Today I want to reveal the other side of the coin, that is costing businesses money, when they run Retargeting ads and most likely they don’t even know that.
Retargeting service providers need access to as much advertising space as possible to make sure that your ad gets the maximum exposure. To accomplish that the providers connect with popular and less popular ad networks that serve ads on millions of web sites.
The more web sites can serve retargeting ads the higher the chance that the visitor who has your cookie will see your ad. Sounds pretty good.
The problem is that not all ad networks are as strict as let’s say Google Adsense. That means some of the networks will display your ads on web sites that pay people to watch and click ads and nothing more.
These sites are called Paid To Click (PTC), Paid To View (PTV) or Paid To Promote (PTP).
The “business model” is targeting clueless people who hope to earn money from home. The advertiser (YOU!) pays for displaying ads on the PTC website, and a part of this payment goes to the viewer when he views or clicks the advertisement.
Do you think the viewers are interested in what you have to offer? Not at all… and you still pay as the retargeting service providers are using the Cost Per Thousand Impressions (CPM) model, which means you pay every time your ad is displayed on a website, even when the ad is not clicked.
Our favorite retargeting service provider Perfect Audience has 2 features that helps to identify the bad PTC websites and block them.
When you access your Perfect Audience dashboard you will see the “Domain Report” tab. Inside the tab you will see the top 100 domains that served your ads during the chosen time period.
The “Site” column shows the exact domains and that’s where you need to look after the bad apples.
Look for domains that include words like: cash, ptc, ptv, ptp, broker or other strange combinations.
Make a list of suspicious domains, open each domain in a new browser tab and check if they offer payments for viewing or clicking ads.
When you identify any of the PTC websites leave them on your list. This will be a list of domains that you want to block.
After you have created a list of PTC websites it’s time to block them. To do that move your mouse over the “Settings” menu in Perfect Audience and click on “Domain Blacklist“.
Now just copy and paste your list of domains that you want to block inside the “Manage Your Global Domain Blacklist” text area and click “Update Domain Blacklist“.
As you cut out the PTC websites your campaign Click-through Rate (CTR) and the Conversion rate (CTC / VTC) will increase and the campaign cost go down.
The whole process should take you around 5 – 10 minutes and you have to do it only once. You can always check your Domain Report once per month for new PTC websites.
