Using paid traffic sources to drive visitors to your website can give you a head start in developing more online visibility, attracting and reaching your ideal target audience, and increasing leads and sales. This article will help you understand the different paid traffic sources that are available to you and the best paid traffic sources to use to increase the number of visitors who reach your website.
What are Paid Traffic Sources?
Here are some of the paid traffic sources you might consider to attract visitors to your website.
- Native ads on the open web. This is where you pay for placement of your content on relevant websites to attract those interested in that content back to your site. Originally a leader in the space, Taboola has broadened its platform to connect advertisers to audiences on the open web. The platform helps advertisers drive meaningful engagements, and marketing results, by reaching audiences genuinely, effectively, and at the right time with finely targeted and relevant campaigns.
- Sponsored content. Sponsored content is a form of native advertising. The sponsored content is similar to the content that usually appears on the platform, whether that’s articles, blog posts, video or audio. For example, a reviews site might include paid reviews as a form of sponsored content. Taboola is an expert in helping advertisers deliver sponsored content.
- Display ads. Also known as banner ads, these are the ads consisting of a static or dynamic images, text and a link that send people to a particular destination. Display ads often appear in the header, sidebar and footer of websites. You can purchase display ads via networks like Google Adsense. However, most people ignore display ads, a phenomenon known as “banner blindness.”
- Paid search. With paid search, you pay for your ad to appear at the top of search engine results pages (SERPS). When people search with keywords relevant to your business, your ad will appear. Google Ads and Bing Ads are two examples of paid search providers.
- Social media ads. With social media ads, you pay for placement of your ad campaigns in social media feeds and content. You can run several types of campaigns, including native ads and display ads. Advertising sources of social media traffic include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media sites. You can drive even more traffic by repurposing and optimizing your social ads via Taboola.
- Influencer marketing. This is paid promotion on social media using the voices and accounts of trusted platform users to reach your target audience. While some influencers have hundreds of thousands or even millions of followers, there are also micro-influencers who may have a few thousand followers targeted in a particular niche.
Learn more about buying website traffic here.
What are the Best Paid Traffic Sources?
- Taboola
- Facebook Ads
- Google Ads
- Sponsored Product Ads by Amazon
- LinkedIn Ads
Here are five of the best sources for bringing paid traffic to your website.
1. Taboola
Taboola is the biggest online discovery network which promotes your content across premium publisher sites. That gives you the advantage of reaching your audience via websites they already trust, with information and content you KNOW they’ll be interested in.
Taboola is also an excellent option for native advertising campaigns to get your content seen on new websites finely targeted to your ideal audience. Taboola can help you drive traffic and get more business by reaching the right people with the right content at the right moment. Here are some of the results Taboola has achieved:
- OTTY wanted to raise awareness of its mattress product to drive sales. The company used Taboola to create a sponsored content campaign to direct traffic to its website. The company got an average 7.8x return on ad spend, and increased conversions 10x with retargeting campaigns.
- Nissan uses Taboola to drive traffic directly to product pages for models like Qashqai, Juke, LEAF, Xtrail, and Navara where potential customers can view pricing and request a quote. The campaigns reach an audience of more than 24M and drove over 174.000 clicks in one year.
- Content marketing agency Imagination wanted to boost ROI for its clients. By using Taboola’s discovery network, it was able to increase web traffic by 150%, gain 27K+ new visitors to their client’s site, and get 32K+ clicks.
- Performance marketing agency Valueleaf added Taboola to its media mix to boost traffic and conversions for healthcare and gaming clients. The agency saw a 50% lower CPA than other channels in their media mix, and a 0.6% – 0.8% higher CTR. The campaigns drove more than 5000 leads a month for both clients.
Compared to regular advertising, Taboola boasts 10x higher engagement and you can start a campaign for as little as $10 per day. Taboola has the world’s most extensive reader dataset, and can help you to reach more than 500 million daily active web users. To learn how to set up a Taboola campaign read this step-by-step list or follow a walk-through video on our support site.
2. Facebook Ads
Facebook has had a few bad weeks recently, but despite its stumbles, advertisers still find its global reach of more than 2 billion users valuable. The question is, at what cost? Hunch estimates that over the past year, the potential reach of any Facebook ad has declined by 25%, while the cost has increased, and the Facebook market is getting saturated.
If you do include Facebook, it’s worth knowing that your ads can do double duty. You can relocate your Facebook campaign to Taboola once your ads are created, then use them to generate paid traffic for your website that’s finely targeted to help you achieve your goals. Check out this article for some Facebook ads examples.
3. Google Ads
When thinking about advertising sources, you’re never going to successfully buy pad traffic without considering Google Ads. Google has 86% of the world’s search traffic, and is useful when you’re promoting products and services with purchase intent keywords. Text-based ads are particularly effective, served via the Google Display Network.
But using Google Ads can end up being pretty costly, with the most expensive keywords having a CPC of more than $40! And you should also be aware of banner blindness which can cause people to ignore your Google ads, as the Nielsen Norman Group points out. You’ll have to optimize dynamic search ads to avoid this.
These ads are fine for bottom of the funnel marketing, when people are ready to buy, but not so great for raising awareness. That’s why it makes sense to use a diverse media mix, including promotions on the open web like those available via Taboola, to drive conversions throughout the funnel.
4. Sponsored Product Ads by Amazon
Using sponsored product ads on Amazon can help you drive e-commerce sales. These ads are targeted by products or keywords, and have an average conversion rate of 9.55%.
Amazon is now the first platform for researching online for 66% of users. So, it’s no surprise that Amazon’s growth as a paid traffic source has increased. Because of Sponsored Products Amazon has taken some of Google’s market share in the last few years, with some advertisers shifting half their ad spend from Google search to Amazon ads. It’s a useful source to generate paid traffic for affiliate marketing.
But there are two major issues with Amazon ads. First, you can only reach people who use Amazon. With 4.6 billion web users, when you count the number of visits to Amazon, you’re ignoring some 48% of web traffic. Second, Amazon is a bit of a black box for data, making it hard to know if you’re using it effectively.
If you want to reach these e-commerce consumers, then an e-commerce recommendations site like Taboola’s Connexity is a better bet. You’ll have access to open web traffic, with the ability to fine tune promotions and get reliable data on e-commerce promotions.
5. LinkedIn Ads
If you’re looking for website traffic sources for a B2B business, consider advertising on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is the ideal platform for promotion. It has 740 million+ active users, and when using LinkedIn Ads, it’s easy to target specific audiences based on roles, companies and professional networks. Advertising on LinkedIn has another benefit: it’s a highly trusted network, which can provide added credibility to your promotions.
Other Paid Traffic Sources
While we’ve listed our picks for the best paid advertising sources above, there are also other platforms you can use to generate paid traffic to your website. Including:
- Bing
- Quora
- Snapchat
- TikTok
- Yahoo
- Yandex
- YouTube
How to Track Campaign Success
If you want to know how your paid traffic campaigns are performing on any platform, make sure to use UTM codes that help you track them in Google Analytics.
Google’s free UTM builder will let you tag your campaigns according to the paid traffic source (such as Taboola), the medium, the campaign name, the content (such as what you’re actually promoting.)
Keeping tabs on this data will soon let you establish which are the best paid traffic sources for your business.
In Conclusion
Now you know some of the best paid traffic sources available to promote your business.
As you’ve read, paid advertising can help you quickly generate traffic, so you don’t have to wait for the slow growth of organic traffic. Instead, you can use Taboola, and the other platforms shared in this article to reach your ideal audience, and begin generating conversions, leads, and sales.
If you want a successful online business, you have to get people to your website, but it can take a long time to generate the right amount of organic traffic to put your venture on a firm footing. Sometimes you don’t want to wait. That’s where paid traffic, which is part of performance marketing, comes in.