Should you be buying website traffic?
As a website owner, it can be difficult to get enough traffic to your site, especially when you’ve recently launched. While SEO and content marketing will pay off in the long run, buying traffic is an option if you need a quick head start.
So, what exactly does buying web traffic mean?
As the name suggests, paid traffic means that you spend money to attract visitors to your website. You can do that in lots of ways. Some common methods of buying traffic for your website include content discovery campaigns, display ads, and pay per click campaigns.
If you’re wondering, “should I buy traffic for my website?” the truth is that there are advantages, but there are also a few potential pitfalls, which we’ll help you to avoid.
When you buy targeted web traffic, it’s a great way to quickly improve your business and site’s online visibility. It also lets you reach your target audience directly, and because it’s so targeted, it can help improve conversions. More conversions puts you on the path to more leads and sales. However, it’s crucial to avoid buying the wrong kind of traffic or traffic the wrong way.
In this article, you’ll learn when it makes sense to buy website visitors, how to do it, and the key pitfalls to avoid.
How Does Buying Traffic Work?
Ready to buy website traffic to supplement your organic traffic? Here are some of the steps you should take before and after you start your paid traffic campaign.
- Know your audience
- Pick the right channels
- Set targets in advance
- Create landing pages
- Track your performance
Know Your Audience
An essential first step is targeting the audience. It’s important to know who you’re trying to reach and the best way to connect with them.
So before you buy targeted web traffic, spend some time getting to understand the audience. The payoff is increasing your click through rate (CTR) and driving even more traffic from your paid traffic campaigns. The information you’ll need includes:
- Demographics (age, gender, location, education, and more)
- Interests and affinity groups
- Behavior
You can get audience information and segment your audience through advertising platforms like Taboola. That will help you to create more effective paid traffic campaigns, so you can spend less while improving ROI.
Pick the Right Channels
Channel selection is crucial when buying traffic for your website, because it makes a difference to the effectiveness of your campaigns.
It’s important to identify the online marketing channels that are already working for you (such as particular social media sites, for example) so you can decide the best places to target your campaigns.
Check out the traffic sources report in your web analytics data to find this information. Sources that are already sending traffic to your site are a good starting point for paid traffic campaigns to ensure you reach people who are interested, and to avoid wasting money.
Set Your Targets in Advance
Before you begin, think about the marketing goals you want to achieve with your paid traffic campaign. These typically fall under three big buckets:
- Awareness: helping people get to know your business or brand
- Consideration: getting your audience to think about your business as a solution to their problem
- Decision: winning the sale
Within that, you’ll break down your goals into specific targets, such as how many new visitors, leads or sales you want to achieve when buying website traffic. Setting concrete goals makes it easier to track campaign performance, and ensure you are spending your campaign budget wisely.
Create Landing Pages
A key element when buying traffic for your website is making it easy for them to take the desired action, and convert, when they land there. That’s why you need a landing page as the destination for your paid traffic campaigns.
Landing pages are tailored to your campaign, include content specific to that campaign, have minimal navigation and a single call to action. Because they are super targeted, they help you increase conversions while reducing the costs of your campaign. In other words, you can buy website traffic cheaper than without a landing page.
Track Your Performance
Launching your campaign to buy targeted web traffic is only the start of the process.
The next step is making sure your campaign is getting the right results. That means monitoring your campaign, measuring what’s happening, assessing what’s working, and changing what’s not. In other words, campaign optimization.
The campaign optimization process includes looking at acquisition, behavior, and conversions for the traffic you attract to your site. Depending on how those stack up against the goals you set earlier, you may need to tweak keywords, content, calls to action or channels to get better results from your paid traffic campaign.
Why You Need to Be Careful While Buying Paid Traffic
As mentioned earlier, when you buy website visitors, it pays to be careful, because there are a few pitfalls to avoid. Read on to learn more about what NOT to do when buying website traffic.
Don’t Buy Traffic Without Knowing What to Do
Depending on your business and goals, buying web traffic can be a large item on your budget. That’s why you want to make sure you’re doing it right and spending your money wisely.
Whether you’re running content discovery campaigns, native advertising campaigns, display advertising campaigns, or pay per click campaigns, get expert help to achieve the best results.
Don’t Fall Victim to the Click Fraud Trap
In the past, paid traffic has gotten a bad rap because of fraud. Some bad actors attempted to deceive buyers, and there are still services around trying to do so.
One common type of fraud is click fraud, which artificially inflates the number of clicks received. Beware: sometimes buying website traffic cheap can turn out to be very costly. With click fraud, you end up spending more money for poor quality traffic. It can also result in penalties from the advertising platforms, making it harder to run paid traffic campaigns in the future. That’s why you should always buy paid traffic through trustworthy, reliable sources.
Don’t Ignore the Policy Requirements
Most websites and platforms have ethical policies related to paid traffic that you have to adhere to. For example, the Adsense policy prohibits publishers from artificially inflating impressions or clicks, and from asking people to click or view their ads, among other things.
Buying website traffic that does not meet the policy requirements of the platform you’re using is extremely risky. Examples of this include non-human traffic such as bots, misleading information and paying users to click. Any of these can result in account closure, and then you won’t be able to run paid traffic campaigns on those platforms any longer.
Again, the solution to this is to run your campaigns via reliable platforms.
Is Buying Traffic a Good Idea?
So, is it a good idea to buy paid traffic? The answer’s a firm “yes, but”.
Yes, buying website traffic can be a great idea depending on what your website needs, the quality of the traffic you get, and how you’ve acquired that traffic.
But when buying traffic it is crucial to avoid the pitfalls listed earlier, to prepare your campaign properly, and to work with trustworthy sources to ensure success.
Taboola is a great option for running your paid traffic campaigns. As the world’s largest discovery platform, serving more than a billion people each month, it has in-depth data on audiences and tools to help optimize your paid traffic campaigns to achieve the best results. Taboola will help you deliver policy compliant, finely targeted campaigns to the people most likely to take action, so you meet your goals.