What Is Paid Traffic?

Date First Published: 11th August 2022

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: Web Advertising

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty: Medium

Difficulty Level: 5/10

CONTENTS

Advantages and Disadvantages Of Paid Traffic

Learn more about what paid traffic is in this article.

Paid traffic describes traffic that comes through paid advertisements, promotions, and campaigns, such as Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and ads that appear at the top of the search engine results page before the organic search results that can be found when people search for keywords that the ad contains. As suggested in the word, this type of website traffic is not free and individuals and companies have to pay each time traffic is generated from clicking on their ads. These are known as pay-per-click (PPC) ads. The more clicks, the more money the advertiser gets charged. Any website traffic that has been paid to obtain is defined as paid traffic.

Paid traffic is a good option when a business is in need of generating traffic to their website and they cannot generate enough through organic search results and referral websites, usually due to competitive keywords and search engine algorithm changes. Even though displaying paid ads does not guarantee that searchers will click on them and visit their website, it does greatly increase the chances and the visibility.

Organic Search Results Vs Paid Search Results

Advantages and Disadvantages Of Paid Traffic

The advantages of paid traffic are:

It is instant and a much quicker method of generating traffic - Unlike organic traffic where it is unknown how long it will take to rank high for a certain keyword and when traffic will be generated from search engines, advertisers can promote their content and once set up, their ads will appear straight away for potential visitors to see. Following SEO tips is a good idea, but displaying ads and promotions where people can easily see them can significantly boost traffic to a business website.
All sorts of users can be targeted. For example, with Google Ads offering a display of ads relevant to the category of the website, ads can appear on millions of different websites since Google Ads is widely used, attracting various users. Personalised ads are often shown based on the user's previously visited page, country, and age in order to show ads they may be interested in.
Advertisers can measure user interaction with their ads with analytics interfaces, such as who clicked and viewed them as well as their country, device, and more. This will help them know their target audience.
Advertisers can place their ads on multiple platforms, including search engines, other websites, apps, software programs, and more.

The disadvantages of paid traffic are:

It can be expensive - If paid advertisements, promotions, and campaigns generate large amounts of website traffic, advertisers will have to pay a lot in advertising costs. If advertisers don't know what they're doing, they could lose a lot of money.
Clicks do not guarantee any sales - Even though clicks will bring traffic to the advertiser's website, that does not guarantee that the visitor will purchase any products, so advertisers could spend a lot of money on advertising when they don't make any profit from each click.
Risk of click fraud - This occurs on pay-per-click (PPC) ads where individuals maliciously click on ads with the sole intention of increasing the advertiser's cost or generating more revenue for the publisher. They may manually click on them multiple times or use automated software or bots that are programmed to click on these ads. However, IP address exclusions can be added to campaigns to block them from seeing ads and most reputable advertising networks have fraud detection tools to reduce the money lost due to click fraud.