There’s a lot to learn about website traffic in the ad tech world. We talk a lot about good traffic versus bad traffic, and all the dos and don’ts, and now it’s time to talk about paid traffic.
For starters, yes, paid traffic is a thing — and a good thing if done correctly. You see, the entire internet has become an uber competitive place where every minute of the day at least 500 hours of content is uploaded on YouTube. In addition to that, about 695,000 stories are uploaded on Instagram and 70 million messages are passed along the various social media channels.
What’s more, every business in every industry is contributing to this mega content uploaded and therefore, every business in every industry must compete for visibility among their websites.
So how do you generate brand awareness online quickly and swiftly?
You buy your web traffic. That’s how.
While it may seem easy enough to buy some website traffic and put up ads to get an edge on your market and demographics, it’s unfortunately not that simple. Most businesses and individuals that embark on paid traffic campaigns don’t even know how to do it properly and it ends up a total waste of time and ad spend. When done correctly, however, a paid traffic campaign can help you grow your audience, increase your ad revenue and strengthen your brand identity and message.
In this article, we’ll tell you everything you need to know and more about not just buying web traffic but buying high converting website traffic. Keep reading to learn more.
What Does ‘Buying Traffic’ Actually Mean?
First thing’s first— you need to understand what it means to buy web traffic. Otherwise, you’ll end up with a bunch of bot traffic and cybercriminals crawling your site. Additionally, when we talk about ‘buying traffic’ or ‘paid traffic’ we’re not actually talking about paying people to hop on your site. We’re also definitely not talking about buying the fake web traffic generated by those pesky bots either.
Just for the record, you won’t get anything out of bot generated traffic nor will you get anything out of paying individual users to visit your site and hang out there for a while. The first thing to keep in mind is that your primary goal is always to improve your conversation rates and ad revenue, which is why buying targeted traffic is about investing your ad spend in grabbing the attention of potential customers — not just traffic for the sake of higher visitor numbers.
Therefore, buying ad traffic, in part, means advertising for your brand, products or services using different channels and sources to get to your target audience. This is also as opposed to generating organic traffic, as buying traffic refers to paid targeted traffic versus attracting users naturally through search engine optimization (SEO) efforts and content marketing efforts.
Essentially, paid traffic is the traffic that comes to your website through paid advertisements, promotions and even campaigns. These are paid ads that can be placed on Google, social media channels, websites, within apps and anywhere else your target audience hangs out.
What’s the Point of Buying Traffic?
For publishers, the main purpose behind spending money to drive traffic to their websites is to generate conversions and make more money. Paid website traffic is arguably more beneficials when it comes to conversions compared to organic traffic since it allows you to reach more of your audience and garner customers quicker — minus the effort you would otherwise put into your organic traffic campaign.
In a nutshell, paid traffic makes up for at least 27% of all the traffic on the internet. It also doesn’t require that you market yourself as an industry expert or create a bunch of SEO-optimized pages — although you absolutely should do that in addition to buying traffic. Lastly, with paid targeted traffic, you can reach thousands of people from your target audience directly and with a single click in less than 24 hours, achieving better conversion rates.
Therefore, the entire point of buying traffic is to ensure high conversion rates in record time. It’s especially beneficial considering that as spend in general often goes to traffic acquisition with the goal of generating a recurring audience. Of course, if you put out valuable and entertaining content consistently, this will happen naturally. However, paid traffic can give publishers the boost they need during any stage of their website’s development to guarantee the end result: Higher conversion rates
Who is Buying Traffic For?
While buying traffic is for both advertisers and publishers, more publishers tend to buy traffic. Here’s a quick breakdown of who exactly is buying targeted traffic:
Publishers
It’s common knowledge by now that publishers monetize their websites via organic traffic. However, they also buy traffic so they can direct it to their own landing page or website pages where there are referral links to products or ads.
This especially true when it comes to larger multi-geo sites and streaming platforms as they’re the best to use for paid traffic to attract quality traffic. It also pays off well during sports events when users visit certain sites to watch matches and games where they’ll also have to consume ads on the punisher’s inventory.
Publisher Affiliates
Publisher affiliates also lead paid traffic to landing pages created to promote specific products from larger online retailers such as Amazon, Bluehost, Alibaba, and other affiliate retailer programs. The goal here is to attract the most interested audiences that will translate into a lot of purchases where the publisher affiliates receive a commission for paid sales.
Affiliate Marketers
Affiliate marketers are also known to buy traffic to send to other people’s landing pages. Essentially, they take someone else’s offer — usually using an affiliate program from one of the many eCommerce retailers listed above — then go to Google, Facebook, Adsterra, etc to buy the necessary traffic to direct users to the landing pages to generate paid conversions.
The key for affiliate marketers is to spend less money on purchasing traffic than they’ll receive through their conversion commissions.
Tips For Buying High Converting Traffic
As we’ve said, buying traffic seems like an easy thing to do. However, if you don’t do it correctly, you’ll end up with nothing but invalid traffic and wasted campaign spend on advertisements that get zero responses.
Below are the top tips for buying high converting traffic as well as how to manage it:
First, Define Your Target Audience
When starting out with paid traffic, you have two significant options: You can display your ads to every single person using the internet while paying a lot of money to only attract a small percentage of visitors. Or, you can show ads to a smaller, more targeted group of users that will likely be interested in what you’re offering.
The second option will always be more cost effective and more effective in general, resulting in higher conversions. Why? Because you’re targeting the people who specifically have a need or want to fulfill via the products or services being advertised. It’s that simple.
When you know who your customer base is, you can get more out of less advertising. Getting to know your audience means getting to know the following details:
- They’re age, gender and location
- The types of jobs they work
- Their levels of income
- Their spending patterns
- How they prefer to communicate (email, direct message, text, etc.)
- Their interests and hobbies
- Their paint points
You can find this information by analyzing your existing customer base using general analytics tools such as Google Analytics. You can also get more valuable user information out of customer surveys, which you can do by offering certain incentives such as exclusive coupons, perks, or other promotional deals.
You can also analyze your competitors to see who they’re targeting, where they’re putting up their ads and what they use to appeal to their customers. This can give you valuable insights as to what they’re doing right and what they’re doing wrong, so you can capitalize on both.
Once you’ve gathered all that valuable information, you’ll want to begin creating buyer personas. A buyer persona is the detailed description of your ideal audience member or customer, and it’s necessary to create at least three to four different ones since businesses will typically target different audience groups. For example, men, women, young adults, Americans and Europeans, etc.
How you differentiate these buyer personas will undoubtedly depend on the business in question, their niche, and the niche of your actual website.
In creating buyer personas, you’ll also want to take the time out to figure out who does not fall into your target audience. This isn’t just about finding out who is ‘the opposite’ of your target audience, but who wouldn’t be interested in the products or services being offered. For example, not every woman in her early 30s will be concerned with anti-wrinkle cream, so you’ll want to find out who ‘that woman’ is and avoid trying to sell her ‘persona’ completely.
Essentially, when you know who your target audience is, you’ll be able to create more appealing and effective advertising to pique their interests.
Align Your Content With the Buyer’s Journey
Each buyer goes through a set of specific steps before making their purchase decision. You need to ensure that with every step, you’re delivering the right content that will be most useful to them so they’ll feel confident moving towards their purchase decision.
There Are three stages to the buyer’s journey and here’s what you need to do to ensure your content is aligned with their interests:
The Awareness and Discovery Stage
During this stage, users have acknowledged that they have a problem and are moving forward in seeking the solutions for that problem. Their goal is to find the most useful information and resources — not to make a purchase decision.
Therefore, at this point in time, you should only be providing the users with the most educational content possible. This could include valuable guides, how-tos, checklists, educational videos, and so on. This is also the point where the audience in question will be at its broadest, so not everyone will continue through their journey.
The Consideration Stage
By the time users get to the consideration stage they already know what the solution to their problems are. Now they’re starting to look at the various products and services available to them so they can compare their options.
At this stage you have ‘potential buyers’ who want to learn more about the products or services and what sets them apart from the others. Therefore, they’ll be looking into different brands and what they have to offer — still not ready to buy, but getting there.
Here is where you’ll want to create landing pages with clear descriptions of the features and benefits of the products and services you’re advertising for. These pages should include text ads and videos that have strong calls to action (CTAs) and case studies for B2B and SaaS companies.
The Purchase Stage
By now, users have learned all they can and have likely come to a point where they’re ready to make a purchase. This is where you’ll need to provide content that focuses on making the sale.
In other words, made the benefits of the products or service aloud and clear, including pertinent information like locations, prices, ratings and sales. You’ll also want to make the act of purchasing as easy as possible by using ‘shop now’, ‘sign up’, ‘get a demo’ CTAs. You’ll also want to use commercial intent keywords where applicable, such as ‘buy your office needs in [city/town name]’.
Ultimately, you want to ensure that you put up ads and content for every stage of the buyer’s journey rather than putting all your efforts into the purchase stage. The key is to allow potential customers to get to know you and what you’re offering from the very beginning so they’ll learn about your industry expertise and build trust throughout their journey.
Set Your Metrics and Track Them
Another important step in buying and managing high converting traffic is setting up key performance indicators (KPIs) and tracking their performance. This allows you to see what’s working in your paid traffic campaign and what isn’t, so you know what to fix.
Setting up and tracking metrics is a step that’s often skipped in most marketing campaigns. However, it’s critical because your goals and plans won’t always align with the reality of your campaign. This is normal, but it’s also something that will cause you to waste a lot of money with little ROI if you don’t know what’s not aligning.
Let’s talk about the KPIs you should be tracking when it comes to paid traffic campaigns:
- Your ad spend return: How much revenue you generate from each dollar spent on an advertising campaign defines whether your ads are cost efficient or wasteful to your business.
- Cost per conversion: How much it costs to attract a customer that takes some sort of action whether it be an email subscription sign up or otherwise, and what those dollars are worth.
- Customer acquisition cost: How much it costs to acquire a customer — as in attracting a customer that’s going to make a purchase decision, which defines whether you’ve successfully reached your target audience or not.
- Impression and reach: This metric refers to how many users successfully saw your ad, making it important for brand awareness.
- Number of clicks: How many users actually clicked on one of your ads which translates to how many people showed interest in what was being offered and the content presented. It aso demonstrates how appealing the content is and whether you’re reaching the target audience at the right time and in the right place.
- Conversion rates: Out of all the users who engaged with the ad, how many actually converted — as in, made a purchase decision. This is especially important for pay-per-click advertisements where you need to ensure that each click pays out.
All of the above are the most basic KPIs you’ll want to measure and track. Depending on your paid traffic goals and overall ad campaign goals, you’ll want to adjust your metrics, leveraging all of the ones listed and possibly more. Just don’t use more KPIs than necessary, meaning don’t bother with any KPIs that don’t align with your goals.
Test and Optimize Consistently
The internet is always evolving and changing, as are its users. Therefore, you need to evolve and change with it — which means you’ll need to continue creating new ads that reflect these changes.
How do you go about this? By testing all your marketing efforts on a consistent basis. In addition to testing, you’ll also need to continue tracking your KPIs to figure out where you need to optimize, such as your ad visuals, target audience, ad text, landing pages, social media channels, and so on.
Don’t hesitate to part ways with any channels or ad visuals that are causing you to lose revenue or to stop using anything else that’s not bringing in any revenue. When it comes to testing, you’ll also want to test your ad visuals, channels, CTAs, audiences, and so on. This will enable you to understand what is resonating with your audience, which may even lead you to discover new audience segments and niches.
Having said that, A/B testing helps to find the most effective way to buy high converting traffic and increase the number of visitors that’ll come to your website and generate conversions.
Converting Your Web Traffic
The last part of buying website traffic is making sure you can convert it. That’s why it’s important to ensure your website is logical and intuitive in the continuation of your marketing efforts.
In other words, make sure your web pages are clean and responsive, and easy to navigate. Your landing page should be as appealing as the ad itself, and remember, the buying process should be as simplified as possible.
Ultimately, you want to ensure that your target audience, the ad content, and the products or services being advertised align. This is the only way to ensure that your traffic converts as your ads will speak directly to the potential customers in need.