Top 10 Tech Marketing Tips

PayPerPost Categories - Possibly the most misunderstood Tool at PPP

April 28th, 2007 by admin

If you setup an advertising campaign at PayPerPost you need to tread very cautiously with categories. You may not get what you expect when you select categories.

I mentioned it in Part 2 that advertisers do not always get what they expect with PayPerPost. To minimize this risk, we must understand the structure of the PayPerPost category system.

Types of Categories
There are two levels of categories that are mutually exclusive despite similarities in subject:

1. General Categories
2. Specialized Categories - available if you click to expand on the link ‘Show Specialized Categories’

Let me illustrate the potential problems with a real example. In this video series I am advertising computer software. I wanted to cover blogs that covered a business computing/software audience. I selected the General Business category when I set up my opportunity. Then I selected more specific categories like Computer Software.

For me that was a mistake. I received completed opportunities from sites that were general business. I had one very good article from a Sporting Goods business blog and I had another very good article from a run your own home business blog.

They were good articles and covered the target well, but definitely not my intended target audience. I didn’t fault the bloggers for selecting the op. I had chosen business and their blogs were business related.

Beware of the assumption of sets and subsets of Categories
Now, unless I want to go very broad, I do not select any general categories ever today. The general categories appear to be sub divided by the specific categories. This is a false assumption.

When I selected a Business Category and then a specific computer category, I did not get a subset of computer business blogs. Instead I received a set of business blogs in addition to computer blogs.

For advertisers hoping to target their campaigns, the ‘Show Specialized Categories’ link option is the most important link on the entire opportunity management page.

If you miss that section, it could mean a significant difference in the results of your campaign. If you misunderstand the mutually exclusive relationship between general and specialized sets of information, then you are going to see some surprising results and that is not good for ROI.