- Paid Traffic Sources:How to Get Your First 20k Visitors Using Paid Traffic Sources

Paid Traffic Sources:How to Get Your First 20k Visitors Using Paid Traffic Sources

Getting attention for your website when there are billions of websites online today can be a struggle, especially if you need steady traffic to get the engagement or sales you are looking for. Since generating sufficient organic traffic takes a long time, starting with paid traffic to your website is a great way to get the ball rolling and grow your visibility online to your target audience.

There are several platforms available that offer paid website traffic options, which allow you to promote your content and organization to specific audiences of your choosing.

With online ad spend projected to reach almost half of all ad spend across platforms by 2020, using ads to get more traffic and sales is estimated as most popular advertising strategy used today, beating out long-time advertising leaders television, print, and radio.

In the following examples, we’ll use an example budget of $3,000 with the goal of driving 20,000 visits to your new company’s website. Let’s go through three of the top options, what their attributes are, and what percentage of our $3,000 budget should be allocated to each channel.

Facebook Ads
paid traffic (1)

As stated by Facebook itself, one out of every five minutes people spend on their smartphone is on Facebook, and about two billion people use the website on a daily basis. Facebook Ads continues to be one of the most affordable paid traffic options, with some of the lowest cost per click (CPC) across multiple industries, according to Wordstream.

In addition, eMarketer found that almost 100 percent (95.8) of survey respondents said that Facebook produces the highest return-on-investment (ROI) of all social media platforms.

Percentage of your budget: 40% or $1,200
Channel Goals: To drive website traffic through brand awareness with campaigns promoting specific content pieces as well as products and services. Campaigns can also be created to drive lead generation as well as website traffic, such as directing users to a landing page to download a free book, which captures their email address.
Campaign Tips:
Take advantage of all the audience parameters Facebook offers. From targeted demographics (like users who birthdays are within seven days) to interests (such as biking and travel), Facebook offers a robust targeting platform that allows you to build campaigns that are extremely targeted.
Choose targeting parameters based on audience reach estimates Facebook gives you while building the campaign. This will help you hit the 20,000 traffic goal.
Use the guided creation tool in Facebook Ad Manager to make the process easier and check out this easy guide from Hootsuite for campaign setup tips.
Recommended Creative: According to Hubspot, Facebook ads need to be visual, relevant, valuable, and include a clear call-to-action. Outdated images will, by extension, make your website and brand seem outdated. Here’s another post with over 140 examples of good Facebook ads and why they work.
Taboola
paid traffic 2

Taboola is the largest online discovery network, sharing and advertising your content across premium publisher sites.

It can appear alongside content, but most commonly appears at the end of related posts. Using audience and topic targeting, Taboola is a great option to get your content read by more audiences and recommended on websites where it might not have be shown before.

Taboola boasts 10x higher engagement with their content recommendation ads compared to regular advertising. If your advertising strategy is dependent on promoting your content, it’s worth running a campaign on Taboola, especially since you can start campaigns for as little as $10 per day.

Percentage of your budget: 40% or $1,200
Channel Goals: Because Taboola focuses solely on promoting content, the goal here is to get more traffic for your website content pieces, like blog posts and news stories.
Campaign Tips:
Read this step-by-step list of how to set up a Taboola campaign, along with a walk-through video to help make the process easier.
Use Google Analytics to see what content is most popular on your Taboola campaigns as jumping off point to create more content for your website going forward.
Recommended Creative: Use images that are colorful and include people smiling as a thumbnail image, and that accurately depict the content you are advertising.
Google Ads
paid traffic (3)

Google Ads should be focusing on your website’s products and services (what you are selling) instead of its content (which is mainly to drive brand awareness and lead generation).

This partly because Google can only target audience members by their searched keywords and basic demographics, such as location, language, and age. The targeting on Facebook is much more niche, which offers more targeted audiences and a lower cost per click (CPC).

Percentage of your budget: 20% or $600
Channel Goals: To drive generalized website traffic based on offered products and services. Creating separate ad campaigns for each new piece of content is much more time consuming than it would be on Taboola or Facebook, with a lower CTR.
Campaign Tips:
Make sure all your ads are optimized for mobile, as almost half of all ad revenue is from that channel.
Avoid using display ads, as the average CTR is only 0.08%.
Group campaigns by landing page or interest
Build out extensive negative keyword and long-tail keyword lists in your campaigns.
Follow this checklist from Google on everything your account needs to get started.
Recommended Creative: It’s all about the words for Google Ads. Since display ads (image/banner ads) have such a low CTR, focus on text-based search display ads.
Tracking Campaign Success
To track the success of your paid traffic campaigns across these three platforms, make sure all ad URLs have UTM codes that can be tracked in Google Analytics.

Google offers a free UTM builder that lets you tag campaigns by source (e.g. Facebook_Ad), medium (e.g. Facebook), campaign name (e.g. new_website_traffic), content (which blog post was being promoted, e.g. UTM_beginner_guide), and campaign term (the keyword that was used to trigger the ad– this would only be relevant to Google ads).

You can use underscores or + for spacing between words in your UTM parameters. Once these are set up, you can create customized reports and dashboard widgets in Google Analytics that lets you view at a high level how your campaigns are translating to actual website traffic.

In conclusion.
Because our goal is to drive our first 20,000 visits to our new website, focusing more on content discovery campaigns that tie into what the user is already reading (instead of what they are searching for), we will naturally already have an audience that is predisposed to visiting our website and reading our content.

This can help you grow audience loyalty and create long-term return users for months and years to come, especially as they share your content and recommend your website to others.