This type of traffic is what they call adware traffic, but it’s nothing to do with any sort of virus. It’s people that actually download a toolbar from a site that might provide them with games or screensavers for free in exchange for displaying popup or popunder ads. Now, most reputable traffic networks do not run these ads consistently to the point that they annoy the toolbar customer. They keep the popup and popunder ads to a daily minimum so to keep the customer from deleting their adware toolbar.

The networks have the ability to target the traffic by keywords and urls’, most tend to go with targeting the urls’. The way it works is quite simple, let’s say that you put on your campaign to target google.com for your ad. Now, every time someone in that has the toolbar installed goes to google.com your ad would popup or popunder. If you have the keyword ‘car insurance’ as a target then if the customer searches for that keyword the same thing happens your ad will show.

You might wonder the difference between the popup and popunder ads, it’s almost self-explanatory. The popup traffic actually pops up on top of the web browser and the popunder traffic shows up under the browser window.

The way this traffic is charged is on a CPM (Cost Per Thousand) method so for every one-thousand views your ad receives then you get charged. The beauty of this is that the traffic could run as low as $0.004 a visitor, which if you have a well converting offer than the ROI could be very lucrative.

You have to keep in mind that this type of traffic is considered to be ‘Interruption Based Marketing’, even though the download customer of the toolbar knows that they will be served ads they still tend to pop in without warning. So, the conversions might differ from other traffic methods such as PPC (Pay Per Click) and Media Buys (Banner Traffic).

You can direct link with most networks, but it is wise to test which works better for your offers, direct linking or sending the traffic to a landing page. This is actually a good way to start when you first decide to run traffic to such offers as CPA (Cost Per Action). It’s a lower entry barrier without worrying about CTR (Click-Thru-Rate) or Quality Scores, such as Google and Bing PPC Networks require.

Keep this method of driving traffic to your site and even some use it to build opt-in list with this method, in your traffic rolodex.

It has been said many times that if you actually create the perfect person for the actual target market that your aiming for it would greatly improve your marketing efforts. Imagine the actual customer as if he or she were standing right in front of you, what they look like, if there married or single, do they have kids, what do they do for a living, why do they need your service or product. Things like that would give life to your market and their habits, plus it makes it even easier to write an effective ad for them.

People don’t like to be sold to but they love to buy, so you have to be clear on the way you speak to the visitors and the language you use. Take everything into consideration, from terminologies used in the market, to the age group and if applicable the income range.

There are tools out there that can help when you begin this phase, such as google adplanner, alexa, compete and some other paid tools can help as far as seeing what the visitors of similar sites look like. But, for those that have been running their business for a while than they can already have a great wide view on their specific target.

This is a critical point to take when you plan on running any PPC ad campaign, don’t let this step slip through your fingers. You have to be smart with your money if you plan on turning the dollars spent on advertising into a positive return. It might be an easy thing to do for some or it might even take others a couple of days to come up with this, but this is a very crucial step in determining your market.