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Home >> Articles >> Promoting and Marketing >> Growing Your Traffic Is Hard To Do - Or, Is It?
Author: Ken
Added: October 11, 2005
Views: 1,956
Rating: 9/10
Growing Your Traffic Is Hard To Do - Or, Is It? (Part 1 of a 3-part series)
Youve launched your website (congratulations!) and there it sits in the bits and bytes of the World Wide Web; but, no one is finding you. Your service or product goes unnoticed and your site is not generating business, which is why you launched it in the first place.
If your brain begins to turn to mush when you
e bombarded with acronyms like: CPC (Cost Per Click), FFA (Free-For-All Link List), PPCSE (Pay Per Click Search Engine) and SEO (Search Engine Optimization), you are in very good company. These are only a few of the marketing strategies that you can utilize to increase your websites traffic.
Questions that might follow soon after you recover from being inundated with acronyms are: What does this all mean to me? How can I most effectively use whats available to target my audience and grow my site visits; and, perhaps, even generate a little extra income in addition to my services or products? And, finally, where and how do I begin to do all this?
Remember, the marketing strategies that work best for your site might not work as well for someone else and their site. In Part 2 of this 3-part series, well focus on one aspect of how to grow your traffic, PPC (Pay Per Click).
PPC is an online advertising payment system in which payment is based solely on qualifying click-throughs. Great - what does that mean? In a PPC agreement, an advertiser only pays for qualifying clicks to the destination site based on a prearranged per-click rate. Popular PPC advertising combinations include per-click advertising networks, search engines and affiliate programs.
As with any program or agreement, there are pros and cons to PPC. Variations of PPC are local and geographical keyword targeting, PPC banner ads and search engine listings. In addition, related terms for PPC are click-throughs, CPC (Cost Per Click), PPL (Pay Per Lead) and PPS (Pay Per Site)
Paying per click is occasionally seen as a middle ground between paying per impression and paying per action. In more plain language, when paying per impression, the advertiser assumes the risk of low-quality traffic generated by the publisher. When getting paid for actions, the publisher assumes the risk of low-converting offers by the advertiser. In the PPC model, the publisher does not have to worry about the sales conversion rate of the target site, and the advertiser does not have to worry about how many impressions it takes to attract the specified number of clicks. Clear yet? Or, are all these "clicks" making you even more confused?
A definition here might be helpful - a click-through is the process of clicking through an online advertisement to the advertisers destination. While the click-through is often the most immediate response to an advertisement, it is not the only interaction. But, thats another topic. Accurate counting of click-throughs involves excluding "robot clicks" and duplicate clicks. This takes on added importance when click-throughs are used as the measurement on which payment is based. You knew there had to be a mention of money, eventually. Thats why your site was launched - to generate and grow your business.
This might be making some sense to you by know; if, for no other reason, than that you
e beginning to become more attuned to the "language" of a marketing strategy within the realm of the World Wide Web. However, as good as you might think this sounds, there are drawbacks. As Jaffer Ali wrote in an article published in ClickZ Network (1/19/99) "...the nature of the advertising medium (and the message) has more impact on the quality of the click-through than any other factor." Ali goes on to cite five tests that utilized five different models to generate conversion from click-throughs to sales. The only difference within the five tests was the advertising medium; and you thought this would be easy; or, at least, easier.. What you
e looking for are a "quality clicks." As Ali concludes, "There are certainly other forms of advertising on the internet. Rich media, opt-in email, site sponsorships and others. And when we test these, you can be sure we will look beyond CPM and CTR to try to measure "click quality."
Stay tuned for the second article in this series.
Note: This article is copy written. Please do not use without permission.
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