistake. Yes, GEO. Because in some countries this problem may be more common than in others, and nationality is also a traffic characteristic we cannot ignore.
You can segment traffic by the following criteria:
- Age, gender, nationality, etc. — primary traits that tell us a lot about the target;
- Interests. A more abstract trait, not always accurate, but very important and cannot be ignored;
- Social status — employment, financial situation, education.
And while it may seem there are only a few characteristics, it’s important to understand their depth. Even interests can describe thousands of categories: some love sports, others groom dogs, while someone else does affiliate marketing.
As a result, we get thousands of different audiences that we must separate in order to build accurate campaigns. This minimizes expenses and gives us higher ROI.
How to segment an audience in practice?
Segmentation helps you target more accurately. But how do you actually do it?
For some campaigns, automated systems are used to adapt landing pages or ads in real time to match the user query. But in fact, this often projects assumptions as reality. Just because someone searches a keyword doesn’t guarantee they are your customer.
So you’ll need deeper work at different stages to effectively “close” the needs of a specific audience segment.
| Stage | Our actions |
| Product creation | If you are directly involved in creating a product, which sometimes happens when working with advertising directly, you should already collect feedback here, conduct quizzes and interviews with potential customers to form a consumer profile. The success of future campaigns depends heavily on the quality of work done at this stage. |
| Content creation | Our main tool is content: ad text, creatives, images on the landing page, and the landing itself. Everything must reflect the target consumer’s views, align with their worldview and needs. |
| Traffic work | This includes campaign settings, particularly targeting in ad managers like Facebook. But even optimizing creatives for a specific segment can be considered traffic work. |
| Customer interaction stage | During retention, you must consider segment specifics. The most obvious example is communicating in the consumer’s language. But you should also adapt tone of voice and other aspects. |
If you’ve done a good job identifying your target audience, you also need to optimize campaigns for them at every stage. Only then can you say you’ve successfully segmented traffic — when every element of the campaign is focused exclusively on the consumer profile.
This minimizes the chance of random people landing on your page and maximizes profit compared to campaign expenses. That’s how successful marketing should work.
Why invest resources in audience segmentation?
We named this section this way because for many affiliates, traffic segmentation seems like just a resource expense. It takes time and may also require money, for example paying a specialist. That’s why it’s so important to understand why we do it.
Audience segmentation allows an affiliate to:
- Optimize clicks more effectively, which increases campaign conversions.
- Reduce lead cost. And the cheaper the lead, the higher the net profit.
- If you segment your audience in advance, you’ll save time on campaign optimization later.
- High-quality traffic segmentation is the only way to profit in competitive niches.
So given the goals of segmentation, it’s clear that we cannot ignore it.
Conclusion
Affiliate marketing is about fighting for traffic, for every lead. High-quality campaign optimization is our main job — and it’s impossible without segmentation.
Do you pay attention to traffic segmentation, or are you still unsure why it’s needed? Share your thoughts and get valuable advice in our Ukrainian Telegram community.
Respectfully, your Geek!
How and why to segment an audience FAQs
Audience segmentation is the division of traffic into separate groups based on characteristics such as age, gender, financial status, etc.
Audience segmentation allows you to create personalized ad campaigns. It helps reduce costs, increase ROI, and minimize wasted traffic.