Paid Traffic: How It Can Boost Your Digital Marketing

What is paid traffic?

Paid traffic is when you pay to get high-quality traffic back to your website; it’s ultimately online paid advertising that ensures you can increase website traffic and improve your chances of conversion. Many platforms offer paid traffic, including search engines like Google and Bing, social media marketing platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Instagram, and media networks like popular blogs and publications.

Paid traffic vs. organic traffic

Paid traffic is not the same as organic SEO traffic. With organic traffic, you don’t pay for website visits. Instead, you perform inbound marketing activities such as writing a blog, using organic social media, and search engine optimization to increase your website traffic. For example, with Google search, you can choose between search ads or employing SEO tactics to generate leads and traffic for your business.

Meanwhile, with paid ad campaigns, you pay to generate paid traffic from your marketing and advertising efforts. However, it’s best practice to employ paid and organic traffic marketing tactics simultaneously to ensure you can bring in as much website traffic as possible. In addition, once your organic traffic strategies take off and start boosting your web traffic, you may choose to stop paying for traffic, ultimately saving you money in the long run.

Types of paid traffic campaigns

There are several types of paid traffic, and what works best for you depends on your business and its customers. Consider where your customers spend their time. For example, if you know your customers enjoy scrolling specific social media platforms, you can target users on those platforms to increase website traffic effortlessly.

Here are some of the different types of paid traffic:

Pay-per-click (PPC)

Pay-per-pick is one of the most popular types of paid traffic marketing strategies because you only pay when a customer clicks your advertisement. There are several types of PPC marketing campaigns and paid ads traffic sources to choose from, such as:

• Google ads: Google Ads is typically one of the first places marketers start when they want to build a PPC campaign because it allows them to maximize their SEO efforts if they have an organic strategy already in place. However, you’ll need to know how search engines work if you want your ads to make a real impact. With Google, there are several different types of PPC campaigns to choose from, including paid search traffic (search ads), display ads through the Google display network, and video ads via YouTube. Which type you choose will depend on your goals and target audience.
• Social media platforms: Social media platforms are another popular marketplace for PPC ads because they allow you to reach your target audience where they spend their time. With social media ads, like Facebook advertising, you can target customers in several ways, including location and age. As long as you can choose the right platform to spend your marketing budget on, you can boost website traffic and conversions using these platforms.
• Display advertising: While Google Ads is a popular platform for all types of digital advertising, some platforms focus specifically on display ads, allowing you to target specific websites where your ads will appear. These display ads can appear on several websites, including industry sites, to help you target your audience and get the most clicks back to your website.
• Native advertising: Native advertising is similar to display advertising in that your ads appear on websites and blogs. However, unlike display ads, native ads are designed to blend into the editorial of the website, making them look like another story rather than an ad. Depending on the type of ad you want to create, native ads can be more effective than display ads, but it ultimately depends on your goals.

Sponsored ads/posts

Sponsored posts in online publications are also a popular option, especially if you have a relationship with the publication through public relations efforts. These sponsored posts are similar to advertorials in magazines since they’re paid guest posts that can help you educate your audience and reach new customers through the publication’s engaged following.

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is when you work with affiliates to sell products and services and bring you more website traffic. These individuals earn a commission for marketing your products, typically when they make a sale. However, depending on your affiliate program, they can make a profit based on how much traffic they send to your site.

You can also choose to work with influencers who can drive traffic back to your website for a fee rather than a commission. Both of these types of individuals have loyal followings and are seen as thought leaders in their industries, allowing you to take advantage of their hard work by marketing to their followers who trust them.

Website banners

Website banners are another popular option. These types of digital advertisements appear on a website as rectangular ads, ultimately known as display ads.

There are several ways you can get website banner ads, including using display ad platforms or reaching out to publications directly, depending on your needs. These visual banners allow you to capture the attention of your target audience on someone else’s website and ultimately bring them back to yours.

Benefits of paid traffic

Now that you understand what paid traffic is, you might be wondering how it can benefit your business. Like any type of advertising, paid traffic costs money, but spending your money wisely might be well worth it to increase your website traffic.

Here are a few benefits of paid traffic:

Speed

Compared to organic efforts, paid traffic marketing can help you reach potential customers faster. Let’s take Google paid search, for example. With search engine optimization and mobile search optimization, whether it’s national or local SEO, you typically have to wait for your rankings to increase. In addition, SEO takes a lot of time and effort. However, with paid search traffic Google Ads campaigns, you can start reaching customers as soon as your ad is approved and published.

Analytics

Digital marketing allows you to track everything from every click on your website to paid traffic sources and more. With paid traffic, you can have analytics and data tracking to make better decisions regarding your budget and advertisements.

With metrics like clicks, click-through rates, and impressions, you can easily set and track goals to determine which paid traffic sources are most effective for your business.

A/B testing

Using paid traffic sources allows you to easily test and optimize every element of your campaign. With the analytics in front of you, you can find out the types of website visitors your ads attract, if they convert, when they convert, and what dates and times your ads perform best. Once you have this information, you can optimize your paid traffic advertisements with minor tweaks to improve upon them in real-time.

Increased conversions

A rise in traffic can increase conversions, including sales and lead generation efforts. However, the caveat to this is that your website must be set up to convert with a good user experience (UX).

If you have a poor-quality website, paying for traffic will not automatically mean more sales or conversion; your website must be able to do the heavy lifting to convert once traffic lands on your site.

Audience targeting

With paid traffic marketing campaigns, you can target customers to improve the chances of conversion on your website. Paid traffic allows you to choose who sees your ads. For example, you can try retargeting campaigns in which you show your ads to people who have visited your website but didn’t convert or individuals interested in a certain service or product.

You can even target your audience by location, age, and gender. There are millions of profiling factors you can use to make your ads more effective, increasing clicks and conversions on your website.

Drawbacks of paid traffic

Unfortunately, every type of marketing has its pros and cons, and paid traffic isn’t right for every business. Ultimately, just because you get more traffic on your website doesn’t mean that visitors will convert to paying customers. However, an increase in traffic can increase your chances of getting more conversions if your ads have accurately set expectations for what customers will find on your website.

You need a quality website if you’re going to invest in paid traffic because there’s no reason to send traffic to a website that doesn’t convert because of poor website design or other factors.

In addition, paid traffic shouldn’t be relied on as your only digital marketing strategy because you’ll need to continue paying for visitors. You should always have an organic strategy in place to help you attract website visitors and drive traffic in case you one day no longer have the budget to continue advertising online.

Paid traffic won’t work without a great website

Paid advertising offers huge potential rewards, but there’s no use driving high-quality traffic to your website with a paid advertising strategy if it won’t convert. Instead, you’ll just have a higher bounce rate and few sales or leads.

However, with a high-quality website that focuses on user experience (UX), you can drive traffic to your website and let your website convert visitors with minimal effort.

Mailchimp makes it easy to design your perfect business website and create a marketing funnel to help customers convert once they make it on your site from paid traffic sources.