It’s easy to buy traffic to get visitors to your website. But if you want to turn them into customers, then you need to have truly targeted traffic.
Why Buy Real Targeted Traffic?
In some circles this general idea has been called the “Whale Method”. A common mistake some people make is to focus too broadly on their traffic sources, with the idea that “My customer is ANYONE”. Take some time to figure out who your ideal customer is before you pay for traffic.
Simply stated, if your traffic isn’t targeted you probably won’t make sales. For example if you sell used cars you might think “Everyone needs a car!”. But the truth is not everyone can afford one. Not everyone will buy today. Not everyone will buy a used car, etc.
Un-targeted, mass (junk) traffic can hurt your Quality Score (given by the advertising platform) and can potentially hurt your organic rankings as well. I can tell you from real-life experience because I made all these mistakes before I knew better. I paid for a whack of irrelevant traffic and it nearly killed everything I had worked for up to that point.
Fake traffic will put your bounce rate through the roof! Having a high bounce rate signals the search engines that the page the user landed on was not relevant to their search. This is part of what can damage your ranking.
Fortunately once you stop the fake traffic you are eventually forgiven. And provided you continue to do everything else above board, you should recover in the SE rankings. Mass traffic won’t convert well anyway so save your money and focus on getting highly targeted traffic to your website offers.
Targeted traffic is already pre-qualified. These are real people looking specifically for what you have to say or sell. By using the right combination of buyers keywords and the right traffic sources you have a winning combination.
I have often heard people complain about having to pay for traffic. I have heard this complaint commonly from people who have recently paid for website development. A websites function is to direct people to becoming leads, prospects, and buyers AFTER you have sent them there. Marketing and advertising your business is absolutely necessary if you want to do more than have people trickle in the door (real and virtual). You could have the best widget in the world and no one will buy it if they don’t know it exists.
The trick to getting your advertising money back is to continue tweaking and testing to ensure your traffic source’s continue to be matched to your offer. Measure your ROI (return on investment) and when done right, you will have a positive return.
It’s true, most often you will have to spend some money up front to learn what really works with your audience.
You can shortcut your pain by actually spending even MORE money by hiring someone who knows what they are doing. Keep in mind the person selling the advertising is usually NOT a marketer and is only interested in selling their particular form of advertising. Hiring the person selling the advertising is like putting the fox in the henhouse.
Building your website to attract organic traffic using good SEO methods is also a great idea and works hand in hand with paid traffic. As your site ages and builds more and more content, this becomes fodder for the SE’s to serve up to their users.
The other way an SE optimized site works with your paid traffic is when you are buying traffic from the search engines themselves. There is a quality score that is based on the content of the page you are driving the paid traffic to. The better optimized your page, the higher your QS. The higher your QS the lower your PPC fee will be.
Finding A Good Place to Buy Targeted Traffic
If you are going to do the work yourself then you need to take the time to carefully weed out the bad actors. They may claim in the BIG PRINT that you are getting good solid traffic, but read the small print. Your traffic could be incentivized (people paid to click on links). The source could be completely bots (not real people). Website redirects, popups, and other non-targeted sources won’t help you reach your sales goals.
Some may try to tell you that the search engines will notice all the traffic and “think” your site is popular which will boost you in the rankings. Don’t be fooled by this, The SE’s KNOW where ALL your traffic comes from. Think of them like Santa Clause – it knows when you’ve been bad or good!
Another way of getting bad traffic is by buying links on blog networks (AKA Link Farms). Don’t do it if you value your web property.
Where to Buy Targeted Traffic
Buying targeted traffic isn’t as simple as just paying someone a few dollars and saying “Hey – send me buyers.” But with a little tracking effort on your part you can source the targeted traffic specific to your business niche. There will be weeds to pull but the rewards are huge AND scalable.
Learning how to use PPC (pay per click) advertising services from the search engines is a science in itself. The basics are:
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1. Decide what you want to focus your ad campaign on.
2. Research buyers keywords.
3. Optimize your Landing Page for these keywords.
4. Make sure your Landing Page has a clear “call-to-action”
5. Using the keywords make different ad groups for measuring and performance.
6. Write a good ad headline and body copy to encourage people to click on it.
Find out more about how to use the search engines including how to advertise using Google.
Buying social media traffic you can super target age and interests as well as other nuances that aren’t available through your search engine PPC campaigns.
Guaranteed Targeted Traffic
Once you have done your initial research by buying traffic from reliable sources and measuring your visitors actions and returns, you can do two more things that will super guarantee you get targeted traffic to your website.
1. Make good use of negative keywords.
When you pay for traffic you get to learn the keywords that people are actually using (AKA Search Terms) to find your product or service. This is important in two ways. By doing [exact match] keywording you can reduce your costs. PLUS you will see the correlation between a keyword and the actions taken. By monitoring this you can come up with a list of “negative” keywords. These are words that you choose to indicate that you don’t want your ad to show to someone using those words.
2. Buy your ads direct from premium sources.
Also by tracking you will learn some surprises too. Use the display network and combine it with the conversion optimization tools provided. Doing this you can find some niche websites that are driving you highly targeted buying traffic. When you have a display ad sending you good traffic, you can approach the website directly to buy ad space. This can save you money and give you more control over placement and frequency, resulting in a tighter ROI.
Another step would be to set up remarketing campaigns. Once a person has indicated they are interested in your product by visiting your landing page, you can “cookie” them so now they will see your ads all over the internet. Including on some very influential websites. Your continuous presence to the customer will keep you in their focus and cement your brand legitimacy and authority. For example; If you sell fitness products and your ad shows up on “Forbes Magazine” – their authority is loaned to you by association. The cost to advertise with Forbes directly would be much higher and less targeted than the remarketing campaign.
There are 1000’s of places you can buy traffic to your website. I have covered some of the more common places in this post; Where to Buy Website Traffic
