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.
