What is Paid Traffic

There is no doubt that traffic is the lifeblood for any website, and even the best of sites will die without traffic. Having a website without traffic is like having a beautiful store in the middle of the sierra dessert. You can have the best products or service, but without traffic, it won’t matter. In this article, we will learn how we can buy views for our website, in other words, paid traffic.

So what exactly is paid traffic? Paid traffic is when you pay for a lead to your website. The term “Traffic” is a metric used by webmasters to measure the number of views or people that lands on their websites. So paid traffic is using advertisement platforms to get a prospect to your site. The most common form of paid traffic comes from PPC or pay per click advertising.

About Paid Traffic

Paid traffic, as mentioned above, requires spending of money by the owner marketer or company that owns the website. The main reason one would pay for a lead is they know their website generates more profit than the amount they spend on paid traffic. For example, let’s say you are a website owner; you have a website on gold investment. You have been around the block and know a few things like:

You have a gold investment offer that generates a $500 commission
You have a sales page that converts 3 in 100 prospects to buyers
You also know that 1 in every 3 customers will buy other products and services you offer

Okay knowing all this how much will you spend on paid traffic. For convenience sake, let’s say it costs you $1000 to get 100 views to your sales page. There are two schools of thought one which the newbie marketer follows and the second which a master marketer fallows, Ill explain now.

The newbie marketer would say I would spend $1000 on paid traffic because then I would make $1500 leaving me with $500 profit.
The Master Marketer would spend as much as possible! Because he knows his numbers, he knows that for every dollar spent he gets two dollars on the back end.
With the hypothetical numbers, I gave above you always come out on to. You could spend $5000 generating 500 leads that convert 15 prospects into buys. Making you $7500 in gross sales which is $2500 in net sales

Now the example above is obviously a golden goose, and I don’t want to leave you with the impression that this is easy by any means.

Know ing that for every hundred views you receives on a particular landing page, will generate five hundred in sales is fantastic. But there are so many other factors you need to take into consideration like:

Gross Vs. Net Sales
Cost Per Click -CPC
Cost Per Acquisition -CPA
Cost Per Lead -CPL
Long Term Value of Each Customer- LTV

Knowing your numbers is critical when doing buying traffic, but on the upside, once you do, marketing becomes unimaginably fun.

A more beginner-friendly method for paid traffic is banner advertisements. What is a banner ad you might ask? A banner ad is what it sounds like usually a graphic with text in a square shape that when clicked on, sends a website viewer to a different web page to buy something. We have all seen them; they are on the top, sides, and bottoms of our favorite blogs. They also pop up in the middle of viewing youtube videos banner ads are everywhere.

what you need to know is those banner ads are used to get traffic from one site to another. You can make money by hosting ads on your website or creating banner ads and promoting them on an ad network.

If you are going to have banner ads on your website you will need to have a website that has high volumes of traffic. The best way to do this is to create valuable content that is regularly searched in a specific nich or industry. Once your website reaches a critical mass you can apply for a premium ad network. a premium ad network will populate your site with quality ads that will generate income when viewers click on the ad.

The other way to make money with banner ads is to create banner ads that lead to a page that converts traffic into sells. You can use design software like Canva to create banner ads just make sure you use the correct dimensions when creating your ads.

What Is The Strategy Behind PPC

Google
Facebook
Instagram
Youtube
twitter

When you implement the right pay-per-click advertising campaign, it certainly will help in driving traffic to your website. However, generating web traffic from PPC is only open to those who use advertising platforms to promote their ads. Marketers have a plethora of ad platforms at there disposal to choose from like:

Those are just a few, and each has its own pros and cons, which will all depend on your budget and target audience.

Marketers use Google ads to target specific keywords. If you are are in the Travel and vacation niche, you might want to target the phrase “Luxury Caribbean Cruise.” Once you discover that this s a popular and profitable search term, you can create an ad and have it put on google where thousands will see it.

The upside to doing this is Google will only charge you for hosting your add when someone clicks on it. Ensuring that the messages and brand match with the advert is critical. Having an official website about travel will make sure the people who click on your ad actually convert into customers.

As stated above the main benefit to PPC advertising is you will only have to pay for those advertisements that are clicked. The second is that Paying for traffic via PPC advertisement is in general cheap. Most PPC advertisement only cost 1-2 dollars per click some can be more, and that why knowing your cost per click is vital.

By doing this, you can have better control over your advertisement spends. While Google may be a cost-effective way to get paid traffic using social media like facebook and youtube has its benefits as well.

Facebook Pros:

Facebook provides a large segmented Audiences

Build Social Proof via Facebook groups

Facebook has amazing analytics that will help you with ad cost

Facebook Cons:

A steep learning curve

A Facebook audience is content-based, not intent-based

A potential to waste a ton of money if you don’t know what you are doing

YouTube Pros:

You can create video content for free

Increase and compete in organic search by making videos

Build a know like and trust factor by putting yourself in videos

YouTube Cons:

A lot of time and energy spent making quality videos

You have to become natural on camera

You will endure negative feedback or bullying

How Paid Traffic Benefit SEO

Those who are seeking information on your topic or niche might come across your advertisements. In a paid traffic scenario, the ads are listed at the top of Google, thus putting your ad in a better position to click on than organic search results. Yet imagine how much credibility your PPC advertisement would have if your website showed in both the paid and organic search for a key search term. In many cases, such search-results based clicks could get converted into organic traffic, boosting your seo. This happens when the search-results are highly focused, and your content or ad takes into account the exact needs people are searching for.

For example, you are selling a luxury cruise via an affiliate network. You have an ad running for “Luxury Carribean Cruise” you also have a blog post ranked in Google titled “10 Best Beaches In The Carribean.” Now someone searches “Carribean Travel” sees you in the top ad spot and top in the organic search you just gain instant credibility. At this point, it doesn’t matter if they click your ad or your blog you when by doing both paid and organic traffic methods.

Searchers who are aware of your brand because they have been exposed to you via paid advertisements. Will recognize your logo name and design and thus be way more likely to click on your content in the future. Searches results that are accompanied by paid traffic can impact organic growth by:

Increasing website recognition
Giving brand credibility
Adding more listing on the front page of Google

Increasing your websites exposure via social media coverage can also help SEO. Google takes into account the traffic a particular site has and the overall site interaction with social media as part of its ranking factor. Therefore, when you come out with effective paid advertisements, it could increase the organic ranking of your site.

This certainly is one of the most apparent yet indirect benefits of paid traffic. However, we need to bear in mind that Google makes uses over 200 other factors as a part of its algorithm. We know paid traffic is one of them. Therefore, it may not be prudent to put all your advertisement time, money, and effort into increasing paid traffic alone.

It should be one of the many approaches to increasing your website’s traffic. Further, this alone may not be the only way by which you can converts visits into real business propositions.

To put it in a nutshell, your PPC efforts alone should not define your overall strategy for improving the organic rankings. It also should not be the only deciding factors when it comes to determining your overall digital marketing plan. The companies goals and your goals should be the main driving factors when it comes to defining your digital marketing strategy.

What Is The Difference Between Organic Traffic And Paid Traffic

The first and foremost difference between organic traffic and paid traffic is the cost factor. In free traffic or organic traffic, you don’t buy the traffic or views. Those who visit your website do so based on the contents that your site has to offer. Organic search results are based on bringing your audience the most engaging and helpful information as possible. If you do this, then your website will be displayed top of Google and other search engines.

On the other hand, when we use paid traffic, as the phrases itself suggests, the website owners will have to pay for visitors. If a searcher finds the right search result in your ad naturally, they will want to know more and will most likely click on it. Once he or she clicks, the marketer or the website owner has to pay for the click. The marketing campaigns in PPC campaigns are designed to leave your potential customer wanting more. Your ability to quench that thirst with a profitable product or service will determine if paid traffic is right for you.

Paid traffic is undoubtedly more efficient and results-oriented as far as search results are concerned. Compared to this, organic traffic is a slow process, and it may take quite a bit of time only after which you can start seeing results. The results, of course, are all about increased traffic to the sites. The upside here with organic traffic is once you got it you don’t have to keep paying for it as you do with paid traffic.

Quality of traffic in a free or organic form is always a notch or two below the paid versions. Because with paid traffic you can target your ideal customer. With organic traffic, we certainly do not have any control over the buying temperature of these viewers.

What Are The Advantages Of Paid Traffic?

Here are the advantages of paid traffic:

One can see continuous improvement. This is because different advertisement channels would be continuously updating the tools that are offered to the user who is buying the traffic. This could include highly focused searches based on location, age, gender, hobbies, and other such attributes. The techniques and approaches for paid traffic are always changing and evolving, and therefore, there is still room for improvement.

The Best Of Analytics

There is no point of running a campaign for improving traffic unless you can monitor it and analyze the results on a live and continuous basis. When you run a paid campaign, you are also provided with tools known as analytics to view the results.

Results Are Visible Faster

Content marketing or unpaid social media do give results, but it takes forever when compared to paid traffic. Many businesses cannot afford to wait for such long periods. They would like to have immediate results, and this is where the role of paid traffic is considered to be a better option. Specific products or services get noticed almost immediately in a PPC campaign. This gives marketers a head start when compared to organic traffic.

You Have Multiple Platforms

Since you have various ad networks in a PPC campaign, it allows the advertisers to make crucial choices. You can decide where to advertise and what kind of audience you want to target. You know your audience best, so choosing to use a visual platform like Instagram vs. a text-based platform like twitter should be an easy decision. It always is better to target different platforms based on what your ideal customer expects from you.

What Are The Disadvantages

One big downside to paid traffic is you may be paying for empty leads. Someone will click on your advertisement and the bounce immediately. After spending a few minutes, they might not find what they are looking for and leave your site. This is known as a bounce and is relatively common to the point where a bounce rate is a metric you will want to monitor. People leave a website for many reasons, but the most common are.

Website is difficult to navigate
the site looks sketchy or scammy
There are too many ads or pop-ups

Getting new subscribers is not easy, with a paid traffic method. With organic traffic setup, your audience gets to know like and trust you. You will have to spend more money, converting cold traffic into buyers and then maybe they will become subscribers. Subscribers are essential because you want people coming back to the site over and over again.