Should you be using third-party aggregator sites?
I’ll answer that question in this post, as well as let you in on a few little-known strategies to take full advantage of aggregator sites.
Watch the video or read the full article below.
What is a Third Party Aggregator Site?
Third-party aggregator sites are websites that help generate leads and traffic for other websites.
Basically, these sites don’t produce their own content.
Instead, they collect content from other websites and “aggregate” it in one location.
It’s not a copyright violation. There are no duplicate content issues.
These are sites like Expedia, for example, that generally cater to one subject or industry and pull relevant information into one easy-to-find place.
It makes life a lot easier for customers. Huge variety of one content in one spot? Check.
And there are tons of these sites out there, in industries across the board.
They’ll help users find the best insurance, the best credit cards, the best flight prices, etc.
And, believe it or not, it’s a huge benefit for businesses as well.
Why Brands Should Be Using Third-Party Aggregators
Should you be working with them? Absolutely.
Why? Because it’s a way to diversify your portfolio of traffic.
That means you want a variety of different sources and mediums that are sending traffic, leads and/or revenue to your website.
It’s important to diversify because, at any point in time, one source of traffic may go up while another very well could go down.
To account for any fluctuation, you want to make sure you have a sustainable online business model.
So if Facebook’s hit with a hack and users back off the site for a while, you want to make sure your site traffic won’t suffer for it. You do that by ensuring the traffic to your site is coming from multiple sources other than Facebook, like email, PPC, and yes, third-party aggregator sites.
By including your brand on a third-party aggregator site, you’re essentially giving users another avenue to find your website.
If the aggregator is doing things correctly, they’re including a link back to your original site. So visitors to that third-party aggregator site have a new way to discover your brand and a new trail that leads to your site.
And that’s great, because it gives you a new traffic channel to add to your portfolio.
It’s also a great way to capture the attention of those who are actively searching for the service you offer, especially if you can good a cost per acquisition (the amount you’re willing to pay for a lead.)
How Brands Can Take Advantage of Third-Party Aggregator Sites
All of the above is absolutely reason enough to get your site listed on some of these aggregator sites.
But don’t stop there.
Here are a few more ways to take full advantage of aggregators – that most brands aren’t using.
Facebook Remarketing
I’m a big fan of using remarketing whenever possible.
Why? Because it works.
And good news: it works really well when combined with third-party aggregator sites.
Remarketing, essentially, is a way to cookie (or track) users as they come to your site and visit certain pages.
Then, because you have this tracking info, you can track them as they continue to search the web and serve ads to them.
Facebook is a great place to do that. After all, the site continues to see an average 2 billion+ monthly active users, and Facebook remarketing ads get 3x more engagement than regular ads.
So say, for example, somebody comes to your page from one of these third-party aggregator sites.
Based on the page they land on (sidenote: it’s a great idea to set up a dedicated landing page aggregator sites), you can drop a cookie on your visitors.
The, you can do start building a Facebook remarketing list from that data.
By capturing that data, you can then remarket to these people inside Facebook – with whatever type of message you want.
To set up remarketing on Facebook, you’ll need to create your audience and install the Facebook Pixel on the page you want to target.
Start by logging into your Facebook Ads Manager.
Click the Ads Manager dropdown on the far left and select Audiences. Then select Create a Custom Audience.
Click “Website Traffic” from the popup that appears.
Then, you’ll be prompted to set up your pixel. Select “People who visit certain web pages” and enter in the URL.
Once you get your custom Pixel code, you’ll need to install it on the page you want to track.
When the Pixel’s set up and your audience is created, you can then create Facebook ads as you normally would and set them to show to that specific audience – with language that will appeal to them based on the aggregator site they came from.
Create a Facebook Lookalike Audience Based Off Third-Party Aggregator Traffic
You can even take Facebook Remarketing a step further by creating a Lookalike audience.
Lookalike audiences are based on existing remarketing lists, but target new users with similar behavior on Facebook to those on your existing remarketing list.
Because these users are so similar to the users who have already visited your site or expressed interest in your brand, they come highly qualified.
That means you’re targeting a group of users whose interests align with your current leads and customers, and that group has the potential to magnify your marketing message by thousands.
Think of it this way: if you have 100 people on your existing remarketing list, and each person is similar to 100 more users, your Lookalike audience could easily encompass 10,000 people.
Pretty cool, right?
In this case, we want to build that Lookalike audience based off the remarketing list you made of third-party aggregator traffic.
Creating a Lookalike Audience follows the same basic setup as a remarketing list, but when you get to Audiences select “Create a Lookalike Audience.”
Then, under Source, you can choose the existing remarketing audience you’ve built.
You can even target your ads even further by layering your remarketing or Lookalike audience with any type of demographic information Facebook provides.
So if you know that your target audience is generally in the 25-60 age range or occupies a certain region, you can add that information to narrow down your list as accurately as possible.
You can also take it a step further. To get the most qualified audience possible, you can target those who have become leads on your website and develop an audience on Facebook to retarget them on the channel.
And of course, you can then use that audience to build a Lookalike audience to cast your net even wider.
Google Remarketing From Third-Party Aggregator Sites
Your remarketing efforts don’t have to end with Facebook.
Google is another channel that benefits greatly from the strategy, and can also be built using visitors from aggregator sites.
What’s cool about Google is that its properties include the search network, Display network, and YouTube.
And, of course, it’s Google, which means the people who are visiting your site from third-party aggregator sites are more than likely using it.
So why not retarget those visitors on the search engine they’re most likely to use (or one of its many partner sites)?
Remarketing in Google Ads is set up through your AdWords interface, and is also similar to your Facebook Remarketing set-up.
First, you’ll sign into AdWords, open the Shared Library and click on the Tool menu.
Then, click Audience manager > Audience lists.
Click the + button and select “website visitors.”
You’ll then be prompted to name your list and set your remarketing “rules,” which means the conditions you’d like to set for each webpage you’re collecting cookies from.
Once created, you can add your remarketing list to your ad group – along with the appropriate messaging – and retarget your website visitors that came from an aggregator site.
And like Facebook, you can then create a Similar Audience.
These are identical to Facebook Lookalike Audiences but made specifically for Google.
Similar Audiences have been available for some time on the Display Network, but only came to the search network recently.
Layering other targeting methods in Google can also help narrow the audience down.
For example, on the search network you could add in income targeting to an ad group using your remarketing list to get the most qualified leads possible.
Over time, these remarketing strategies will allow you to build up clear audiences that are converting well, and eventually even wean off aggregator sites completely.
Third-Party Aggregator Sites For SEO
We already touched on how aggregator sites can help send more traffic to your site.
But these sites can also help you improve your organic SEO.
How? By rank tracking and reverse engineering.
To do that, you’ll need a tool like SEMrush.
Launch the site, type the name of the aggregator site into the search bar, and choose “Domain Overview” from the dropdown menu. We’ll use Expedia for this example.
Then, scroll down to ‘Top Organic Keywords” and click View Full Report.
These will pull a list of all the keywords the site is currently ranking for.
You can export this list for future reference, and use it to reverse engineer their SEO strategy.
See, the aggregator sites you use will likely be very specific to your industry, meaning they’re targeting many of the same keywords you are to get their organic traffic.
With their keyword list in hand, you can use it to identify any keywords you’re missing or haven’t fully capitalized on.
By incorporating them into your strategy, you can help boost your organic rank and traffic while also receiving more traffic straight from the aggregator site.
Similarly, you can reverse engineer third-party aggregator sites PPC strategy.
To do so, you can use SEMrush or a more specific competitor research tool like SpyFu.
If you’re using SpyFu, you can search for the aggregator site and see every place they’ve shown up in Google, every keyword they’ve bought, every rank and ad variation they’ve run over the last 12 years.
This information is huge.
It’s basically a blueprint to how these sites run their ads and PPC strategies, and you can easily identify which have been most successful and which keywords have driven the most traffic.
Then, you can ethically “steal” their ideas and use them to build your own ads, targeted to a very similar audience.
Wrappy Up Third-Party Aggregator Sites
Third-party aggregator sites represent a huge opportunity for brands.
Not only will they help more users discover your brand and provide an alternate source of traffic, but brands can visitors from the aggregator site to build their own remarketing lists across Facebook and Google.
Additionally, a little spy work into the keywords and ads aggregator sites are using will help give your own SEO strategy some direction and ideas to incorporate in the future.
In short: almost all brands should be seriously looking into third-party aggregator sites.
