6 ways of using paid traffic for your business

Entrepreneurs wish to make their business grow and gain new customers. However, for this to become reality, their brand needs to become known and impact new users who may become consumers in the future. 

Among the various forms of making your brand known, one of the ways of increasing this visibility is with paid traffic.

Basically, we can increase traffic in two ways: by means of content marketing and with paid links. In this article, we’ll go over the second alternative.

If you want to learn how to make your business stand out by investing correctly, this post is for you!

What is paid traffic? 

Before explaining what paid traffic is, let’s clarify the concept of traffic in digital marketing. Traffic is the flow of users accessing your communication channels.

For example, let’s assume that an average of 500 people visit your site daily. This is your website’s current daily traffic!

But since the goal of every digital business is to attract more visibility online, you’ll probably have to put strategies in place to help you increase that traffic.

The same happens with other channels, such as social networks and landing pages.

Thus, when we talk about paid traffic, we’re talking about a strategy that involves investing money to increase traffic. 

Paid traffic is a faster option to grow on the internet.

But it’s important to keep in mind that just paying for sponsored links isn’t a magic wand; users want to find solutions to their main questions on your page. 

That’s the only way they’ll stay on your page long enough for the algorithms to consider your content relevant and display your paid ads.

In short, paid traffic means investing money in paid ad platforms and sites to attract users to a particular page, profile, or offer.

It allows you to promote your business in several places and thus, reach different audiences.

What’s the difference between paid and organic traffic?

As we discussed earlier, paid traffic is a faster way to invest in the growth of your online business. But it’s also possible to use free traffic strategies, known as organic traffic.

Of course, you’ll have to invest time and patience in this type of strategy, but financially speaking it’s not necessary to spend anything. The difference is that the results will come in the medium to long term.

Paid traffic campaigns, on the other hand, return almost instantaneous results. For this reason, many entrepreneurs use them to boost their businesses.

But one strategy doesn’t preclude the other. In fact, the best bet is to use both to ensure the best results in traffic.

Organic traffic is constant and gradual. You should invest in content creation, SEO, backlinks, email marketing, among others.

Paid traffic can be both frequent and sporadic. It depends on how much money you are willing to invest and what kinds of returns you’re looking for. But for all entrepreneurs, it’s a worthwhile investment.

Why should you invest in paid traffic?

Many people believe that they don’t need to invest in paid traffic, since organic traffic is enough.

That idea may be considered faulty, because one of the premises of digital marketing is the development of integrated actions that, when put into practice together, increase the desired final result. 

Of course, it is possible to only use organic strategies to promote your business. However, investing only in one area might mean compromising the action’s success, in addition to being a way of not exploring other alternatives.

Take a look at a few tips on when it’s a good idea to use paid traffic:

Promote specific actions

Many entrepreneurs complain that maintaining exclusive funds for paid traffic isn’t feasible. If using a fixed amount isn’t possible, this mode can be used for specific actions.

For example: 

Whenever you launch a new product, exclusive material recently posted on the website, a promotion or something sporadic with a predetermined time to start and end, you can use the strategy of buying traffic.

Gain more visibility faster

Organic traffic works and helps maintain the brand name at the top of search results, but the major problem is that it might take months before it happens.

As a result, by investing in paid ads, you will be increasing your business’ visibility and improving brand recognition faster.

Thus, after these actions, it is possible to work with an audience that has already been initially impacted by these campaigns and turn them into buyers.

Expand the conversion rate

Using paid links can be efficient in impacting leads in the last step of the sales funnel. 

When users make specific searches on the internet, this means that they know what their problem is, have considered the alternatives and are searching for a solution.

By choosing the correct terms and keywords, you can expand conversions, delivering content and solutions to users at the moment they perform a search.

Improve your reputation with Google

As we briefly explained, Google uses an algorithm that ranks the best web pages according to specific terms. 

One of the factors that are taken into account in this ranking is the time users spend on the website after performing a search.

This time shows the platform whether or not the search was useful and, if it was effective, Google understands that the page is reliable and improves the website’s domain reputation

How does paid traffic work?

Just like any other digital marketing strategy, paid traffic requires a lot of planning, monitoring, tests, and analyses.

To properly plan this type of strategy, you’ll have to first decide on your objective. Some options are:

• promote your brand and gain visibility;
• get more followers;
• bring more visitors to your website;
• capture leads;
• sell an offer.

In addition to your objective, good planning requires you to know your audience and persona well. The reason is that the better targeted your paid traffic campaigns are, the better your results will be.

Next, you need to define the offer format: text, image, video… And also what your call to action will be.

This choice is also made based on the choice of channels or platforms that you will advertise on. We’ll talk about this later.

And finally, you’ll have to choose the budget for the ad and how it will be billed. Billing can be per click, CPC, or per thousand impressions, CPM. See below!

CPC

CPC is cost per click. With CPC, you pay each time your ad is clicked, or you can set a maximum budget, let your campaign run, and it will accumulate as many clicks as the budget allows.

CPC is the ideal strategy for anyone looking to generate conversions, i.e. page visits, product sales, leads, etc. That’s precisely because you only pay if whoever sees your ad actually clicks on it, unlike CPM.

CPM

CPM is cost per thousand impressions. In other words, you’ll pay each time a thousand people view your ad.

In this format, whoever makes the highest bid ends up being the one with the best reach and ranking. So if you want more results, you’ll have to invest more money, and of course, create a relevant and valuable ad.

Money isn’t the only criterion that defines a campaign’s reach and rank, but it is one of the most important.

Therefore, CPM is recommended for those who aim to generate brand recognition and gain visibility online.

6 traffic-generating tools

There are currently several platforms and websites that provide advertising options. It will be up to you to understand the purpose of each one and identify where your target audience is. 

Here, we’ve set aside 6 main sources:

1. Google Ads

Google Ads is one of the most used traffic-generating platforms, because the ads appear at the top or side of the Google search engine or partner sites.

One of the advantages of this option is you can opt to pay only when users click on your ad.

In addition, the platform allows for A/B tests to be performed with call, keyword, text, and call to action variations. This way, identifying what works and what doesn’t is easier and clearer.

The ads compete to appear at the top of the search results and the chosen one is decided by the bid value and the website relevance.

The platform also offers a display with the key metrics necessary for evaluations and the ads can be targeted by gender, access device, location, among other options.

2. Facebook Ads

Facebook Ads allow you to create ads with photos, texts, and videos that will be displayed on Facebook and will lead users to visit your business’ website.

This platform can be used together with Google Ads, since it ends up capturing a different audience.

It also allows a high segmentation in which it is possible to define the display of the ads based on interest, gender, age, relationship status, and profession.

3. Instagram Ads

With Instagram Ads, you can display video, single photo, or photo carousel ads, including text. You can also advertise in Stories and Instagram Shopping.

The tool is connected with Facebook as they are from the same group. This is great because you can create joint strategies for both channels.

As one of the most used social networks in the world, advertising on Instagram is very beneficial for many entrepreneurs.

You’ll have amazing targeting and analytics tools, as well as diverse features and formats to appeal to your audience!

4. YouTube Ads

If your business also produces video content, YouTube Ads can be an excellent ad tool. 

Users are currently changing their data consumption habit and most of online accesses come from videos.

In addition, producing video content is a bait to attract users to your website to sell content and online courses, for example.

5. LinkedIn Ads

LinkedIn is a platform used for professional connections and the generation of contacts between B2B companies. However, if your audience is on LinkedIn, nothing prevents you from advertising on the platform.

It’s important to emphasize that clickthrough pricing on this platform is usually higher than other options. But, if your audience is highly segmented and can be converted with this action, it may be worth investing in it.

6. Taboola

Another option is Taboola, which brings user traffic from the main news portals and can reach millions page views per day.

The platform allows you to create campaigns that will be displayed on the major internet portals, as content suggestions.

If users access The New York Times website, for example, in order to read news about possible changes to social security, and you are a labor lawyer, it’s possible for readers to find an ad related to your business immediately below the article so that users are taken to your page.

Invest and analyze

The fact that your brand invests in paid traffic doesn’t mean that your website will gain more access and neither will users be part of your target audience. But, this is another strategy that can be used to increase your business’ reach. 

But always remember that, before investing, you need to plan, build content, have a responsive website and think about your users’ experience in order to optimize the advertising of this material. After all, there’s no use in buying traffic if your users have nowhere to go.

In addition, you need to access available campaign information and create reports that identify if the investments are really worth it. Because this is how you’ll understand what worked and what can be improved. Did you enjoy this article? If you have any questions, just leave us a comment below.