Clicking links can reveal someone as a prospect or potential target audience.
If I share a link to an article on Forbes about brain performance research for improved cognition, you may be nootropic candidate. Clearly, the better you identify content that would attract your preferred audience the more useful this technique can be.
There are several ways marketers target audiences with this marketing method.
- Links to relevant content to boost channel (social media accounts) attention
- Branded links to relevant content with pixels to identify prospects
- Branded links to relevant content with CTA built into the link page or view
GDPR may have outlawed stealthy pixel techniques in some markets. The rule in Europe right now is that any time you identify someone as a prospect and collect connecting data on them, you have to explicitly warn them that you are doing that. And, you must provide them a clear and obvious way to opt out.
Fear not. There are ways to send eyeballs to your offers with GDPR warning statements, if you provide them.
Marketers are still free to use the embedded pixel without explicit warning in the US.
Twitter is full of brands that use news links to maintain attention. The brand with the best curated news for a niche topic can maintain substantial attention. Obviously, blogs and podcasts produce better stickiness. But, for the rapid fire cycle of attention maintenance, links can be very effective.
Branded links to sticky content are even simpler and faster. It takes very little human effort to identify content as potentially interesting to your target audience. Automation can be implemented to grab topics automatically from newsfeeds and regurgitate them with branded links.
The next question is whether to use a pixel to push ads to that target audience member or immediately offer a CTA.
These services provide pre-built systems to plug in your offers or pixels to track or sell your target audience when they click on your link.