from a social media junkie

Your Guide to Buying Banner Ads and Boosting Traffic

When you’re trying to increase traffic to your website, you have to consider other options along with search engine optimization. One of the best ways to boost traffic is through media buying, also known an banner ads. With media buying, you can buy banner inventory from ad networks or a specific website like Facebook. As with anything, the key to successful media buying relies on doing your research. Let’s go over what you need to know to start buying banner ads to boost traffic to your website.

Why Paid Traffic?

Paying for traffic to your website offers many advantages. Most traffic to your website relies on traffic from the major search engines like Google. To rank high on search engines, you must employ SEO, which is a time-consuming endeavor that requires constant tweaking and then waiting as traffic simply won’t appear overnight. Among the many benefits to paid advertising is the fact that these ads are usually less dependent on changes to Google’s algorithm, which comes out to your advantage. When it comes to paid traffic, here are some key points you’ll want to keep in mind.

Paying for traffic gives you on-demand traffic. With SEO, you must go through initial SEO and continuous updates and then play the waiting game, hoping you’ll see an increase in traffic. Paid traffic, on the other hand, is instantaneous with traffic as soon as your ad goes live.

While paid traffic does have up-front costs, it’s the best option if you don’t want to spend weeks or months with SEO, blogging and getting backlinks, all in the hope that you’ll get more traffic. Paid traffic is the choice when you want to see immediate results.

Paid traffic allows you to easily target and then track your traffic. When you get traffic from free sources like forums, it’s very difficult to track visitors because your website has many points of entry. Paid traffic allows you to know exactly where visitors are landing because you’re directing them there. In the case of Facebook ads, for example, you can also target specific groups of people to see higher returns.

Pre-Requisites for Paid Traffic

So, what do you need to get started with paid ads? Despite its near instant results, don’t be fooled into thinking paid traffic is something you just jump into. Succeeding at this game requires understanding your numbers and knowing how to get a higher conversion. Your website and ads must also be set up to draw in your audience and gain ad approval.

To really see the most benefit from your paid traffic, start by gaining a lot of insight into your numbers. Always run tests before buying a lot of traffic and understand your CPC and EPC. CPC, or cost per click, is the net cost that you need to spend to generate a single visitor, or click, to your landing page. EPC, or earnings per click, is the net earnings per click. Think of this as a simple buy/sell equation. Your goal is to buy cheap (low CPC) and sell high (EPC).

To illustrate this, assume your CPC is 15 cents, meaning it costs 15 cents to get a single click, or visitor, and your EPC is 20 cents. In this case, you would make 5 cents as profit from that single click. These numbers will change through the course of your campaign but this same basic principle will remain the same.

This type of website advertising is especially useful for e-commerce businesses, although it’s absolutely essential that your ads appear on relevant websites. If the ad is not relevant, EPC will fall.

Unfortunately, you’ll find it isn’t very simple to simply narrow down your options to a single offer and then buy traffic, as the success of your campaign depends a great deal on how targeted the traffic is. A good rule of thumb is to start small with a small amount of money. If the campaign is profitable, you can then start to scale it up, buy more traffic and further optimize your ads.

A note about affiliate products: While you can certainly make money by promoting an affiliate product, it’s easy to get tricked by the EPC numbers from the vendor, which may make you think you’re making more money than you are. Don’t forget to divide this number by the percentage you’ll actually receive. You’ll also always make more money when you buy traffic to your own product rather than an affiliate product.

Things to Avoid

Before you start paid advertising, here are some things to avoid, both in the ads and on your website:

• Never have a one-click installable on your website unless you clearly state that it’s an .exe
• Do not use auto play videos — they drive people away!
• Don’t try to buy ads unless your website has a Contact Us, About Us and Privacy Policy page clearly found in your navigation. Most PPC (pay per click) websites will not approve your ads without these pages.
• Avoid any intrusive pop ups or URL diversions. This will ultimately delay your ad approval and waste time and money.

Along with avoiding these things, you’ll also want to take some advice to get low CPC. The higher quality score you receive, the cheaper CPC you’ll get. This quality score is usually rated on a scale of 10. The less relevant content on your target URL, the lower your score. Before you buy paid ads, start by making sure you have relevant content and plenty of high-quality text at your target URL or landing page. This gives more value to your visitors along with getting you cheap CPC, which in turn boosts your earnings per click.

You can also improve the experience of your visitors and boost your conversion rate by ensuring your ad title is relevant to the title of your landing page. This will also improve your quality score, thereby helping you get cheap CPC.

EPC: Earnings Per Click

CPC: Cost Per Clicks

PPC: Pay Per Clicks

SEO: Search Engine Optimization

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