The Internet is getting more and more competitive today. Every minute 500 hours of content is uploaded on YouTube, 695,000 stories are added on Instagram and 70 million messages are being received. Every business has to somehow withstand this competition to attract users to their websites.
One of the ways to catch users’ attention is to buy website traffic. It seems easy - you pay, put up some ads, and you are ready to conquer the market. However, every ad spot is a battlefield against your competitors, the content of the page, and other advertisers.
In this article, we want to give you a strategy for winning that cut-throat competition: learn what buying traffic is, how to get the most out of your web traffic investment, and where to buy high converting traffic. This is the ultimate guide to all things targeted traffic.
What does buying traffic mean?
For a better understanding of what buying traffic is, let’s define what buying traffic is not. It is not about paying people to visit your website and it is not about buying web traffic generated by bots. The reason why it makes no sense is that you will get nothing out of such website traffic: it won’t improve your conversion rates and you will have zero ROI.
Buying targeted traffic is actually about investing money in capturing the attention of potential customers in order to get more money later. It means advertising on different sources to your target audience.
Buying traffic refers only to the paid targeted traffic which is opposite to the organic web traffic. The latter means that users were looking for something and you naturally appeared in their search results, without paying for it. Organic web traffic is won by SEO and content marketing efforts.
Paid web traffic is more popular than organic one since it has numerous benefits. Paid targeted traffic allows you to reach more people, gain customers quickly with less effort. It is responsible for 27% of traffic on the Internet. With organic web traffic, you have to create multiple SEO-optimized pages, establish yourself as an expert, and maybe you will get noticed by search engines someday. With paid targeted traffic, you can reach thousands of people with a single click in less than a day and achieve impressive conversion rates.
Tips for buying high converting traffic
Even though buying targeted traffic seems easy, you still have to know how to do it right. Otherwise, you might end up investing a lot of money in advertisements and not getting any response.
In order to avoid this unpleasant situation, we suggest preparing in advance and constantly getting better by following these tips.
Define your target audience
So you have two options: display your ads to every person on the Internet, pay millions, and attract a small percentage of website visitors, or show ads to a small number of targeted users that are potentially interested in your offer. The second is obviously more cost-effective and would result in higher conversion rates.
You can gain more with less in advertising if you know who your potential customers are. You should know their:
- Gender
- Age
- Location
- Job title
- Income level
- Spending patterns
- Pain points
- Preferred communication channel
- Interests
How can you find it out though? Learn more about your potential customers by:
- Analyzing your existing customer base
You can use a general analytics tool like GoogleAnalytics or get more valuable and precise information by disseminating customer surveys. Do not forget to attract more customers to the survey by offering them exclusive coupons or perks.
- Analyzing competitors
You can learn a lot from your competitors: whom they target, where they put up their ads, what they appeal to customers with, whether there is a niche that they are overlooking, etc.
- Creating buyer personas
A buyer persona is a collective image of your customers with the most specific, detailed description. You can create one based on the data that you have gathered from surveys and competitors. Do not forget to create at least 3-4 personas since businesses usually target different kinds of people: men and women, young adults and adults, Americans and Europeans, etc. The differentiation criteria of your personas depend fully on your business and niche.
- Finding out who is definitely not your target audience
It is not only about people who are opposite from your target audience but whose demographics and interests are close but they will not be interested in your product or service.
If you know who your main audience is, you will be able to create more appealing and effective advertising and use the targeting options of the ad networks to the fullest. Below you can see an example of how a company successfully defined their target audience for serving display ads.
Align content with buyer’s journey
Buyers go through specific steps before deciding to make a purchase. On every step, you should deliver the content that they will find the most useful. Let’s take a look at those steps:
- Awareness and discovery stage
At this stage, users acknowledge that they have a problem and start looking for solutions. Their intent is to find useful information and resources, (they are not ready to buy yet). At this stage, you should provide educational content, meaning guidelines, how-tos, checklists, informational videos. Your keywords should include “How to...”, “What to do if...”, etc. At this point, you will target the broadest audience.
- Consideration stage
At the consideration stage, users already know what the solution to the problem is and start looking for several products and services to later compare them. Potential buyers want to know more about the product itself and what benefits it provides in particular. This is not the stage where they buy, but rather read about different brands so you have to make sure that your offer stands out among the competitors. You should create landing pages with a clear description of features and benefits. It should primarily be text ads and videos with strong CTAs. B2B buyers will also like to see case studies at this point.
- Purchase stage
At this stage, users have accumulated enough knowledge and are ready to buy. Marketers should focus on closing the deal. Spell out your benefits, locations, prices, ratings, and sales. You should also make sure that website visitors know how to become a customer: add “Shop now”, “Sign up”, “Get a demo” CTAs and make the purchasing process as easy and straightforward as you can get. Commercial intent keywords are essential at this stage, they sound like: “Buy … laptops in (city’s name)”, “where to buy … laptops”, “... laptops review”, etc. The most fitting ad types are shopping ads with product photos, price, and review, and image carousels to show off the whole line of products.
It is essential that you put up ads for every stage rather than aiming at the last one. If customers get to know you from the very first stage, they will know that you are an expert in the field and your brand’s name will be more familiar and, therefore, trustable than those of other brands. It does require more effort from you to serve content for buyers at every stage but it is worth it.
Set KPIs and track them
You should make sure to create KPIs in order to understand how well you are performing. If the performance is not so good, you may consider changing some things. This is essential because what we plan and assume does not always align with reality and it is completely normal. If you decide to skip this tip, you might end up spending a lot of money with no or small return on investments.
You should be tracking the following KPIs:
- return on ad spend: how much revenue you generated from every dollar spent on advertising; it defines whether your advertisement is cost-effective or harmful for your business.
- cost per conversion: how much it costs to attract a customer that makes some kind of action (gives you an email, sign-ups for your events, downloads an ebook, etc.)
- customer acquisition cost: how much it costs to attract a customer that actually bought something; it defines whether you reach your target audience successfully.
- impression and reach: how many people saw your ad, it is important for brand awareness.
- clicks: how many people actually clicked on your ad, meaning how many became interested enough; it shows whether your ad is appealing enough and whether you reach your target audience at the right time.
- conversion rates: how many users out of those who clicked on the ad converted, it is important for pay-per-click advertisement where you have to make sure that clicks are worth the money.
Those are basic KPIs, you can find more on the web. However, it is important to not get lost in all the indicators so we recommend sticking to specific goals. For example, here is a list for measuring brand awareness KPI.
Test and optimize
It is essential to be flexible to get the most out of buying website traffic. If you create an ad solely based on your research in the tip one and two and never change it up, you are likely to experience losses or get the minimum out of your marketing efforts.
By tracking your KPIs, you will know what you need to optimize: target audience, ad visuals, and text, landing pages, channels, etc. Do not be afraid to cut off channels that only cause loss, to stop bidding on keywords that are too expensive and not bring any conversions, to pause ads in the most expensive times of the day, etc.
It is also important to test different visuals, channels, CTAs, audiences, etc. By doing so, you will understand what works best for your customers (colors, wording, time) and may discover the new niche of the audience that was never noticed by your competitors. A/B testing helps to find the most efficient way to buy high converting traffic and increase the number of visitors to your website.
Learn how to convert Web Traffic
You may buy website traffic but are you sure that you can convert it? It is important to create a website that is a logical continuation of your marketing efforts.
It should have a clean, responsive, and intuitive design, the landing page should be as attractive as the ad itself, the buying process should be very easy and straightforward.
We also recommend creating a mailing list. Those customers who are interested in your business but are not ready to buy yet will receive valuable content that will remind them of your products and build trust. In order to get a customer’s email, you can:
- offer exclusive content for the newsletter subscribers
- offer a community
- offer exclusive sales and coupons to newsletter subscribers
- use lead generation offers (ebooks, checklists, webinars, studies, statistics, infographics, etc.)
- share newsletter previews on social media
- create an appealing popup
Working together, advertising, email marketing, and good landing pages and website structure can do wonders to your return on ads spent and significantly lower your cost per acquisition.
Where to buy high converting traffic?
So where is the high converting traffic sold? What platforms are the best to run campaigns with? Let’s take a look at our top picks!
SmartyAds DSP as the best way to buy high converting traffic
One of the best ways to buy high converting traffic is to turn to Demand Side Platforms. SmartyAds is a good example of a reputable independent DSP that offers global coverage, access to major publishers, and most importantly affordable CPM prices. The platform is among the most effective traffic sources for affiliate marketing or for driving traffic to e Commerce stores.
You can target users based on their demographics, psychographics, geolocation, online behavior, type of device, and operating system. Retargeting options and weather-dependent offers are available as well. SmartyAds has partnerships with numerous big ad networks like Smaato, InMobi, AdColony to grant you access to even more publishers. Its attractive features are omnichannel advertising and AI-powered optimization.
You can choose among such digital ad formats as banners, videos, native ads, rich media, connected TV, and push notifications. The pricing model of the network is the cost per mille.
Google Ads
Google reaches pretty much everyone with a computer or a phone because we all use Google as a search engine. From small children looking for cartoons to elder people looking up recipes, we all use Google. There are 5,4 billion searches every day, meaning 5,4 billion opportunities to tell about your product.
Not only the impressive reach but precise targeting options and powerful analytics make Google Ads one of the most popular ad platforms for driving targeted traffic to your website. Keywords tool allows you to show ads only to people who are already interested in your industry enough to search for it on the search engine.
You can also narrow down your target audience based on age, location, gender, and device type. Moreover, you can target people with relevant browser history and remarket people who already visited your website but did not convert.
Google Ads works on a PPC (pay-per-click) basis. It means that you do not pay for users who see your ad and do not engage any further but for people who actually click on the ad. It is a great option if you target the right keywords and right audience, deliver the right content, and have good enough landing pages. Otherwise, you might run into numerous clicks without further engagement and ruin your budget. So if you know how to work with PPC, buy high converting traffic on this platform.
Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads is the next bid advertising platform that runs advertising on social media: Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, etc. Facebook has 2,7 billion monthly users and Instagram engages 1 billion users monthly, meaning that if you want to buy traffic here, you will be able to reach a pretty impressive number of users and find your audience.
Facebook Ads allows you to create native ads that are almost identical to a normal social media post. This unintrusive ad format is okay with users, unlike popups. The targeting options are pretty amazing too: you can target interests, behaviors, demographics, specific age, locations, languages, or even fans of your competitors. It will allow you to buy high converting traffic and not waste money on uninterested users. You can also add custom CTAs, remarket, and use powerful analytics for tracking your ad campaign’s success.
In Facebook Ads, you will take part in real-time auctions - the basis of programmatic advertising. You will be charged for impressions or clicks and you can set budget limits that you are ready to spend on the platform daily or during the whole campaign.
Adcash
Adcash is an ad network that welcomes numerous trusted publishers, connects them with advertisers, and is considered to be a decent platform to buy high converting traffic. You can reach 196 countries and small, medium, or big publishers with the network.
The network offers a wide range of digital ad formats: pop-unders, push notifications, interstitials (covers the full screen), banners, and native ads. As for targeting, you can choose the location, language, device, IP, timezone, etc. Two unique features that attract advertisers to AdCash are ad fraud detection tools that help you to bypass ad blockers and, therefore, reach wider audiences.
It works on a programmatic buying auction basis same as SmartyAds and the other options on the list. You can choose to pay either per click or per mille.
Adsterra
Adsterra ad network has 18,000+ direct publishers, numerous partners, 1 billion impressions per day, and robust targeting options, so you can easily buy targeted traffic. You can target users based on their device, OS and browser versions, GEO and language, IPs, 3G, and Wi-fi. You can also blacklist and whitelist publishers, set time for your ads, retarget, etc. The available ad formats are pop-unders, push notifications, banners, native ads, videos, and a very special social bar that offers even more ad formats. You can buy high converting traffic on a CPM, CPC, CPA, CPL, or CPI basis.
How to avoid bot traffic?
Bot traffic is about non-humans visiting your website. You can buy it or get it for free but the last option requires a lot of effort since many such bots are bad ones: they steal content, spam, look for vulnerabilities, etc.
Why do websites have bot traffic in the first place? It is the fastest, the cheapest, and the easiest way to monetize websites among cheating publishers.
Do you need such web traffic? Not really. Such web traffic is coming in load but has no value: bots will not buy anything so you basically pay for thin air and will not get any return on investments. SmartyAds DSP is a part of the safe full-stack advertising infrastructure that has its own SSP, direct publishers, and traffic security protection and monitoring systems onboard. With SmartyAds DSP you can increase website traffic while staying sure that your impressions are viewable by real people.
Conclusion
Buying high converting traffic is not that complicated if you know where and how to buy it. Make sure to get prepared (find your target audience and align ads to buyer’s journey), find your perfect ad platform, and test and optimize your ad campaigns to get the best results. Now you know the 5 best platforms where you can buy targeted and high converting traffic to increase the number of visitors and boost your conversions. We recommend registering on SmartyAds demand-side platform and start benefiting from the robust programmatic infrastructure that allows driving brand safe and viewable traffic to your website in the most cost-effective way.
