If you haven’t added paid traffic to your T-shaped marketer toolbelt, you’re missing out. Paid search marketing is a proven marketing strategy for getting instant results and dialing in the four Ps of marketing: product, price, place, and promotion.
Let’s talk about the benefits of paid traffic.
#1: Speed to Market
The first benefit of paid traffic is speed. To illustrate what I mean, let’s compare paid ads to search engine optimization. You may think this is an unfair comparison, but it illustrates my point perfectly.
Search engine optimization or SEO is the process by which you try to get your content to rank in the search engine results pages or SERPs. SEO strategy includes keyword research, meta data, backlinking, and all kinds of technical elements. Most people view organic traffic as any traffic you don’t have to pay to get in front of.
With organic marketing, it can take three months to get a piece of content to appear as a search result. In other words, to rank organically.
If you’re trying to optimize for a term that has any level of competition, it can be 3, 6, 9, 12+ MONTHS before you begin to see any traction.
With paid traffic, you can see traffic the next day.
Both paid traffic and organic search traffic are critical to business success. But paid traffic needs to come first. Why? Because it’s so freakin’ fast. In the realm of digital marketing, you need proof of concept before you can scale. Proof of concept is difficult to have without speed.
Quickly & Easily Test Campaign Elements
Speed has another benefit. It gives you the opportunity to quickly test what’s working or not working with your ppc ad.
You get to test your ad copy, pricing, the call to action, landing pages, the ad creative, etc. And it can all be tested quickly.
Testing takes the uncertainty out of paid advertising. It doesn’t take a lot of time or money, because paid traffic is so fast.
#2: Analytics You Can Actually Track
Another of the benefits of paid traffic is the analytics that back it up.
With organic marketing, social media marketing, and especially email marketing, there are limited data points, and those data points are being taken away from us because of privacy first initiatives.
With paid traffic, the advertising networks – Google AdWords, Facebook, Bing ads, etc. – have to give you this information because you’re paying for the traffic.
The Conversion Path
A conversion path is the sequence of events a user goes through before they engage in a desired action. It’s important to track the conversion path and look for the common behaviors of your best customers.
It’s difficult to track the conversion path with free traffic.
For example, organic social traffic is very disparate in terms of the information that you’re given. Because of the iOS 15 update, we don’t see things like open or click through rates for email marketing.
But because the advertising networks like all that ad revenue, they allow paid advertising customers access to advanced and detailed analytics. When you track the conversion path, you start to see the story people need to be told before they’re willing to convert.
#3: Optimization of Every Element of the Campaign
Who is this paid ad reaching? Where is the conversion happening? What time is our social media ad performing best?
With paid advertising, you can optimize everything with minor tweaks. You can’t optimize or change these variables outside of a paid ecosystem.
Again (beating a dead horse), because you’re paying for that Facebook ad, Google ad, Bing ads, whatever, the network gives you opportunities to enhance your ad campaign.
When you pay attention to the data, you see exactly where the disconnect is. Then you can make minor tweaks to improve the performance of your paid search ad long term.
The changes don’t have to be major. Everybody’s heard the analogy about the plane that’s off course by 1% that ends up in an entirely different country over time. Your campaigns will be the exact same way.
The ability to optimize your campaigns is one of the strongest benefits of paid traffic.
#4: Enhanced Customer Targeting
One of the major differences between free traffic and paid traffic is targeting. With paid traffic, you get to decide who you put your ads in front. This is an amazing benefit, especially given how much information these ad networks know about people.
Ad networks have 70 million demographic and psychographic profiling factors on every human on the planet.
Who is your target audience?
- Where do they live and work?
- What are their interests?
- Are they married?
- How much money do they make?
- What products do they buy online?
From a machine learning perspective, this data is important. Why? All the ad networks are reverse engineering intent. They want to understand why people do what they do. They want to know what makes people buy.
It’s a little scary, to be honest with you, because they’re getting good at it. But the better they get, the bigger your advantage.
You can take advantage of machine learning through targeting.
As you can see, the benefits of paid ads are immense. I’m not here to tell you that paid ads are the only thing you need to do. There are not the end-all-be-all. But paid advertising should be a cornerstone of your digital marketing foundation because of these benefits.
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NOTE: This content came directory from DigitalMarketer’s Paid Traffic Mastery Certification.
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