Transform Your Paid Traffic Into A Qualified Lead Generation Machine

Want to understand how to create media campaigns that will generate quality paid traffic to your website or landing pages?

We are going to cover here, in detail, all the points that involve this type of strategy.

What is paid traffic?

Paid traffic is one that involves ads created to promote a brand and that generate visitors to pages or sites, through clicks that direct there.

This type of traffic depends on the creation and investment in paid media in the online environment: we are referring to ads and campaigns created on channels such as Facebook, Instagram, Google, Youtube, Twitter, LinkedIn and many other platforms.

According to the US research firm eMarketer, companies are expected to invest in 2023 around $517.51 billion in online paid media.

What is the difference between paid and organic traffic?

Unlike paid traffic, organic traffic is one that does not come from online paid media investment.

The organic search is what generates most of the organic traffic to a website or Landing Page.

Today the biggest search platform is Google and most of the organic accesses come from the searches that users carry out there.

This does not mean that this type of access happens magically.

It is necessary to invest time, dedication and technique in a website and internal pages, investing in optimized content for organic search.

What are the benefits of investing in paid traffic?

Paid traffic campaigns strengthen the brand's digital presence, offer audience segmentation possibilities and reach a very diverse, relevant and present group of consumers, who for the most part access the platforms on a daily basis.

Below, we list the main benefits of investing in paid media:

Create specific segments

Online media tools make it possible to create very specific segments, which are selected according to the data that users provide for the platforms themselves.

You can publicize your campaigns to audiences segmented by region, age group, profession, interests, consumption habits… To name a few examples.

It is also possible to target campaigns only for users who already follow your pages, who have already accessed your site or who have already shown interest in competitors of your brand.

Generate qualified traffic

With this type of targeting possibility, well-crafted campaigns generate better qualified traffic to websites and Landing Pages.

That's because well-crafted and monitored paid media campaigns will attract the right audience.

Targeted ads arouse the consumer's curiosity, according to their maturity in relation to the purchase.

Increase Conversion Rates

With better qualified traffic, chances of conversion also increase.

If you know how to create interesting conversion hooks and the right tools to turn your visitors into leads, you will be successful once you attract them to your pages.

Achieve quick results

Investing in paid media drives high volume traffic at a higher speed than investing in organic traffic, for example.

For this reason promotional campaigns and disclosures that need to take place within a specific time frame usually involve paid campaigns.

Who is paid traffic for?

Paid traffic is indicated if your company fits into one of these main situations:

  • There is no time available to study SEO and produce relevant content to attract traffic volume through organic traffic;

  • It doesn't have a specialized content marketing team that can produce this type of content;

  • It has a new website and has not managed, so far, to generate a large volume of visitors to it;

  • You are going to create a website and already want to generate traffic for it right from the start.

How much to invest in paid media?

This is one of the main questions that come up after you decide to work with paid media: how much do you need to invest to get results?

Well, the truth is that we don't have a ready-made formula for your company, but we want to bring attention to the following points:

  • Paid media can be for businesses of all sizes. We have already seen entrepreneurs and small businesses starting and achieving good results with budgets of less than $1000/month. And also the other side of the coin: big brands and business groups that make investments in the millions.

  • The minimum investment is different for each ad platform, so select your channels well when doing paid media planning.

  • If you're looking to invest your company's profits to start a paid media strategy, consider dedicating a 5% to 10% percentage to your campaigns.

  • For those who already invest in paid traffic, the bill is different: calculate the budget based on your Customer Acquisition Cost or Cost per Result (if the expected result is not directly related to revenue).

We'll talk later about how to define and calculate these metrics.

How does paid traffic work?

When you start creating campaigns to generate paid traffic to your website, you need to understand that there are two ways to pay for the investment made in the platforms.

In addition to being a practical matter, these different forms affect the results of campaigns and the type and objective of each one should determine the choice between them.

CPC (Cost Per Click)

In the CPC (Cost Per Click) or PPC (PPC or Pay Per Click) method you pay each time the platform user clicks on the created ad.

Pay-per-click ads drive better qualified traffic to your pages once the user has already shown an interest in what you're offering — and that's why they clicked on it.

It's important that your ad's CTA is consistent with what the user will find on the landing page, so they don't get frustrated. This way you guarantee better conversion rates.

CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions)

In the CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions) method, you pay an amount for every thousand times an ad is displayed to users of the chosen ad platform.

This type of ad is more suitable for those who want more visibility, as the number of times it is printed is greater.

What are the most used paid traffic platforms?

Paid traffic platforms fall into three categories: search ad and display network tools, Social Ads and programmatic media.

Facebook Ads

If you want to create ads for Facebook, you need to create campaigns on the Facebook Ads platform.

Instagram Ads

Instagram's ad platform is Instagram Ads , which is actually part of Facebook Ads, as both social networks belong to the same company, Facebook.

LinkedIn Ads

LinkedIn also has its own platform for ads that are displayed on the network.

The LinkedIn Ads is the choice for those who want to make announcements to reach the B2B audience, as it allows the audience segmentation based on criteria such as function, title, level of experience, industry and company size, and more.

You may have heard of the Google Ads platform as Google Adwords, its former name.

Through it, you can create keyword search campaigns or on the display network, with banners that are distributed among thousands of partner sites.

Twitter Ads

Twitter also offers its own ad platform for those who want to reach users who are there, Twitter Ads .

Other ad platforms

Taboola

Taboola is an ad platform that stands out from others because of the native ad profile. That is, ads that look natural and don't look like advertising.

In the case of Taboola, ads convert to blog content format.

TikTok

TikTok, a social video sharing app, also offers brands the possibility of inserting ads for the platform's millions of users.

Bing Ads

The second best-known search platform is Bing. Which, like Google, also offers the possibility to create ads for paid traffic on the platform itself .

Display ads

The ads are disputed in a real-time auction and distributed on websites and internet pages, without the need to contact each of these spaces.

What are the key paid media metrics and KPIs?

CPC

As we've already mentioned, CPC is Cost per Click. It helps to understand the return on the campaign.

CPM

Cost per Thousand Impressions represents the spend every thousand times the configured ad is displayed. This value is determined before the campaign goes live.

CPL

What is the cost for your company to earn a lead? This is the answer proposed by the cost-per-lead or CPL metric.

To reach this value, it is necessary to add up all the investments in paid traffic campaigns and divide it by the number of leads.

CAC

The Customer Acquisition Cost is a metric that allows to understand the financial health of your company and the results of investments in Marketing and Sales.

CAC is calculated through the sum of investments in these two areas divided by the number of customers conquered in the same period of time.

Thus, it is possible to reach the average amount invested to win each of these customers for your brand.

CTR

The CTR or Click Through Rate is the metric about the click through rate, whether in a sponsored links campaign or in SEO optimized content. The higher the CTR of an ad, the better.

ROAS

The ROAS (Return on Advertising Spend) or Return on Investment in Ads measures the profits earned through paid media campaigns, whether online or offline.

This metric is essential to understand if the investments are paying off and also to identify the campaigns or channels with the best performance.

6 Steps to Create a Paid Traffic Strategy

1. Define your persona and your audiences

The first step in creating a paid traffic strategy and campaigns is to define the persona and what audiences you want to reach.

As we mentioned, segmentation is one of the strengths that paid media campaigns enable. If you don't know who you want to target, you won't be able to exploit this functionality.

2. Define your goals

If you don't clearly know what your goals are with paid media campaigns, you also won't know what investments, efforts, and metrics will help you track whether you're getting closer to achieving them.

3. Choose your acting channels

Once the audiences and objectives are defined, it will be easier to choose the right channels and platforms to build your paid media campaigns.

We recommend that you focus on a few channels, especially if you have a low knowledge or budget available.

Better to deepen your knowledge in the channel that has more to do with your persona and create successful campaigns there, than trying to embrace the world and do the insufficient just to be present in all channels.

4. Create your campaigns

The next step is to create the campaigns. In addition to the setup and investments, you will also need to create the titles and text for your ads.

In some formats, such as display network or Instagram Ads, you will also have to create the visual part of the campaign.

The platforms themselves offer tutorials for you to explore.

5. Optimize

Platforms offer the ability to pause or optimize campaigns. So, the best tip for those who are starting to invest and understand paid traffic is to test it!

Track the performance of your campaigns and make adjustments to those that are not getting positive results

6. Track the results

A good metric needs to have certain characteristics: it needs to be important, it needs to be simple to understand, it needs to be easily measurable, and it needs to be able to lead to positive action.

The metrics need to bring knowledge about the actions and investments and, mainly, guide the decision-making regarding the maintenance of these actions.

By setting the right metrics, you can track your campaigns based on data.

Investing in paid media will bring qualified traffic to your website and pages and also strengthen other actions of your company's digital marketing.

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