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People and companies create websites of the most diverse types based on everything that is said about it, especially because of the success stories. But most of the time, disappointment soon comes, because unlike the speeches of successful people, the return does not seem to happen.
For some of these situations, a possible solution is paid traffic.
If you don’t know very well what it is, when to use it and where to start, this content will answer these and other questions.
What is paid traffic?
The traffic of a website is like the physical traffic (of people and cars), that is, it is the number of visitors that pass through the pages of a website in a time interval. Paid traffic, on the other hand, is making use of a variety of paid tools that produce this traffic and which, in general terms, is advertising on the Web.
And when we talk about a variety of tools, it is not an exaggeration or a figure of speech. There are many and, above all, in the most different forms, however much they look a lot like others.
The oldest and already present in the early days of the Internet is the banner.
Despite some caveats and questions about its use, it is still widely used and we have already addressed the problem of excessive online advertising and the consequences that this can have for a website, such as “kicking out” visitors who are unable to consume the content they it literally ends up hidden under so much advertising or because abuse destroys the layout.
But this is not the behavior we came to deal with, after all, if well planned, banners still fulfill their role, which is to lead visitors to the site who pay for their display on any page.
Alongside the space that digital influencers began to have, a more subtle format emerged with great results, especially when influencers began to migrate from their blogs to platforms like YouTube.
Whether just using a product in different videos, as if it were part of the set of things that the influencer consumes in their private life, or through assessments that intended to be impartial and sincere, brands and companies were adapting the already established model of “ famous poster boy”, of television commercials.
As a channel sponsor or even helping to produce content, by opening the company to show how a product is manufactured, advertising variations to bring leads and prospects have evolved.
Today, you download and install an app on your smartphone and part of the cost to keep the app free in its most basic version is paid by the promise of traffic generated for the company whose advertising is being displayed.
You do a search on Google or Bing, or any search engine, and the first – and often the last as well – links on the results page (SERPs), are advertising. Depending on where the search is being made, the words “sponsored”, “advertisement”, “advertising”, or none of that may appear somewhere, but in a format that resembles e-commerce sites.
It doesn’t matter the artifice behind it or the name given to it. These are all paid forms of traffic generation.
If you prefer, to appear there, the person responsible for the product / company / brand is paying and waiting for you to click and go to their page.
Why pay for traffic?
In a few quick searches on best practices for bringing visitors to your newly created website, you will find far more content than you will ever be able to consume, talking about traffic resulting from organic search, SEO, Content Marketing, Digital Marketing and one more lots of related subjects.
It all works, no doubt about it.
The problem is that even if you do everything exactly as they teach, it won’t work right away. Not the next day or the next week. And that turns out to be the problem for most.
Adopting the set of practices, techniques and fundamentals to produce organic traffic, which is the visitor that naturally comes to your website as a result of all that work, takes time. Sometimes a long time.
And it’s not because you didn’t do it right, or because the “tips” aren’t good enough, or any reason like that. Think of this as a race where everyone – besides you – is striving towards the same goal. Not to mention that in the midst of this dispute, Google, the “new Bing”, changed some rules and part of the work had to be redone.
It’s like in traditional business. You open an incredible store, with a beautiful window, good products from good brands, fair prices, personalized, courteous and attentive service. But in many cases, all this is not enough to fill the store with consumers. Your competitors are everywhere and also working to get customers into their respective stores.
It will be necessary to invest in ads in the media in the region, who knows how to make pamphlets, banners, posters, banners and other forms of conventional advertising. Otherwise, building a clientele will take much longer.
This analogy justifies one of the reasons why pay for traffic. While the work to produce organic traffic does not start to pay off, it is necessary to pay to generate it.
But there are other possible situations where it may also be necessary and/or desirable to produce traffic using paid tools/services:
- HotSite – created a HotSite for an event, product launch, or something special? Usually this type of site has an “expiration date”, that is, they are sites that are not permanent, but while active, they need to bring visitors in good numbers;
- Landing Pages – similar to the previous example, landing pages or pages where visitors “land” on the website, sometimes also called entry pages, can be essential for a commercial and/or Marketing strategy. Investing in the production of these pages can accelerate the process of knowledge and popularization of a site;
- Special seasons – there are dates and times of the year, as well as the seasonality of certain segments, which need to be taken advantage of (eg: Mother’s Day, holidays, customer day and consumer day, Black Friday, Christmas, etc.) there is organic traffic, it is necessary to produce traffic – and not lose sales – by paying for it;
- Competition – depending on the segment of activity, there may be more or less competition and, therefore, the difficulty and time to achieve a good position in search engines will be directly proportional. Meanwhile, increasing visitation with paid traffic may be necessary;
- Accelerate Rankings – There are many ranking factors that are used to position website pages for different searches. By bringing an “artificially” public, he can be interested in what he found and like, comment, share (engagement), in addition to browsing other pages, remaining longer and all these behaviors contribute to improving rankings, because search engines “ understand” that your content pleased the visitor and, therefore, must be relevant;
- Improve conversion – the conversion rate is the ratio between any visitors and visitors who have met a goal, which can be buying a product, registering, downloading, subscribing to a service. Generating traffic to pages that facilitate or call for a specific action (CTA’s) contributes to improving this rate.
How does paid traffic work?
Paid traffic has many similarities with conventional advertising, starting with the fact that even with some particularities, it is still advertising.
And so, first of all, you need to know your target audience and / or persona.
In the case of online advertising, it is more appropriate to go further. It means having a persona – or at most a few – in mind and that is the most detailed and specific consumer profile of your product / service.
Knowing this implies knowing things like: what attracts him (needs, desires and expectations) and where he can be found.
This knowledge is what will help you determine whether it’s best to adopt search engine tools such as Google Ads, corresponding social media alternatives, or those used by influencers, or another solution.
Because just like branding in traditional media, if your typical customer is a cyclist, or if he’s an engineer, or even if he’s a foodie enthusiast, what do you have to say and how do you get it across? each of the three, needs to be quite different.
Unless someone is all three at the same time, but this is a very specific situation and represents the exception and not the rule.
How good your knowledge of your typical customer is allows you to work on the specificity of long tail keywords.
Take, for example, the aforementioned cyclist. Working on the keyword “bicycle” means that you will have all the sites that sell the product “bicycle” competing with you, which includes everything from a small bike store to large magazines and e-commerce. But if you have “bikes with a tapered and boost frame”, you will only compete with certain advertisers for that particular search.
It is highly important to think about this, because online advertising has its value attached to this. In other words, the more popular a term / word is, the more expensive it is to pay to display advertising linked to that word. It’s a real auction.
Also, a cyclist looking for this type of equipment is different from the occasional cyclist. The first frequents specialized content sites and blogs and channels of professional cyclists. Anyway, it consumes lots of related content. The second, on the other hand, is not very interested in this type of subject, except occasionally and as a curiosity.
How to generate paid traffic?
Once you have seen the advantage of resorting to paid traffic, you must be wondering how to generate it or what services / tools exist.
As one of the leaders in this area, Google alternatives always come to mind, such as the aforementioned Google Ads.
Generically known as sponsored links, they are advertising insertions that many sites display, as well as the results pages of alternative search sites, such as Bing, for example.
We could make a reasonably extensive list, but that would only reinforce the dominance of the biggest companies in the sector.
Instead, our suggestion is to think and act like your typical customer.
What sites does he access? On social media, what content does he consume the most? Which influencers have the most followers belonging to this audience? Which YouTube videos are most watched, liked and commented on? Are there dedicated forums and what are they?
Finding those places on the web where your customer is most will help you figure out what ways to generate traffic they use and work for the audience you’re aiming to reach.
The big problem with doing like most and simply paying the leaders, in addition to having the possibility of paying more, can be ineffective. After all, how many times are you shown advertising that you have ZERO interest in?
Despite the impressive advancement of artificial intelligence that promise to increasingly infiltrate all web services, including online advertising, it is not new that many content producers have been questioning the efficiency of algorithms for recommending content and advertising, as well as the constant changes in monetization policies practiced.
As a result, interest has grown on the part of them, influencers and other sites that generate paid traffic, for alternatives outside the domain of big techs and leaders in the area. Aligning partnerships with them can be more accessible and produce more interesting returns.
Conclusion
Paying to produce traffic on a website can be useful and give good results, depending on your intentions, needs and how it is put into practice.
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