Paid Traffic: What is it and What are The Main Types?

Investing in internet ads is an important strategy that offers many possibilities; learn more about the subject before opening your wallet and opting for paid traffic.

Paid internet traffic is traffic that comes from advertisements made on search engines, social networks, and even other websites. In Digital Marketing, it is used to drive visitors to strategic pages for companies, such as sales or conversion.

SEO and Email Marketing strategies work in the medium and long term, bringing sustainable and predictable growth. However, when we are in a hurry, what we need most is paid traffic.

Also known as paid media, paid ads, or good old-fashioned advertising paid traffic scares you at the beginning of its implementation. However, when the balance between investment and return is achieved, it does bring smiles to companies in all markets and sizes.

Have you started putting money into ads? Or do you want to get clearer on the topic before giving your money to Google, Facebook, and other tech giants? In this post, we bring you what’s most important for you to know about paid traffic, read along as we dig deeper into each of the main types. 

What Is Paid Traffic?

When we talk about the internet and Digital Marketing, paid traffic is all that audience of a website or blog that comes from ads made on search engines (Google, Bing, etc.), social networks (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.), and other sites (Taboola, Outbrain, etc.).

In other words, it’s when you pay for visitors to come to your page. However, it is not the internet user friend who receives the money you invested, but the tools mentioned in the paragraph above. “But do I really need to pay?”

While it’s perfectly possible to succeed in the digital economy by betting on organic growth alone, it’s often necessary to invest in ads to accelerate that growth. The best thing is to combine paid and organic traffic, making everyone laugh on all fronts.

Read Also: 10 Google Ranking Factors You Should Know

That’s why it’s worth knowing more about SEO and Email Marketing as well – and I’ll say it with ease because I know you’ve come to this text organically. Let’s go to the main types of ads you can do on the internet to get paid traffic to your business’ website, blog, or landing page.

How Do I Get Paid Traffic? What are the main tools?

As we said above, there are many options for tools that gladly accept your money to display links to your business. The main ones are:

• Google Ads
• Facebook Ads
• Ads on YouTube
• Instagram Ads
• LinkedIn Ads
• Native Ads

It is noteworthy that some of this list are from the same companies, such as Google & YouTube and Facebook & Instagram. So you can manage them on the same platform (Google and Facebook, respectively). And it’s a reminder of how these two companies dominate a large part of the world’s advertising budget today.

As we said above, there are many options for tools that gladly accept your money to display links to your business. The main ones are:

• Google Ads
• Facebook Ads
• Ads on YouTube
• Instagram Ads
• LinkedIn Ads
• Native Ads

It is noteworthy that some of this list are from the same companies, such as Google & YouTube and Facebook & Instagram. So you can manage them in the same place (Google and Facebook, respectively). And it’s a reminder of how these two companies concentrate a large part of the world’s advertising budget today.

Google Ads

Google Ads, formerly known as Adwords, is Google’s advertising platform. Through Google Ads, you can create Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, and Play Store ads.

Search ads are the ones that appear at the top of search results when you do a Google search. Banners on websites are the most popular types of Google Display Ads. The other three (YouTube, Gmail, and Play Stores) are self-explanatory: they appear in these three locations.

Facebook Ads

Facebook Ads is the ad system of the Facebook Meta family, which includes different formats in the different vehicles of the group. They include paid traffic on Facebook itself, Messenger, Instagram, and ads that lead to a conversation on WhatsApp, for example.

As people give a lot of profile information to Facebook, which in turn also analyzes millions of interactions, comments, and clicks per second, its ads platform has always been famous for allowing for greater personalization. In other words, it was possible to make super assertive ads, such as remarketing to finalize the sale.

And also due to the large number of assets that Facebook has, its ads make powerful combinations, generating very relevant results.

Ads on YouTube

Don’t forget that more and more people are watching YouTube on their smart TVs, so the ads on this Google streaming platform are like the old ads on the big TV channels. You have to be creative!

And do you know what in-stream, bumper ad, the masthead, video discovery, and out-stream? Well, there are types of ads on YouTube. 

Instagram Ads

The most visual social network in the world has photos, videos, and ads. However, as part of the Facebook family, you may have noticed that they are super targeted to your tastes – or at least to what the algorithm understands as your taste, using your clicks, searches, likes, and comments.

In summary, Instagram Ads serve ads in both the feed and Stories of the social network. These ads are in the form of photos, videos, and a carousel with sequences of photos or videos. They can be used to generate clicks, conversions, app installs, and video views.

LinkedIn Ads

“What do you mean, do you mean I have to pay to see my resume?” Come on, you know that LinkedIn is much more than just an online CV. The professional social network is very attractive for ads precisely because whoever is there is already looking for business or learning opportunities.

Even so, paid traffic coming from LinkedIn tends to be a little more expensive. The platform just sells more professional profiles to value the cost. However, depending on your strategy, it can be quite worthwhile, especially for B2B businesses!

There are also several types of ads there, with multiple possibilities for formats and optimizations. 

Native Ads

Native Ads stand out for not having a standard advertising format, appearing as featured or recommended content within relevant portals, websites, and blogs. In general, they don’t detract from the user experience. The best-known platforms for this type of paid traffic are Taboola, Mediavine, and Outbrain.

Read Also: How To Get SEO For Your Website

They tend to adapt to the format of these sites, avoiding a problem that can affect ads: being ignored. This is because the brain of the modern internet user is already trained to not even see some areas of websites, precisely because of the old misuse of banners.