Paid Traffic

What is Paid Traffic?

Paid traffic is any customer that visits your website after you have paid for advertising promotions. Many platforms offer paid traffic services including search engines, social media platforms, and media networks. One of the most common forms of paid traffic is Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising which utilizes Google Ads. Other types include Pay Per Acquisition (PPA) advertising, Cost per Thousand (CPM) impressions and banner advertisements.

You may know if as PPC (pay per click) or CPM (pay per thousand impressions, the “M” in CPM represents the Roman numeral for 1,000). Google Ads and Facebook are two of the most popular platforms used to generate paid traffic to websites, but there are also many other paid traffic sources.

Benefits of Paid Traffic

Paid Traffic can have an extremely positive impact on your website if carefully planned and executed. One of the benefits is choosing exactly how much you want to spend in order to best direct paid traffic to your website. Furthermore, you can set a daily maximum amount you wish to spend on certain types of advertising (Pay Per Click). You can also use keyword optimization to more carefully lead targeted traffic to your website.

Drawbacks of Paid Traffic

Just because someone clicks on a link at the top of Google doesn't necessarily mean they are going to like your product or service. You are paying to drive consumers to your website, but they have no obligation to purchase anything. Therefore paid traffic doesn't directly increase sales and conversion rates. Poorly designed websites combined with high traffic are detrimental. If browsers leave your web page immediately after entering, your bounce rate will increase. Conversely, a higher bounce rate results in a lower Google ranking, and you're still charged for the page visit.

Best Traffic Sources to Attract Customers to Your Website

Facebook. - With more than 1 billion users, Facebook is one of the largest and most active social media networks in the world. Facebook PPC campaigns are incredibly effective at spreading awareness and creating traffic due to the gargantuan user base. It also allows you to target with extreme precision. You can target demographically, geographically, psychographically and behaviorally. For Example, you could target single males between the ages of 45-60 that live in Toronto and enjoy watching psychological thrillers. Facebook is one of the top paid traffic sites available today.
Google Ads. - Google Ads are one of the most popular methods to drive paid traffic to a web page. Google uses display networks to create appealing formats to reach a wide variety of customers. It is considered one of the best-paid web traffic generators and helps build brand awareness and increases visitor engagement. Google Ads also uses search queries so you can target people with very specific interests. Additionally, you can also control your costs by setting daily maximums as well as measure and manage campaign results through quantitative analysis.

The Goals of Paid Traffic

The goal of paid traffic is to acquire customers at break-even or better. Why cap it off at break-even? Digital Shift is focused on helping businesses make money, and that means that revenue and costs are important. The acquired customer needs to make your business money. Otherwise, your business will dry up.

When it comes to paid search, the company that is willing to spend the most money to acquire a customer will usually win. Targeting customers can be expensive if you are trying to reach everyone and you can run out of your budget quickly if you fail to plan. For these reasons, it is important to define the audience and target your audience through your marketing funnel. Paid traffic should also be used to complement your SEO services, by remarketing previous website visitors.

Paid traffic is usually used as a system with multiple campaigns to generate leads for your business. Your campaigns can work together to achieve different goals.

Make sure you have goals for your campaigns.
Don’t look at paid traffic as platform-specific
Always know what stage of the relationship you are at.
The goal is to prove that you know what you are talking about before you ask visitors to buy.
Explain: Who’s this brand, what do they have to sell?

Paid Traffic Tips