This article is about paid ads that get traffic to your web-site. Many of you might ask: why would someone pay for it, if there are free ways of getting traffic? The answer is straightforward. Paid offers help you get specific traffic of higher quality. Under 'specific' and 'higher quality' I mean traffic of visitors that really want to get to your site and visitors how are already searching a product to buy.



There are two models of charging for ads. Some charge you for how many times your ad has been show in their network. That is the case when you place a banner in a site similar to yours. The advantage of it, is that it is quite cheap. Some ads wholesalers only charge you a couple of cents for dozens of impression (that is, how many times your site has been shown).

The second way of charging for ads is how many times a visitor actually came to your site. That is know as Pay per Click (aka PPC). The advantage for you is that you know that a user actually has interest in something that he clicked and that you only pay for real visitors that came to your site.

When buying traffic, consider carefully the source of this traffic. There is a huge difference between buying traffic from pop-ups and pop-unders than buying traffic from ads places in mainstream search engines. You will see that in the first case it is much cheaper, however, this price has its reasons. People who click on pop-ups often didn't want to do that, it just happened and they came to your site without interest at all. The CLR is clearly lower in price and in quality.

If you know how to deal it, PPC from mainstream search engines has the best result, but also the higher initial cost. Setting the right keywords can be a tricky business. They should meet a trade-off between being cheap enough and being relevant enough. With time and checking your site statistics carefully, you will get a much better deal from commercial ads. If you sell, for example, snow blowers, you don't care if people from Florida is clicking on your ads. If you are in the real estate business, you only want local lead to your site.

Remember that pay-per-click marketing campaigns can be pretty expensive in the hands of an inexperienced webmaster. Try at least to get an expert on boat to evaluate your strategy. There are several pitfalls out there for a novice and even if major ads wholesalers won't try to scam you, they only aggregate offerings of minor sites, that sometimes want to get your bucks away. So watch out for strange patterns like many users from the same IP coming to your site at once.