Getting attention for your website when there are billions of websites online today can be a struggle, especially if you need steady traffic to get the engagement or sales you are looking for. Since generating sufficient organic traffic takes a long time, starting with paid traffic to your website is a great way to get the ball rolling and grow your visibility online to your target audience.
With online ad spend projected to account for more than 67% of all media spend by 2024, using ads to get more traffic and sales is the most popular advertising strategy used today, beating out long-time advertising leaders television, print, and radio.
What is Paid Traffic?
Paid traffic is generated when users click a paid advertisement and are redirected to a specific website page related to that ad. Paid traffic is a highly effective way to attract new customers, generate warm leads or drive sales, and if done right, it can be cost-efficient. Paid traffic sources include news sites and digital properties, search engines and social media platforms.
In contrast, organic traffic, which can also come from search engines, social channels and more, is traffic that arrives at your site through non-paid means.
How Does Paid Traffic Work?
Traffic is bought through ad platforms, exchanges or networks. You’ll need to decide if you want to use sponsored content, display ads (which aren’t that effective anymore), search ads, social media ads, or influencer campaigns. Then, create all of your campaign elements such as eye-catching images, intriguing messages, dedicated landing pages or articles, and destination URLs.
After creating your advertising budget, you’ll need to decide how you want to pay for your traffic. The three most common options include:
- Cost per click (CPC): You pay for each user that clicks on your ad
- Cost per million (CPM): You pay for viewable impressions
- Cost per acquisition (CPA): You pay per conversion
Buying paid traffic that’s valuable often comes down to having a deep understanding of your ideal audience. Those insights will help you define your targeting parameters and get your ad in front of the right users. Think about your audience in terms of demographic data, geolocations, keywords, interests and more.
Is Paid Traffic Worth It?
Absolutely! Think of it like this: do you want to wait for people to stumble upon you, or do you want to get in front of people and make them see you?
The advantages of buying web traffic are undeniable. Platforms today are user-friendly, making campaign setup quick and painless. Advertisers can launch campaigns in minutes, so traffic will start pouring in almost immediately.
Because you can target users across the web on millions of websites, you’ll massively increase your exposure without a ton of manual work. Ad networks provide critical campaign data which you can use to optimize your campaigns and refine your audiences for even better results.
Examples of Getting Visitors from Paid Traffic Sources
There are several platforms available that offer paid website traffic options, which allow you to promote your content and organization to specific audiences of your choosing.
In the following examples, we’ll use an example budget of $3,000 with the goal of driving 20,000 visits to your new company’s website. Let’s go through three of the top traffic sources, what their attributes are, and what percentage of a $3000 budget should be allocated to each channel.
1. Google Ads
Google is the world’s most popular search engine, handling over 40,000 queries every second. That means when people are looking for an item you sell, you can use Google Ads to lead them to your site. Ads should focus on your products and services (what you are selling) instead of their content (which is mainly to drive brand awareness and lead generation).
Make the most of your budget by creating extensive negative keyword and long-tail keyword lists in your campaigns. Take extra care when creating your ad campaign landing page because Google considers the value of the post-click landing page when determining which ads get seen.
- Recommended Percentage of Budget: 20% or $600
- Channel Goals: To drive generalized website traffic based on offered products and services.
2. Taboola
Taboola is the largest recommendation engine on the open web, sharing your ad content across thousands of premium publisher sites and making it a top source for paid traffic. We boast 10x higher engagement with our content recommendation ads compared to traditional advertising. Campaigns appear in high-converting areas of websites, including on the homepage, mid-article and Taboola Feed and always in brand-safe environments.
Taboola gives advertisers extensive audience and topic targeting options plus a wide range of tools. Taboola Trends provides insights and tips to create the most impactful creatives, and its semi-automatic SmartBid bidding strategy uses historical data to increase or decrease your bid based on the likelihood of conversions. If your advertising strategy depends on content promotion, it’s worth running a campaign on Taboola, especially since you can start campaigns for as little as $10 per day.
- Recommended Percentage of Budget: 40% or $1200
- Channel Goals: Because Taboola focuses solely on promoting content, the goal here is to get more traffic for your website content pieces, like blog posts and news stories.
3. Facebook
Last year people spent more time on social media than ever before, and Facebook led the pack with people engaging on the app for about one hour a day.
According to statistics collected by HubSpot, Facebook’s Q4 2020 ad revenue was up 31% from 2019, but the average price for an ad increased 5%. Facebook gives you targeting capabilities including demographics, interests and locations as well as letting you block competitors and others from seeing your ads.
- Recommended Percentage of Budget: 40% or $1200
- Channel Goals: To drive website traffic through brand awareness with campaigns promoting specific content pieces as well as products and services. Campaigns can also be created to drive lead generation as well as website traffic, such as directing users to a landing page to download a free book, which captures their email address.
Tracking Campaign Success
The best way to track the success of your paid traffic campaigns across these three platforms, make sure all ad URLs have UTM codes that can be tracked in Google Analytics.
Google offers a free UTM builder that lets you easily and quickly tag campaigns by source, medium, campaign name, content and campaign term. Once these are set up, you can create customized reports and dashboard widgets in Google Analytics that show you how your campaigns are translating to actual website traffic.
Affiliate Marketing & Paid Traffic
Affiliate marketing is highly competitive, and new websites can’t afford to wait for organic traffic to build. More traffic to your site has a waterfall effect – more impressions should amount to more clicks which, in turn, will create more opportunities for conversions and sales.
Buying paid traffic for affiliate marketing can make all the difference as long as that traffic is relevant. Experiment with paid traffic from all types of ad campaigns, including Google Ads, native advertising and social media ads. Use the platform or network’s targeting options to reach niche audiences and drive them to specific landing pages, and evaluate your campaign results to determine which provides the best ROI.
In Conclusion
Starting any new venture can be challenging, and getting your first 20,000 website visitors can seem daunting but buying website traffic will put you on the path to success much faster than waiting around for organic traffic to arrive.
Paid traffic gives you the ability to actively and thoughtfully put your ad campaigns in front of your target audience. Using Taboola ad campaigns can boost your potential conversions even more, given that content discovery campaigns tie into what the user is already reading (instead of what they are searching for), naturally providing an audience that is predisposed to engaging with your ad content and visiting your website. That’s exactly the kind of traffic you want and the traffic that’s worth paying for!