The shift from a keyword-based marketing approach to a demographic-based approach when it comes to paid traffic campaigns signals a possible shift in maturity/sophistication in traffic generation, and being able to shift with the wave can be highly profitable, if you’re targeting the right group.

With keyword campaigns you have the luxury of creating a 100,000 keyword campaign, sending traffic to it and seeing which sticks. But can you use a similar shotgun type approach when it comes to demographic-based techniques like media buying, PPV and similar ad networks? You could, but it might cost an arm, a leg and your left kidney.

In my opinion, it’s better to adopt a sniper approach when it comes to taking down high value targets finding profit hotspots. Which is where demographic-based site profiling tools like Quantcast come in.

The important criteria I look are include:

• Gender
• Age
• Income
• Education

Other criteria such as kids and race might be useful, depending on the marketing campaign.

Here is where some affiliate trip up, using Quantcast on one, maybe two sites, then building their campaigns based on that data.

A couple of points to note:

• Is the site demographics based on actual data ( ie “quantified”) or based on site estimates
• How many visitors does the site receive? (anything less than 100,000 might be a ballpark estimate)
• Even then, some of the data might not be accurate, so use the data as a guide, rather than take it as fact

Let’s look at the site stats for a business services site:

In the example above, notice how 3-12 year olds account for 12% of site traffic (about 123% of the Internet average). About 60% of site visitors have a college degree, yet 29% of them (or 161% of the Internet average) makes $0 to $30,000 a year. It’s pretty obvious that the site data is faulty, especially for a business services site, the stats just don’t come together. That’s why you need to expand your data set before spending money on your campaign.

Statistical significance is when you have enough data in hand to make an accurate judgment, in the case of demographic profiling, it will involve taking at least three representative sites (or possibly as many as 10) to construct an accurate demographic profile.

If not, your efforts might be as productive as firing shots into the air.

Being a sniper always pays off.

Ultimately, demographic-based campaigns will give the highest payoffs with lead generation-focused affiliate networks (ie CPA networks). You can check out my recommendations here.