educational

Making the Most of Traffic Filtering Strategies

Whether you’re building a new adult website or revamping an existing property one of the best places to begin is by understanding how and where it will fit in with today’s traffic ecosystem — because it doesn’t matter how good your site and offer is if nobody ever gets to see it.

With that in mind, let us take a look at one simple strategy for filtering your site’s traffic to make the most from each and every visitor, keeping in mind that this is only one way to go about things — and you may not even want to filter your site’s traffic at all.

Regardless of how you’re going about it, a continual cycle of testing and optimization is required if maximizing profits is your goal.

In this strategy, rather than trying to expose as many people as possible to your offer, we’re focusing on serving only the most promising prospects — those having the desire and ability to enjoy and pay for your products or services. But why not just jam as many people through the door as possible, relying on volume, tricks and luck to make a sale?

That depends on your business model: if you run a flea market that attracts low dollar shoppers and plain old gawkers, then go ahead — and you may be able to squeeze a few bucks out of them for parking, admission and refreshments, while charging vendors for a spot in your marketplace — delivering multiple revenue streams from non-affluent users.

For example, a mixed genre tube site relying on plugs, affiliate offers and advertising networks for revenue generation would fit nicely into this scheme.

On the other hand, say you run a Ferrari dealership, where the desirability, exclusivity and quality of your product is paramount, and its prohibitive pricing a secondary concern for those who can afford it. Obviously, you don’t want people who simply cannot afford your product to be wasting your sales staff’s time, taking “test drives” in your Ferraris, or helping themselves to your complimentary champagne and munchies — there is no need to waste costly resources on unqualified prospects.

If you’re running a charity rather than a business, this won’t apply to you, but if you run a premium site offering exclusive content and a highly optimized user experience, while providing limited promotional content to always keep customers hungry for more, that site will fit in nicely here.

Of course, any type of site can make use of this strategy with just a few basic tweaks.

Let’s take a closer look, beginning with this simple flow chart:

GEO/LANG/ENTITY > DEVICE > DOORWAY > OFFER

The first step is to separate the haves from the have nots — in this case, those visitors that have the ability to read and understand your site and the ability to pay for your wares — if a site is only available in Swedish, it may not make sense to offer it to non-Swedes, for instance.

Using geo-targeting and browser-based language redirects, a traffic filtering strategy can encompass everything from sending visitors to translated pages to mitigating dubious transactions (and chargebacks) by blocking countries with high fraud rates.

At this point, you may also wish to filter out non-human entities, such as spiders and other robots. While some, like Googlebot, are beneficial, some are malicious — and none of them have credit cards.

After filtering users based upon their language and location, many webmasters choose to further discriminate between fixed and mobile surfers; sending the former to traditional web pages and the latter to a site or affiliate offer intended specifically for mobile users.

The growing trend towards responsive design that accommodates both types of users with a single site is making this step redundant for many operators — but discrimination based on access device remains a good next step. While responsive design is helping to make access more universal, there are times that a different site should be served to a different audience, such as in the case of so-called feature phones, aka dumb phones — or to segregate higher total value iPad users, who have become one of the most lucrative audiences for adult entertainment marketers.

Think of this sifting process as grouping users with similar attributes together in order to better serve each of these audience subsets.

It is not only a matter of “niche marketing” — profitable traffic generation is about consumer demographics and psychographics, too.

Once the technical filtering is done, those latter elements come into play, where the psychology of the consumer (as best you can ascertain) influences the various doorways (otherwise known as landing pages) that you send him or her to.

Let’s go back to our earlier example of flea markets and Ferrari dealerships: one may welcome visitors with a dirt parking lot, while the other rolls out the red carpet and offers you a glass of champagne — each audience requires a separate approach that best suits it.

Your landing pages are no different in that one will be more suited to your audience than another. The only way to know which is which however is through A/B split testing, which is beyond the scope of this article.

Likewise for the offer presented on (or through) the landing page: are you trying to sell something directly, such as with a “send to join” strategy; or are you using the lander as a “splash” or warning page, and hoping the visitor will take the tour and end up on the join or sales page?

Perhaps you have some other traffic flow plan in mind, as there are many options.

Combined with geo-targeting, custom offers can be presented to consumers falling outside of your normal pricing range. For example, you may run a pay site charging $30 per month, but try selling memberships where that is the equivalent of a month’s pay. Perhaps a different (or differently priced) offer will gain some traction with this audience.

Regardless of how you’re going about it, a continual cycle of testing and optimization is required if maximizing profits is your goal, but once you have established a traffic flow and understand the various implications of each step along the way, you will find changes to your traffic filtering strategy simple and profitable to make.

Related:  

Copyright © 2024 Adnet Media. All Rights Reserved. XBIZ is a trademark of Adnet Media.
Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission is prohibited.

More Articles

opinion

How to Halt Hackers as Fraud Attacks Rise

For hackers, it’s often a game of trial and error. Bad actors will perform enumeration and account testing, repeating the same test on a system to look for vulnerabilities — and if you are not equipped with the proper tools, your merchant account could be the next target.

Cathy Beardsley ·
profile

VerifyMy Seeks to Provide Frictionless Online Safety, Compliance Solutions

Before founding VerifyMy, Ryan Shaw was simply looking for an age verification solution for his previous business. The ones he found, however, were too expensive, too difficult to integrate with, or failed to take into account the needs of either the businesses implementing them or the end users who would be required to interact with them.

Alejandro Freixes ·
opinion

How Adult Website Operators Can Cash in on the 'Interchange' Class Action

The Payment Card Interchange Fee Settlement resulted from a landmark antitrust lawsuit involving Visa, Mastercard and several major banks. The case centered around the interchange fees charged to merchants for processing credit and debit card transactions. These fees are set by card networks and are paid by merchants to the banks that issue the cards.

Jonathan Corona ·
opinion

It's Time to Rock the Vote and Make Your Voice Heard

When I worked to defeat California’s Proposition 60 in 2016, our opposition campaign was outspent nearly 10 to 1. Nevertheless, our community came together and garnered enough support and awareness to defeat that harmful, misguided piece of proposed legislation — by more than a million votes.

Siouxsie Q ·
opinion

Staying Compliant to Avoid the Takedown Shakedown

Dealing with complaints is an everyday part of doing business — and a crucial one, since not dealing with them properly can haunt your business in multiple ways. Card brand regulations require every merchant doing business online to have in place a complaint process for reporting content that may be illegal or that violates the card brand rules.

Cathy Beardsley ·
profile

WIA Profile: Patricia Ucros

Born in Bogota, Colombia, Ucros graduated from college with a degree in education. She spent three years teaching third grade, which she enjoyed a lot, before heeding her father’s advice and moving to South Florida.

Women In Adult ·
opinion

Creating Payment Redundancies to Maximize Payout Uptime

During the global CrowdStrike outage that took place toward the end of July, a flawed software update brought air travel and electronic commerce to a grinding halt worldwide. This dramatically underscores the importance of having a backup plan in place for critical infrastructure.

Jonathan Corona ·
opinion

The Need for Minimal Friction in Age Verification Technology

In the adult sector, robust age assurance, comprised of age verification and age estimation methods, is critical to ensuring legal compliance with ever-evolving regulations, safeguarding minors from inappropriate content and protecting the privacy of adults wishing to view adult content.

Gavin Worrall ·
opinion

Account-to-Account Payments: The New Banking Disruptor?

So much of our industry relies upon Visa and Mastercard to support consumer payments — and with that reliance comes increased scrutiny by both brands. From a compliance perspective, the bar keeps getting raised until it feels like we end up spending half our time making sure we are compliant rather than growing our business.

Cathy Beardsley ·
profile

WIA Profile: Samantha Beatrice

Beatrice credits the sex positivity of Montreal for ultimately inspiring her to pursue work in adult entertainment. She had many friends working in the industry, from sex workers to production teams, so it felt like a natural fit and offered an opportunity to apply her marketing and social media savvy to support people she truly believes in and wants to see succeed.

Women In Adult ·
Show More