Cloaking! The definitive guide (Part 3 - Targeting)

• Cloaking! The definitive guide (Part 1 - An introduction)
• Cloaking! The definitive guide (Part 2 - IP delivery)
• Cloaking! The definitive guide (Part 3 - Targeting)

Now we have gone through the snooper protection, we need look deeper into who sees what. This calls for super-dooper-uber-targeting! As far as I’m concerned, there are 4 typical levels of traffic when targeting affiliate products (which by the way you need to do - Adsense sucks for income), Gold, Silver, Bronze and Snoopers.

• Gold Traffic

Gold traffic consists of extremely motivated buyers. They know exactly what they want and they want to be told where to buy it. They are from the US (as long you are promoting US affiliates) and you should expect very specific queries like “Toshiba 32AV504DB”. You want to serve these people a page centred mainly around the specific product, but you may also want to include a small number of related products for the user. The brilliant thing about gold traffic is the fact that it is usually long tail queries. The biggest problem you will have with getting gold traffic is having a system that can target the vast amount of longtail terms.

• Silver Traffic

Silver traffic consists of users who are unlikely to buy today, they are for the most part just researching and plan to purchase at a slightly later date. The beauty of affiliate programs is that cookies last, so even if you visitor doesn’t buy today, you may still get paid if they decide they are going to buy at a later date. They will come from the country you are targeting goods at and will be likely to search for thinks like “Walking shoes” or “Sony Bravia reviews”. You will want to show this people a large choice of products that may be what they are looking for. Silver traffic is shorter tail, so it’s easier to target, but harder to get.

• Bronze Traffic

Bronze traffic is not suitable for affiliate products. This is any traffic that isn’t from the country you are targeting. It also includes people searching for unrelated keywords/phrases that appear in your content, but that you aren’t specifically targeting. These people aren’t going to buy the product associated with the page they came in on. If they are from the wrong country, hit them with PPC ads. If they are from the correct country and you have products that may match their query string, promote them.

• Snoopers

You DO NOT want snooper traffic to be able to tell that you are cloaking. They are likely to use queries like ’site:’ etc. And come from sources other than a search engine. If they try and come in, hit ‘em with a ‘hosting suspended’ page, or use your imagination a bit. Of course rick-rolling them would be pretty fun These people don’t appreciate the beauty of cloaking or making money and will gladly spend there time running around doing Google’s work for free. Confuse them!

Find out where them is!

If we need to factor location into our cloak, we are going to need to work out where they are. The best way I’ve found is the Maxmind GeoLite PHP module. Just download the module, put the geoip.inc file in the root file of the cloaked site, put the GeoIP.dat database here: “/usr/local/share/GeoIP/GeoIP.dat” and add some code to extract location from the user information. Here’s some extremely basic usage determining if the user is based in the US and allowing/denying them access to the site based on this information.

< ?
//Get the users IP
$visitorip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];include("geoip.inc");
 
$gi = geoip_open("/usr/local/share/GeoIP/GeoIP.dat",GEOIP_STANDARD);
 
//Get a two-letter country code
 
$country = geoip_country_codes($gi, "$visitorip");
 
geoip_close($gi);
 
if($country = 'US') {
 
echo 'standard US page';
 
}else{
echo 'Non-US page';
}
?>

That, of course is extremely basic usage and utilises a tiny fraction of the power of Geo-targeting. The real power is when you start cloaking for the user’s specific country, rather than an ‘if/else’ solution.

Further Targeting

Wondering what the user wants? If only there was a way of knowing; you would be rich. But for now we can guess. One of the easiest ways I see, is too use NL Fulltext search in MySQL. Display whatever comes up as the most relevant product. Of course, this is the first step in a much bigger targeting algorithm. Record all the data you can for further analysis and use that as the basis for creating/improving your targeting algorithm.

That’s it! That’s all you are getting. They were a few more things I considered giving away, but I think anybody who puts the effort in would be able to work them out.

• Cloaking! The definitive guide (Part 1 - An introduction)
• Cloaking! The definitive guide (Part 2 - IP delivery)
• Cloaking! The definitive guide (Part 3 - Targeting)

Filed under: Conversions. Make 'em better!, echo 'Programming'; by Ryan