Wow, there’s a lot of ways to spend money online to help grow your business. Deciding which paid traffic sources to focus on can be pretty overwhelming. Focus is essential when optimizing your marketing mix, so we’ve identified 5 paid traffic source that you should master or at least test, before looking elsewhere.
1. GOOGLE ADWORDS
This one’s a no-brainer. Adwords offers one of the most versatile paid traffic solutions around, both for search and display advertising. Targeting someone by what they search online is an excellent way of understanding a visitors intent to buy your product. Often referred to as reaching someone at the “bottom of the funnel”, Adwords can be extremely effective at targeting people who are ready to buy. Unfortunately that portion of the funnel can be pretty small, so how you attract visitors at the top of the funnel and coax them down the funnel with great content and best practice inbound marketing tactics is the hard (or harder) part of marketing online. In the early days of the internet this might have been possible with the Google Display Network (GDN), but now due to banner blindness, for the most part we don’t really see these ads; and ya gotta see ‘em to click ‘em (you can quote me on that). Here’s a heat-map study from the Nielson Norman Group showing just how much people ignore display advertising.
That being said, a hugely effective tactic that the GDN can be used to execute, is retargeting. Coupled with some of the below paid traffic sources, retargeting is a great way of advertising only to people who have already shown interest in your company by visiting your website. And not your entire website, but a particular page on your website, like…I don’t know… your pricing or checkout page! (yeah, pretty good indicator of someone who’s thinking about pulling out their wallet)
In short
-If you know what keywords your customers are punching into Google, Adwords is a no-brainer.
-The GDN has massive reach, but think about retargeting before you drop a bunch of dough on people accidently clicking on your banner.
2. FACEBOOK ADS
Over the last couple of years, the Facebook ad platform has evolved a great deal. In it’s early days I was definitely a naysayer, but now it’s hard to find an online marketer worth their salt that doesn’t think Facebook offers extremely effective ways of driving targeted paid traffic. Not only can you choose the type of people you want to reach (gender, age, occupation, to name a few), but you can also target audiences that are similar to your existing customer base. That’s right, Facebook will actually find people similar to the ones who have already purchased your product. You can do all the demographic, geographic, contextual, or behavioral targeting you want, but I’d take the behavior of actually paying for your own product, over any of that, when it comes to finding your next customer.
In case you don’t believe me or think this sounds too complicated, here’s a super simple demo from that Jon Loomer on how to do it.The downside of a constantly evolving platform is that you’ll need to keep up with the changes regularly via blogs and updates on their platform. I’ll actually go as far as to say that the key to success on Facebook is to stay connected to their updates. So seriously, stay up-to-date on their updates.
In short
-Get your Lookalike Audience on!
-And follow people like Jon Loomer like a hawk.
3. OUTBRAIN AMPLIFY
OK, obviously I’m extremely biased here, but you can’t dispute the facts. When a company outranks Google and Facebook for unique visitors on a comScore top 30 list, and you’re looking for paid traffic sources, I’m pretty sure you need to check it out.
Now, we definitely won’t take your ads like Facebook and Google, but there’s no question you’ll want to use us to drive traffic to those awesome blog posts, articles, videos, and third-party reviews… This is where you start the relationship with your potential customer, bringing them down the funnel by providing nothing but valuable, useful, funny, and endearing content. Similar to Facebook and AdWords, Amplify offers a cost-per-click bidding system, the ability to test multiple headlines directed to the same content, device targeting, and geographic targeting. Our premium network of publishers ensure that your always getting traffic from high quality sources. More importantly though, the algorithms behind our content discovery platform are constantly working to find the most engaged audience for your content. The people who click our content recommendations are far more engaged than people who come from search or social, and we can prove! Here’s are a couple of the results you’ll find in our Discovery vs Search vs Social Audience Engagement Study:
While Outbrain may be best for building that relationship with great content, many of our customers have seen great success using us to drive traffic to a recent press article or blog post, and then retargeting that person in Google’s Display Network or through Facebook’s Custom Audience retargeting. So in reality, social, search, and discovery actually work together quite nicely.
In short
-Outbrain outranks Google & Facebook for monthly unique visitors, so when looking for paid traffic sources, we are a must!
-Use Outbrain Amplify to drive highly engaged traffic to your great content, then retarget those visitors on the GDN and Facebook.
-Bonus post about Outbrain’s impact on SEO: How to Distribute Your Content at Scale and Get Google Juice Now
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