Let's take an extreme example of "untargeted" traffic for comparison. Let's say you own a joke site. It has hundreds of jokes and you've built it up to 10,000 daily visitors. Now, let's say you want to sell widgets on a new widget site. So, you place a link on your joke site that says "Free Stuff" which links to your new widget site. You figure that some percentage of your 10,000 daily visitors will be interested in "Free Stuff" (lots of people are) and some percentage of those who click on the "Free Stuff" link will want to buy your widgets. Right? Yep; That actually is right. Some small percentage will click the "Free Stuff" link and some small percentage will then buy a widget. The extremely small percentage is a result of an extreme example of not targeting your traffic well.

If you actually did own a joke site and had no other way to make money from it, the above strategy might be just fine. There really isn't anything wrong with "untargeted" traffic. It just isn't very effective. If you can get it for free or extremely cheap~ Go for it. Why not? One sale out of 100,000 visitors is better than zero sales. If you do pay for untargeted traffic though, you should be very careful to ensure that it really is inexpensive. You will want to actually calculate your cost of sales to make sure.

Most Internet marketers have found that targeted traffic is much less expensive in the long run~ even though it may appear to cost more up front. That's what we want to talk about here. In the above example, we wanted to sell widgets, but we did two things to sabotage our efforts to get targeted traffic. First, we advertised in a place unlikely to have a high percentage of people who wanted to buy widgets. Second, we further missed an opportunity to help turn that untargeted traffic into targeted traffic when we put "Free Stuff" for our link instead of "Widgets" for our link.

Let's talk about the first mistake. We advertised on a joke site for widgets. Obviously it would be better if we had advertised on another widget site. That would have been a good example of "topic targeting" or "keyword targeting". This is the most common type of targeting used by Internet marketers and is probably the most important. If you want to sell widgets, it is probably easiest to target people interested in widgets. That's pretty obvious; right?

It's not the whole story though. Let's say your site is in English and you place an ad on a Spanish widget site. Even though you did your topical keyword targeting properly, you will still have only a tiny percentage of people who speak both Spanish and English who can read your offer once they click-thru to your site. Let's say you advertise on a "free widget" site. You might find that a very small percentage click-thru to your $100 widget site.

In the marketing business, we refer to the factors that affect targeting as "demographics".

Knowing the demographics of your target audience is extremely important. It can actually allow you to bypass topical keyword targeting entirely. Let's say you discover that 85% of people who buy widgets also play golf. That opens up your opportunities.

You can now advertise on golf sites. Let's say you discover that 90% of men want to buy widgets. Now you can target any site appealing to men. The art of targeting is simply finding the kinds of people who want your product/service and guiding them to the right place.

Let's talk about the second mistake in our original example. We placed a "Free Stuff" link on our joke site to guide people to our widget site. It seems obvious that it would have been better to place a "Buy Widgets" link instead. Why would we have even considered a "Free Stuff" link? We might have considered it to get a higher click-thru rate. Is that a good idea? Maybe~ If the only thing you can sell is widgets, you might as well give it a shot at the very largest possible audience.

However, you may want to take a different tact. Why not turn untargeted traffic into targeted traffic? By changing your link from "free stuff" to "buy widgets", you have done just that. Whatever percentage of your joke site visitors may have been interested in buying widgets may click this link. That traffic is now somewhat targeted.

Let's talk about how to target that traffic even more. There are really two ways and they both have to do with choices. The first way is to give your joke site visitors more choices. Let's say that your home page has only two links; one is labeled "free jokes" and the other is labeled "buy widgets". Some percentage will click on the "buy widgets" link. That percentage will be more interested in buying widgets than reading free jokes at the moment that they click. That's good. Now let's compare that to a home page that has links for "free jokes", "buy widgets", "travel deals", "hot rods", "free stuff". Now, the percentage that click on the "buy widgets" link are people who are more interested in buying widgets than any of the other choices on that page. Your traffic is now even more targeted then when the only choices were "buy widgets" and "free jokes".

The other way to help turn untargeted traffic into targeted traffic (or targeted traffic into more targeted traffic) is to offer second choices. Let's say you change your link on the above joke site to simply "widgets" instead of "buy widgets". The traffic you receive will be less targeted than when you had "buy widgets" as your link. It is a simple matter to refine the targeting though. All you have to do is to offer a couple of choices on the home page of your widget site. If you have links to "free widgets", "buy widgets", "red widgets" and "blue widgets" on your home page, you can refine your targeted traffic into groups that are even more targeted.

I hope this article helps you see that targeting traffic is more like a million shades of gray then just a black-and-white issue.

When you purchase targeted traffic, evaluate how targeted it is compared to other sources of targeted traffic. When you purchase untargeted traffic or less targeted traffic, you can help target that traffic yourself.