Turn Your Paid Traffic into a Qualified Lead Generation Machine

Want to understand how to create media campaigns that will generate quality paid traffic for your website or landing pages? Then you’ve come to the right article!

Here, we’ll cover all the details surrounding this type of strategy.

What is Paid Traffic?

Paid traffic refers to traffic generated through ads created to promote a brand and bring visitors to pages or websites through clicks that direct them there.

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

What is the Difference Between Paid and Organic Traffic?

Unlike paid traffic, organic traffic is that which doesn’t come from investment in paid online media.

Organic search is the main source of organic traffic for a website or landing page.

Today, the largest search platform is Google, and a significant portion of organic visits come from searches conducted by users on this platform.

This doesn’t mean that organic access happens magically.

It requires time, dedication, and technique to optimize a website and its internal pages, investing in content that is optimized for organic search.

Learn more in – Paid and Organic Traffic: Which Generates Better Results?

What are the Advantages of Investing in Paid Traffic?

Paid traffic campaigns strengthen the digital presence of a brand, offer opportunities for audience segmentation, and reach a diverse, relevant, and engaged group of consumers who, for the most part, access platforms daily.

Here are the main benefits of investing in paid media:

Create Specific Segments

Online media tools allow the creation of highly specific segments, which are selected based on the data users provide to the platforms themselves.

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

It’s also possible to target campaigns only to users who already follow your pages, have visited your website, or have shown interest in your brand’s competitors.

Generate Qualified Traffic

With the ability to segment, well-executed campaigns generate better-qualified traffic for websites and landing pages.

This is because well-crafted and monitored paid media campaigns attract the right audience.

Targeted ads spark curiosity in consumers, depending on their purchase readiness.

Increase Conversion Rates

With better-qualified traffic, conversion chances also increase.

If you know how to create attractive conversion hooks and use the right tools to turn visitors into leads, you’ll be successful after attracting them to your pages.

For lead generation, the combination of paid media and conversational marketing (with chatbots or virtual assistants) works very well since these qualified traffic visitors will receive personalized service and, in the process, your brand gathers valuable information during their first contact with your business.

Achieve Fast Results

Investment in paid media drives large volumes of traffic much faster than investing in organic traffic.

For this reason, promotional campaigns and announcements that need to happen within a specific timeline typically involve paid campaigns.

Who is Paid Traffic For?

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

• Doesn’t have time to study SEO and produce relevant content to attract traffic through organic search.
• Doesn’t have a content marketing team capable of producing such content.
• Has a new website and hasn’t yet generated significant traffic to it.
• Plans to create a website and wants to start generating traffic right away.

How Much to Invest in Paid Media?

This is one of the main questions that arise once you decide to work with paid media: how much should you invest to see results?

The truth is, we don’t have a one-size-fits-all formula for your company, but we want to highlight the following points:

• Paid media can be for companies of all sizes. We’ve seen entrepreneurs and small businesses starting and achieving good results with budgets under $1,000/month. And on the other hand, large brands and business groups make investments in the millions.

• The minimum investment varies by advertising platform, so carefully select your channels when planning paid media.

• If you plan to invest your company’s profits to start a paid media strategy, consider allocating 5-10% of your budget to campaigns.

• For those already investing in paid traffic, the calculation is different: calculate the budget based on your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) or Cost Per Result (if the expected result is not directly tied to revenue).

Later, we will discuss how to define and calculate these metrics.

And remember: defining the best paid media strategy and budget for your company can be much easier with the help of a professional!

How does Paid Traffic Work?

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

Besides being a practical matter, these different methods influence campaign results, and the type and objective of each one should guide the choice between them.

Here’s a closer look:

CPC (Cost Per Click)

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

Click-based ads bring better-qualified traffic to your pages, as the user has already shown interest in what you’re offering — which is why they clicked on it.

It’s important that your ad’s CTA aligns with what the user will find on the landing page to avoid frustration. This ensures better conversion rates.

CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions)

In the CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions) method, you pay a fee each time an ad is shown to users on the selected advertising platform, based on every thousand impressions.

This type of ad is best suited for those seeking more visibility, as it is shown more frequently.

What are the Most Used Paid Traffic Platforms?

Paid traffic platforms are divided into three categories: search and display network ad 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. If you want to deepen your knowledge of creating Facebook ads, read our article on the topic.

Instagram Ads

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

LinkedIn Ads

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

LinkedIn Ads is the choice for those looking to advertise to a B2B audience, as it allows audience segmentation through criteria such as job function, title, experience level, industry, and company size, among others.

Google Ads

You may have heard of Google Ads, formerly known as Google AdWords.

Through it, you can create search campaigns using keywords or display network campaigns with banners shown across thousands of partner websites.

YouTube Ads

YouTube Ads, being part of Google Ads, allows keyword search and includes ads in search results, as suggestions, or within videos posted on this social network.

Twitter Ads

Twitter also offers its own ad platform for those looking to target users on the platform, called Twitter Ads.

Other Advertising Platforms

Taboola

Taboola is a lesser-known ad platform that stands out from the others for being a native advertising type. That is, ads that don’t look like traditional advertisements.

In the case of Taboola, the ads are presented in the form of blog content.

TikTok

As expected, TikTok also offers brands the opportunity to place ads for the millions of users on the platform.

Bing Ads

The second most well-known search platform is Bing. Like Google, it also offers the option to create ads for paid traffic on its own platform.

Programmatic Media

Ads are bid on in real-time auctions and distributed across websites and pages on the internet, without the need for direct contact with each of these spaces.

What are the main Paid Media Metrics and KPIs?

CPC

As we’ve mentioned, CPC is the Cost Per Click. It helps understand the return on a campaign and can be calculated as follows:

CPM

Cost Per Thousand Impressions represents the cost for every thousand times an ad is displayed. This value is determined before the campaign is launched, and the calculation is as follows:

CPL

What is the cost for your company to acquire a lead? That’s what the Cost Per Lead (CPL) metric aims to answer.

To calculate this value, you need to sum all investments in paid traffic campaigns and divide it by the number of leads generated.

CAC

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is a metric that helps understand your company’s financial health and the results of investments in marketing and sales.

CAC is calculated by summing investments in these two areas and dividing it by the number of customers acquired in the same time period.

This way, you can determine the average amount invested to acquire each customer for your brand.

CTR

CTR, or Click Through Rate, is the metric for the click rate, whether in a paid link campaign or SEO-optimized content. The higher the CTR of an ad, the better.

ROAS

ROAS (Return on Advertising Spend) measures the profits obtained through paid media campaigns, both online and offline.

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

To calculate ROAS, use the following formula:

Also read – What is ROI in Marketing, What It’s For, and How to Calculate It?

6 Steps to Create a Paid Traffic Strategy

1. Define your Persona and Target Audiences

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

As we mentioned, segmentation is one of the strengths of paid media campaigns. If you don’t know who you want to reach, you won’t be able to fully explore this feature.

2. Define your Goals

If you don’t clearly understand your objectives with paid media campaigns, you won’t know which investments, efforts, and metrics will help you track whether you’re getting closer to achieving them.

3. Choose your Channels

Once you’ve defined your target audiences and objectives, it will be easier to choose the right channels and platforms for your paid media campaigns.

We recommend focusing on a few channels, especially if you have limited knowledge or budget.

It’s better to deepen your understanding of the channel that aligns best with your persona and create successful campaigns there than to try to spread yourself too thin across all channels with insufficient effort.

4. Create your Campaigns

The next step is to create your campaigns. In addition to the configuration and investment parts, you’ll also need to create the titles and copy for your ads.

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

The platforms themselves offer tutorials to help you explore them.

Learn more – Titles for Ads: Discover How to Create Impactful Ads

5. Optimize

The platforms allow you to pause or optimize your campaigns. Therefore, the best advice for those just starting to invest and understand paid traffic is to test!

Monitor the performance of your campaigns and make adjustments to those that aren’t yielding positive results.

6. Track your results

A good metric must have some characteristics: it needs to be important, easy to understand, easily measurable, and capable of leading to positive action.

Metrics must provide insight into actions and investments and, most importantly, guide decision-making about maintaining those actions.

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

Conclusion

Investing in paid media will bring qualified traffic to your website and pages, while also strengthening other digital marketing actions for your company.

Want to add more valuable leads and higher conversion rates to this?

Check out the article we published to enhance your results with digital marketing by combining paid traffic with conversational marketing.