Demographic Research Process? (7)

Hey everyone,

Could the more experienced folks of you share the process you use to do demographic research? I know about sites like quantcast, adplanner, alexa but I'm not sure what else would I need to know apart from age, gender, income, kids, edu etc.?

I've also heard of people creating some "avatar" of their target customer, do you do that as well and if so, could you explain how?

What data do you need to make assessments about your target demographic and what data do you consider unnecessary/irrelevant?

Would be great if someone could drop some ideas here as I'm not really sure if it's enough to plug the offer URL into quantcast etc. and take that to plan a campaign.

Cheers!

What else are you looking for? No tool will ever tell you what's going to work. Quantcast, AdPlanner and Alexa are only estimates. You can pay for Compete's tool which is meant to be more accurate but in the end you have to test what works. More times than not I see results that contradict what those tools tell you.

A lot of guru shit-heads talk about creating an avatar which is a great idea and a cool thing to talk about at over priced seminars but for fuck sakes, just do it!

You can do a lot of research if you want to...forums, Yahoo answers, facebook pages ec. - see who the audience is, where they hang out and what they talk about. From my experience this will all just create more doubts and make the task more arduous than it should be.

ask the advertiser

I personally think that facebook fanpages/apps/groups are a great resource to get ideas from....it allows you to talk to your audience better......gives you ideas of stuff to test with.....and if you are doing FB traffic you can look at there public profiles and see there likes and interests and see if you can finda a commonality.....

but its easy to get stuck in the "if I learn it all this will be a super successful camp that will ball"......imo its better to under-read and over-test.....cuz in the end....its the data that makes guru's into disciples and disciples into guru's........

so get some ideas then throw out a few a/b tests....and see if your headed down the right path......

Thanks guys, I guess that's what I needed to hear, to just do lots of tests instead of over-reading and trying to get everything perfect before starting a new campaign...spot on, polarbacon.
@index: I did that almost every time but usually would only get back age and gender, which is a bit lame since every advertiser that has been around for a while probably knows their average customer very well.

Fuck all that quantcast shit, there's no set demo for anything. I spend very little time looking at any of those sites. I'll make you a bet right now for 10 grand that says if we took a mentally retarded person and had them pick from a list of websites to advertise on vs compete recommended sites based on demographic, the retard wins at least 50% of the time, probably closer to 70%

Certainly there are framework demographics like if you are running a skin rebill, obviously you wouldn't target 18 year old girls, or asians, the target is mostly white women over 50 who make over 60k a year. Well great, that's still a huge demo and there are no definitive answers on if they should be married, have kids, if they're republicans, or any of that.

Most of the sites I've made the most money on were found essentially by accident from following links around the web or on purpose by scanning the alexa list from #1 to #250,000 (yep, I looked at every god damn one of them and took notes)

You can't research hitting a home run, you gotta swing and miss, pretty soon you start getting the timing of the ball down and getting tips, then base hits, then you're batting 300+ and that's all you need to make a few million a year in this game.

Originally Posted by peraction

Fuck all that quantcast shit, there's no set demo for anything. I spend very little time looking at any of those sites. I'll make you a bet right now for 10 grand that says if we took a mentally retarded person and had them pick from a list of websites to advertise on vs compete recommended sites based on demographic, the retard wins at least 50% of the time, probably closer to 70%

Certainly there are framework demographics like if you are running a skin rebill, obviously you wouldn't target 18 year old girls, or asians, the target is mostly white women over 50 who make over 60k a year. Well great, that's still a huge demo and there are no definitive answers on if they should be married, have kids, if they're republicans, or any of that.

Most of the sites I've made the most money on were found essentially by accident from following links around the web or on purpose by scanning the alexa list from #1 to #250,000 (yep, I looked at every god damn one of them and took notes)

You can't research hitting a home run, you gotta swing and miss, pretty soon you start getting the timing of the ball down and getting tips, then base hits, then you're batting 300+ and that's all you need to make a few million a year in this game.