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The Importance of Target Links

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A circular archery target with five colored rings, gold, red, blue, black, and white, that is pierced by four arrows.

Our mission at b00st.com is to simplify, automate, and supercharge online advertising throughout music. As such, we build software to handle most of the complex tasks required to set up and execute successful advertising campaigns.

Critical advertising components

There are two important components that by design have to come from the party looking to advertize: creative and the target link.

In this article, we are going to focus on target links and explain why every second matters to make an advertising campaign successful.

In short, it's the link promoted during a campaign that leads to a destination online, like a website or app. Here are a few examples for actual b00st.com campaigns

The time it takes to load a website or app can make the difference between a sale and no sale. The more friction, the less likely it is that a person clicking an ad will actually take the desired action.

Contrary to common belief, the fanciness of a website or landing page has little to do with how willingly a listener might take an action. Pop-ups, third party apps, and slow loading media are all working against advertisers.

Page load speed is incredibly important as well. It varies greatly depending on the underlying destination's site engineering. If you want to see for yourself, pop open Google's PageSpeed Insight in a new tab and plug in some links.

An exemplar of decent page speed

Notice how the YouTube link is faster than the rest. Does that surprise you, given that YouTube has the second most hits on the web, second only to google.com, as of this writing? Did you know that Google's parent company, Alphabet owns YouTube?

They might just know a thing or two about the web...

An exemplar of terrible page speed

You've probably heard of Lenovo, the computer manufacturer. Though a large, well-funded company, Lenovo's online site is a great example of what not to do on many fronts. In particular, try lenovo.com on Google's page speed site.

On a very fast connection you will likely see a performance score < 25 out of 100 for Lenovo's site. Notice how "choppy" or "laggy" the site feels? Over tens of thousands of visitors that makes a difference in how many computers they sell.

In contrast, load up vercel.com, a next-generation web company working on standardizing engineering excellence across the web. Notice how quick their site loads? They have fantastic pagespeed performance and it shows when you use their stuff.

We're proud clients of Vercel, which helps us serve you b00st.com quickly and efficiently.

Some campaign recommendations

Before launching a campaign, make sure you know how fast your target link loads and how it compares to the best in the industry. Vercel is a good example of near-perfect.

Define your advertising goals and narrow your marketing destination as much as possible. Decide whether you want to engage new listeners or re-engage current fans.

For example, a landing page that captures emails before letting fans proceed to listen to the song on Spotify will probably lower advertising effectiveness. Is that not asking a lot of a person that might have heard of a band for the first time?

And be wary of platforms that do block your listeners. Spotify is one example of blocking behavior that we've seen limit campaign effectiveness, while YouTube allows immediate consumption for a user and often enhances campaign effectiveness.

We'd love to hear from you

We started a topic in our community portal and would like to hear what link tools you find useful to help your marketing efforts.

Head over to the community portal and let us know what you think.

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