Nowadays, many digital marketers have an suggestion. They recommend going for paid traffic for your website. But is it worth it?
Need for Paid Traffic for Your Website
Along with the website, you need to have active and responsive profiles on social media. That is where most prospects and customers spend their time today.
These can use an email marketing campaign to supplement them. All these platforms would have content of high quality to attract visitors. The visitors should come in large numbers and also keep on returning. But this is easier said than done. Most new businesses are completely caught up with setting up the business. So, spending time and effort on curating great content for the website is very low on the list of priorities.
What Does Paid Traffic Mean?
What happens when a company engages a vendor to generate traffic to its website? The vendor initiates a search engine marketing campaign. This pushes visitors to your website. The vendor charges a price for doing this, and the benefit of the charge is that your website sees more visitors.
Pros of Paid Traffic
The following are the pros of buying paid traffic:
Volume
The first result of a paid traffic campaign is a huge jump in the number of visitors to your website. This works something like pollination. The flower produces millions of pollen grain. This is because not all (or very few, actually) of them will find the right flower.
When it comes to visitors too, paid traffic will increase the traffic in huge numbers. This is because not all of them will bring revenue to you. The more the visitors, the greater the likelihood of at least some of them generating revenue. Continuous monitoring of the traffic is very important. The vendor employed by you should give you a daily update about the traffic. This will tell you how effective your paid traffic campaign has been.
Speed
Keeping a website at the top of search engine results pages can be a daunting task once it goes live. If you are banking on only organic customers, you will need to spend a lot of time and effort on your website. Paid traffic offers a faster alternative to that. It gives you the initial surge of visitors fast, on which you can continue to build up.
As you will see later in this article, this advantage of speed does have some disadvantages too.
Time
In paid traffic, an agency does the work of bringing in paid visitors to your website. It frees up valuable time for you. You can use this extra time for your business. You would have more time for activities.
Furthermore, you can devote time to production, distribution, marketing, sales, and collections. You could also work on improving the content of your website. This would be on the basis of the feedback from paid visitors. Also, you should include the vendor in the internal marketing meetings of the company. That way, he can get an idea of the purpose of the website and what the company hopes to achieve through his campaign.
Cons of Paid Traffic
The following are the cons of buying paid traffic:
Loss of Control
This is a conundrum which a business owner faces with every aspect of his business. The convenience of giving any job to the vendor does save time. On the flip side it takes away your control over that activity.
You wouldn’t have any control on the quality of work done. Also, you could get duped by scammers who misuse your company’s information after doing your job. If the quality of the job is not good, it might also result in bad press or ill will towards your company.
Traffic Jams
When you use paid traffic to your website, there is a huge increase in visitors for the first few days.
Some campaigns see a spike even in the first few hours of launch of the campaign. Though that is the stated goal of the campaign, but it does present some problems too. First, the website might become slower due to the huge number of users. This might put off organic visitors. Second, some websites might crash under the strain of so much traffic. The websites then need repair, till which time your campaign would be on hold.
Incorrect Traffic
A paid traffic vendor’s mandate is only the quantity of traffic. He couldn’t be to bothered about the quality of traffic. The paid traffic campaign might be bringing you several visitors.
But not all of them might be generating revenue. This would happen if the wrong kind of traffic comes to your website. A paid traffic campaign will create the initial traction for sure. But that is of no use if the visitors do not transact. That will result in the effort and money getting wasted.
Conclusion
A paid traffic campaign does have its advantages. It can give you results which an organic effort will find difficult to replicate. If you want to buy traffic we can suggest you this list of 86 paid traffic sources in 2018.
But because of the cons listed above, you should exercise caution. That is why many companies are willing to live with a slow and gradual buildup of website traffic. They are willing to forego a superfast spike through paid traffic. What we recommend is a smart combination of both. For example, you can get traffic from Reddit. Build organic traffic on an ongoing basis. Punctuate it with paid traffic campaigns. Also, have periodic reviews of your campaigns. This will tell you if your campaign is fetching you good returns.
