Websites and traffic go together like roads and cars. They just do not make sense without each other. Fortunately, there are tools to leverage your traffic to make money, or to pay money to gain traffic.
Building Traffic with Adwords
The best visitor is a visitor who finds your site organically. The second-best visitor is one who finds your site through a well-crafted advertisement targeted directly at them. Google Adwords is, currently, the number 1 place on the Internet to advertise. Complicated it is. Rewarding it can be. A money pit for many.
How Google Adwords Works
Adwords is Google’s keyword advertising system. When someone enters keywords into Google’s search engine it triggers advertisements at the top of the search results and on the side of those search results. Each keywork or keyword phrase has a cost associated with based upon competitive bidding. You put it what you are willing to pay per click and if you pay more than the next bidder your ad will be higher on the page. A typically click costs anywhere from $0.20 to $2.00. Highly competitive words are even more costly.
Each campaign has a set budget per day. When that budget is used up the advertisements no longer show up. On average, a $100 / month campaign might see 100 – 300 paid visitors per month.
Finding the best keywords is important. Keywords have bounce rates (i.e. the visitor leaves within 30 seconds or so) and conversion rates (e.g. x% of visitors buy a product) that vary wildly from each other and from day-to-day. You might lose 80% of your visitors from a specific keyword, but you also might convert 4% of those visitors into buying customers.
In this scenario… let us say you spend $100 a month on one keyword phrase, and you get 300 visits. 240 visitors disappear within 30 seconds (which means they did not like what they saw). 60 visitors spend time on the site, and 12 (4% of the 300) visitors actually buy something. That is a really high conversion rate, but fine for this exercise.
Now this gets more complicated, but easier to understand. If the average order is $10 and the margin is 35%, you have grossed $120 and netted $42. In essence, this keyword phrase would lose you $58 for that month. To break even in this scenario the conversion rate would need to be tripled, or the average order be over $25.
Choosing the correct strategy is complex and time consuming. As well, it takes a lot of data to make a decision that is statistically relevant. To get this data you need a lot of time, or money (or both).
Did I mention organic visitors are the best?
Adwords is not right for every website, but it might be the solution for which you are looking. If so, get started today.