What are the reasons to buy traffic?
 

I know many webmasters buy traffic and I was wondering if buying traffic is worth the money, even targeted traffic.

Does that kind of traffic convert well, give exposure, help improve PR/SERP or bring any other advantage?.
I always had the idea that that kind of traffic was only good to inflate visitor numbers and send the bounce rate over the roof.

I'd like to hear GFYers before making my mind.

In my opinion it is a numbers game. You want to monetize your best to get recurring customers for your business as well as build branding. You can also use the paid traffic to gauge just how well your design and process of presentation to sale are. Then adjust accordingly to optimize things.

Many reasons :) But most great marketing ideas cost nothing but effort.

i really depends on your budget and of course, the quality of your website

buying traffic and sending them to a spammy website will clearly not help at all

if you re site has quality content, try the free techniques first and see after if you need to buy some traffic

Only buy traffic if you A) are good at analyzing statistical results VERY specifically with keyed landing pages, and B) if you can afford to spend plenty of cash as you weed through a lot of crap before - MAYBE - finding some sources that produce the desired results.

Also, be sure to keep an eye on side effects/auxiliary results that may change your opinion - minus OR plus - about your benefit. I buy a small traffic source that loses money on the front end, but has an interesting effect I discovered by accident on a related website that makes it very profitable. In other words, see if you can look three or four moves ahead on the chess board.

If you find traffic that costs $0.05 CPC but makes you $0.07 ePC then you spend $50,000 on it and get back $70,000 then you are happy as a pig in shit when you stuff $20,000 per month in your pocket.

Now granted it's usually not this clean cut but this is the basic idea.

I've been spending $5000 per month on one site and getting back $7000 per month. So it does happen. Lots of trial and error usually.

Unlike seo you can turn it on and off and ramp up fast. It's not a tedious process.

Good to know. I always believed that kind of traffic does not convert.

If you buy crappy redirect traffic, no, it doesn't convert. If you buy targeted traffic and use a little common sense, yes it can convert.

I just paid to drop an email to someone else's list of paying customers. Got tons of conversions.

You need to imagine you are the consumer, and you click on something you want to see while on your phone and you mobile redirect and see something you don't want to see. Well what the fuck are you going to do? Hit the back button of course!

The trick is imagine you are the person getting sent through whatever traffic it is, does it make sense? Does it provide value? These are the questions you need to think about before you start spending money.

That's why I believe most paid traffic isn't a terrific thing. If someone is looking for pro hardcore, he won't pay attention to the amateur gallery site he has been taken to.
Adult targeted traffic includes amateur, pro, gay, lesbo, etc. Even the straight adult traffic offered by many brokers is too wide and may not serve your needs. Buyers don't have control over the paid targeted traffic sold by brokers.

I belive the only paid traffic that may give you some real results is the one that comes from your ads on niche relevant sites with high traffic.


Everything else is only good to boost statisics.

ManPuppy had good points... the key to all paid traffic is having a page that converts. So you have to study all the conversion factors really deeply, and get good at setting up goal tracking with google analytics and whatever split testing software you decide on.

All of marketing is about conversion rates. If you get your page converting high enough, you can buy all the traffic in the world. Different sources of traffic convert at different rates, and the broader appeal your offer has, the wider you can cast your net.

If you have a super-niche site, I'd play around with buying some traffic from extremely similar sites. If anything, it's a great learning experience. Just keep your budget in check.

I have bought traffic my entire internet career and love it. Organic is way too slow for me and prefer just optimizing paid traffic.

It is possible to make money by converting purchased traffic, but it is not an easy thing. As far as I know, there is some websites about it, you can also find some resources at amazon.com.

I would say is not the best converting traffic as you get pissed of visitors that don't really want to be on your site, but buying traffic can make sense in a lot of situations. It can be used also as a part of a wider more complex strategy.

I use to buy traffic in the past when I start a new project just to get a jump start till other more time demanding methods kick in.
Also years back I would put a tgp and buy traffic then start trading with other tgp's then stop buying and have some traffic going trough the trades(who didn't). I remember the first time I did that was for a brand new tgp with no traffic, I both traffic for two days, like 500 or 1000 visitors per hour and spend like 120$, it got the trades going for like 300 uv per day, stable didn't drop, after a month is was already 500uv per day, same month this tgp made 200$ so it was well worth.

In the early days of "x rodent" they were starting "fake" MGP's that have all the thumbs link their videos, there were like hundreds of those fake mgp's, new ones popping all the time, and they were buying traffic to then trade it with other mgp's to basically accumulate traffic on the mpg's before sending it to their main site, way better than just buying directly. Worked like a charm for them ;)

If you just have your site and you are like "lets buy some traffic for it" it won't work, you have as others said have the landing page optimized for it, choose very carefully the sources or have it as a part of a more complex strategy.