Marketing is very competitive. If you want to stay on top of your game and ahead of the competition, you need to find every possible way to bring the most people to your campaigns, optimize them, lower the cost of running them, and increase your profit margins. All of this is much harder than it sounds. And doing these things effectively is the difference between the pros and beginners.
If you are just starting, you probably have no idea how to do any of this. But with enough time and research, you can learn anything. Today, it’s time to cover one of the most basic things. Getting traffic to your website through paid traffic sources.
Paying for traffic is something that most marketers use for their campaigns. The concept is simple, you pay traffic sources money and they redirect some of their traffic to your page. Hopefully giving you users that want to convert in the meantime.
Some of the most popular methods of achieving this are through:
- Display ads
- Paid search
- Paid discovery
- Social media ads
- Sponsored posts
- Influencer marketing
How Paid Traffic Can Improve Your Campaigns?
Paid traffic should not be mixed with fake traffic. Fake traffic is usually generated by fake users and bots. They add no value to your page and they can even hurt your statistics, reports, and optimizations.
Paid traffic is usually made by utilizing pay-per-click (PPC) ads. This means that you will pay for every click that lands on your page. Why would you do this? Well, traffic sources will send you those clicks to your page in the first place. And when your potential customers arrive, you have the chance to make a sale and earn that click fee back and earn some decent profit.
While it might sound counterintuitive at first, you need to spend money to make money!
The biggest advantage that paid traffic can get you is faster results. If you are only after free traffic, you will need to do a lot of SEO and outreach to get any traffic at all. And even then, it might take days or weeks to get a significant amount of visitors to your page. This makes optimizing campaigns very difficult. You simply don’t have enough data to see the right patterns and make your campaigns better. This in turn leads to lower conversion rates and thus lower profits.
With free traffic you will have to wait for Google to rank your page, users to search for content that you have written on, and click on your website. This is a long process and it’s not the way you can get to thousands of people daily without a lot of time and effort.
While free traffic is free, paid traffic is much more versatile, and your investment can be easily refined in no time.
The biggest misconception about paid traffic is how much you have to pay for it. Usually, people think that you need a large budget to be able to start with paid advertising. But in reality, you can start with only a few bucks. Traffic is usually cheap, and if you know what you are doing, you should recover your investment almost instantly.
What Makes PPC Good?
Depending on what kind of marketing you are trying to buy, you can expect pay-per-click (PPC), pay-per-view (PPV), or pay-per-acquisition (PPA).
Like said before, the biggest advantage that paid traffic can bring to your campaigns is customers. Instead of waiting for days or weeks to get some organic visitors, you can pay a small amount per click and get a lot more eyes on your content. This increased traffic means that you have enough data to better optimize your campaigns. Whether it be your placements, ad types, copy, targeting, creatives, or anything else. With a lot of traffic comes the possibility to improve your campaigns and take them to the next level.
A lot of eyes on your content together with optimized landers will lead to a lot of conversions. These conversions are what are so important in affiliate marketing.
Optimizing Your PPC Campaigns
Optimizing PPC is not much different from optimizing for any marketing model. You will do some testing (preferably split testing), you will make detailed stats on what happened, and you will try improving key areas so that you have more success in the future. Rinse and repeat. But some things set PPC apart. Here are some of the things you have to optimize when starting with PPC!
- Keywords
Keyword research is incredibly important for PPC. As we mentioned, a lot of PPC ads are done through platforms like Google Ads and similar ones. These usually use some sort of keywords to show your ads to the right users. This is why finding relevant keywords that are not overcrowded is so important. You can always use the internet to find what keywords are currently searched for and what keywords are competitive and which are not.
You also need to take into account things like Negative and costly keywords. Block them so that you don’t pay for keywords that are guaranteed to not bring you any profit or conversions.
- Optimize your LPs
When your prospect gets directed to your landing page, you need to make sure that it’s attracting the customer to continue reading and buying. The only way to find a winning combination of creatives, copy, and placements are through the method of trial and error. DO your best, fail, improve your previous best, and repeat everything until you see profits.
- Target the right audience
A thing that PPC does well is the possibility to target the right people with your campaigns. On most platforms, you can target based on age, gender, income level, GEO, relationship, etc. Use all of these targeting options to make sure that your campaign is as good as possible.
What Are The Best Traffic Sources?
There are a lot of paid traffic sources available to marketers all over the web. Finding the right one might be difficult so here are some of the best traffic sources that most affiliates swear by. It is important to note that all of these are famous and trustworthy platforms. Maybe you use a different platform that gives you a much better deal or has features that you can’t go without, but this is not how our ranking works. We took the best-reviewed trustworthy traffic sources and grouped them. So don’t get mad if you don’t see your favorite traffic source in this list!
Google Ads
Google is one of the largest companies on the planet. And most of their money comes from their ad programs. Knowing this, it’s no wonder that their system is incredibly robust and optimized. Google Ads can help you put your ads in search results, within search queries, on websites, and platforms like YouTube. You have access to their vast advertising network and a lot of users that are already searching for something similar to what you are advertising for.
Facebook Ads
Facebook is everywhere on the web. Their shady tracking practices have landed them in hot water recently when governments started questioning their tracking practices. This culminated with a congressional hearing and lately tech companies implementing tracking restrictions like Apple’s iOS 14. These new tracker blockers have made Facebook a worse choice for advertising on iPhone and other Apple devices.
On the positive side, Facebook has some of the best targeting feature sets. It has every possible demographic and GEO on its platform. Over 2.2 billion users are on this platform in the first place! This leads to incredible targeting options that are unrivaled to other platforms. You can target people with specific interests, or who liked specific pages, visited specific websites, or searched for specific things. This made Facebook one of the preferred affiliate marketing traffic sources for the past few years.
Instagram Ads
Instagram was bought by Facebook a few years ago, and their ad platforms have slowly merged in features and approaches to advertising. The demographic on Instagram is mostly teens and young adults. There are over 600 million active users on this platform and most of them are willing to buy a wide range of products. A lot of studies have shown that conversion rates are incredible on this platform. This is also the place where the concept of influencers was born.
Influencer Marketing
Social media influencers have grown in popularity in recent years. Once they were considered a joke but nowadays they can be a key element to a successful marketing campaign. Anyone with a big following can become an influencer, but picking the right one is the key. You need to pick someone that is in the same niche as your products are. It’s not worth marketing to random people on the off chance they are into something. Make sure that you are always marketing to people who might be interested in your products.
Conclusion
Organic traffic should always be a part of your marketing campaigns, but you should not ignore paid traffic sources. They can increase your conversions, help with optimizations, and if you know what you are doing, they are well worth the money.
Pay-per-click is one of the best ways to utilize paid traffic. With PPC you can learn the basics, scale your campaigns and make some nice profit from your effort. Just make sure to research your audience and keywords beforehand.
Have you used paid traffic for your campaigns? Was it worth it? Answer in the comments below and share some of your experience with paid traffic and PPC!
Please log in to Facebook to access the comments section