Already have organic traffic?
So you already have a great site with a reputable amount of organic traffic? Your advertisers are happy and keep asking for more volume. There are a number of things you can do at this point but the best way to get immediate results is to advertise your site, or as some people call it, buying website traffic. The main problem you will likely face is finding a source of good quality traffic that your advertisers will like. In addition you will need to have some sort of system in place which will help you prove that the traffic you are buying is actually real human visitors. And perhaps most importantly of all you need the traffic to yield a profitable return on investment.
Return On Investment
Making sure you have a good ROI is often where the problems first begin. A common early mistake that can be made is setting your bid strategies to produce a huge ROI from the start. As you scale your ROI estimations up you must in turn scale your costs down. Scaling your costs down means you are buying cheaper and cheaper website traffic. The cheaper the website traffic is that you buy can exponentially increase the percentage chance that your traffic sources have fraudulent clicks in them. A good rule of thumb when starting a new campaign would be to price your bidding strategy at somewhere near a wash while you test the quality and actual ROI that you achieve. You can then start reducing your bids while performing campaign optimizations so you can attack your ROI from multiple angles. Eventually, if you do it right, your supplemental website traffic will help improve your CPM thus increasing your ROI even more.
Website Traffic Quality
How do you know you are buying good quality traffic? This is the crux of the industry and the solution is muddled in all directions. There are lots of third party verification companies that can be used but they all come at a cost which will further reduce your margins. I’m not saying not to use them, in fact I think you should, however you need to factor this into your bidding strategy. Another good approach would be to buy website traffic from a company that is already utilizing third party verification systems. They will often get a better deal than you would due to volume discounts and the cost will simply be factored into your cost per click. Now which third party verification system should you use? Unfortunately this question doesn’t get any easier as they all do things somewhat differently and in my experience all yield different results. The first rule of thumb would be to use the system that your top advertiser brands use, or suggest you use. You are trying to provide them with the quality they want and if they prefer a system it would definitely benefit you to use the same one. In addition you should also be using your analytics software in as much detail as you can.
Visitor Analytics
With most analytics software you easily see things like page views and time spent on your site. You can also see things like funnel paths and mouse movement. By tagging your traffic buys in an organized fashion you can drill certain reports down in ways that will greatly help you understand what your traffic is doing, and how it might differ from your known organic traffic. I’ve seen some very sophisticated buyers further tag their traffic sources so that they can pull IP addresses from them. With the IP address you can generate, and automate, automatic IP block lists based on behavioral criteria that you choose to observe. By implementing a process that generates daily IP block lists from your own analytics you can do this third party verification stuff yourself and save some pennies on your CPC in the long run.
Advertiser Transparency
Another talking point is the topic of advertisement transparency. Transparency is an important subject and might be the latest trendy requirement that buyers have these days. Transparency into where the ads are placed is very common among the most expensive top tier ad networks out there but is by no means a solution to the fraud problem. Transparency gives the buyer a sense of confidence that they are buying high quality traffic but I would suggest taking it with a solid grain of salt. You still need to do the work on your end to make sure your traffic is good quality. In addition to the high transparency tier 1 networks you have the less, or even non, transparent tier 2 and 3 ad networks. These networks typically cannot provide ad placement transparency partly because of the nature of how the networks connect with each other. These networks run clicks through redirects which are where the filtering, or often lack there of, happens. These redirects end up taking the place of the real referrers in the click headers which is why you would see the referrer of the network you are buying from instead of the original referring URL.
You Have More Options
Why do people buy from the low transparency tier 2 and 3 networks? It’s simple, because they are significantly cheaper than the alternatives and people love an opportunity to buy something for less. If you have all your ducks in a row and you have the analytics and/or third party verification systems in place you can buy cheap traffic that is actually real human and of high quality. So now instead of paying $0.25 – $1.00 for a click you can pay on average in the $0.05 – $0.10 range.
Allocating Your Daily Budget
Some of the most successful publishers who buy traffic will buy from many different networks at a time, ranging from tier 1 all the way down to tier 3. They will allocate certain portions of their daily budgets in the right places and create a blend of traffic that is not only of high quality but is also of high ROI. With the proper tools at your disposal you can be confident that you’re buying real human traffic that performs well with your advertisers.
About Danari Media
Danari Media is a tier 2 network that serves thousands of buyers and sellers. We use a third party verification system from Are You A Human to offer different tiers of traffic ranging in confidence and price. Depending on the tools you have at your disposal you can choose to buy our most strictly verified traffic or you can do much of the work yourself and buy traffic from a lower level of verification.
