How to drive traffic? Effective ways to attract targeted traffic. Encyclopedia of Marketing What is targeted traffic

How to drive targeted traffic to your website? For these purposes, you can resort to the most numerous solutions. There are many effective tools for increasing traffic to web resources. What means deserve attention? How to check the remainder of the traffic that can potentially go to the site? We will talk about this in our article.

Search engines

As practice shows, the highest traffic is observed on sites that are in the first lines according to the results of issuing requests in search enginesoh. It is for this reason that the owners of web resources tend to increase their rating. How to attract traffic? "White" methods of website promotion will come to the rescue here. It is on placement on pages of a unique, quality contentwhose content is truly arousing in users. Competent placement in texts is also important. keywords.

Naturally, the application of the above solutions will not allow the site to be in the first positions in a week according to the results of user queries in search engines. However, as soon as this happens, no "black" methods of optimizing other web resources will be able to squeeze it out of its place. Thus, traffic from search engines will gradually begin to flow.

Guest posts

How to drive traffic? A good free way is to search for web resources of similar topics. After finding such sites, it is enough to contact their owners. The latter should be invited to exchange content. In one of the articles posted on someone else's site, you need to provide a link to your resource. The owner of a third-party site operates in a similar way. Thus, a kind of traffic exchange takes place.

Social network

These days, it is safe to say that every Internet user is registered in one of the popular social networks. People come to such sites for the purpose of communication, exchange of information, and an exciting pastime. Considering the impressive number of visits to such resources, it becomes obvious that they are a great place to attract potential visitors to your site.

1. Thematic groups - all kinds of communities unite users according to their interests. Here you can post interesting posts that contain subtle links to your own Internet resource. At the same time, it is worth working with groups whose topics correspond to the promoted site.
2. Sending messages - users of social networks can directly send offers to visit the web resource, inform them about updates, contests and special offers.
3. Links under other people's posts - posting messages under third-party posts that lead to the site is a fairly effective solution to attract traffic.
4. Special statuses - a link on a personal page on a social network can interest users who are friends. Many of them can go to the address of the left source and subsequently tell their comrades about it.

Social media traffic can also be obtained using paid methods. We are talking about placing advertisements in communities whose topics correspond to the focus of the web resource. For a fee, you can ask a person who has an impressive number of subscribers on the social network to recommend to visit the site to users from the category of friends.

Thematic forums

Forums are pretty good for the site. Naturally, in order to avoid a negative reaction from visitors to such resources, you need to act competently, demonstrating unobtrusive behavior and trying not to violate the rules of the resource.

How to drive traffic from forums? To do this, you can do the following:

• Place a link to your own website in the user's personal profile.
• Leave a short advertisement for a web resource under each post.
• Invite forum users to go to your site in order to obtain the information they are looking for.

Blogging

Blogging is one of the better solutions to attract users to the site. How to get traffic from blogs? It is enough to create an article page on the corresponding resource. The latter must be regularly filled with high-quality, interesting materials. It is advisable that the articles on the blog page correspond to the subject of the web resource where you plan to attract traffic.

Infographics

Considering the ways to get traffic, it is worth saying a few words about such an effective method as infographics. Most users don't have the patience to read large texts. The method consists in presenting information on the site in the form of pictures. Short explanations can be attached to the latter. To create high-quality infographics on the pages of a web resource, it would be nice to hire a professional designer. Only then will the content look really attractive.

Offline advertising

If you have a budget, you can place ads advertising your own site in newspapers and magazines, on public transport, on television and radio. As a result, the name of the web resource will become familiar to a wide range of people. Such advertising may not be as expensive as it seems at first glance.

How to attract traffic to affiliate programs?

Some people don't have a website of their own. However, they want to attract traffic to make money on affiliate programs. To benefit from such a solution, you need to do the following. For a start, you should register with a suitable affiliate program and get sponsored links. The latter should be posted on popular forums, pages of Q&A services, sites with the highest traffic, in social networks.

Free bulletin boards

How to drive traffic? In the global network there are many promoted services with ads, where a whole mass of people visit every day. You should create a personal profile on such resources. Then you need to periodically advertise, offering services or products of your own site. It is desirable that such posts are decorated brightly and with high quality, which will allow you to count on attracting maximum traffic.

Cross references

The method of driving traffic is under one article leading to another. As a result, users do not immediately leave the web resource after viewing the content of interest. Site visitors are highly likely to look at other materials. The link mass of the site is automatically increased. Thus, the site will receive a higher ranking in the search engines. It is better to deliberately place only the most interesting and useful articles on the site. Perhaps one of the third-party resources will be interested in their content, copy them to their own pages and give the appropriate link.

Gifts for site visitors

Internet users love getting something for free. To increase website traffic, it is enough to send messages on social networks and forums about holding contests with prizes. Let the gifts be the smallest. Despite this, the possibility of winning them will definitely force users to go to the site and figure out the essence of the issue.

Buying traffic

The method involves the organization of a special advertising campaign, which is broadcast for a certain amount on popular, promoted sites. This approach contributes to the systematic attraction of new users to your own web resource. There are several formats on the basis of which an advertising campaign can be built:

1. Banners are graphic blocks that are installed in certain places of sites for a fee. Their purchase is possible both on promoted Internet sites and on social networks.
2. Contextual advertising - usually in the form of text messages that appear on certain pages of advanced sites according to the content topic. This way of buying traffic is quite expensive. For order contextual advertising you have to turn to the relevant services of popular search engines such as Yandex and Google.
3. Pop-up ads are ads that appear randomly in separate parts of Internet pages.
4. Teaser advertising - graphic blocks with the most vivid, interactive content. Often, appropriate text is added to the enticing image, which makes the user want to click on the website.

Sending messages by e-mail

Links to your own web resource can be sent to arbitrary email addresses. The latter can be purchased or obtained by agreement from the owners of well-promoted sites on which a whole mass of users are registered. Naturally, sending with the help of letters is necessary not just a "naked" link. The message must be issued in the form of a notification of upcoming promotions, contests, special offers, discounts.

Opening a channel on Youtube

To increase site traffic, it makes sense to register your own channel on the popular video service Youtube. First, you will have to work on its promotion, offering videos for viewing that can interest a mass audience. When the number of channel subscribers increases significantly, you should start offering them a visit to the promoted site, serving everything in the form of unobtrusive advertising. The address of the web service does not have to be shown directly in the videos. A link to it can be placed in the description under each video.

Subject mailings

There are special services through which users can be sent announcements, links and offers on topics of interest to them. For this, a person must agree to such a service. For example, the user is interested in sports or cinema. He agrees to receive a weekly compilation of relevant content published on selected sites. This has its own convenience. After all, a person does not have to independently search for interesting articles, traveling through various pages on the Web. Naturally, the owner of the site, who orders participation in the thematic mailing list, also benefits. In this case, users are regularly offered links, and sites receive the desired traffic.

Control over the amount of incoming traffic

How to check the rest of the traffic and keep statistics of site visits? For these purposes, a special counter must be built into the web resource system, which will automatically monitor the number of site visits. There are several services that offer similar services. Among the most reputable traffic counters, it is worth noting:

• Liveinternet;
• Hotlog;
• Rambler Top 100;
• OpenStat;
• Mail.ru.

"Black" methods of increasing traffic

If you wish, you can use the so-called black ways to attract visitors to the site. You need to use them at your own peril and risk. After all, such decisions can harm the image of any site, as well as cause resentment from users who are bothering them. This category includes:

• Spam is an annoying site advertisement that is offered to uninterested users.
• Doorways - when a person clicks on a link, they get to a site of a completely different subject than expected.
• Swapping is replacing popular pages in search engine results with less top ones.

Finally

So, we have reviewed the most effective and affordable ways to increase website traffic. Most of the above developments do not require absolutely no cash investments from the owner of the promoted web resource. Smart use such methods potentially allows you to attract an impressive number of new users to the site in a short period.

Targeted traffic - definition and example

So, targeted traffic is a flow of visitors who can really be interested in what you have to offer on the website / landing page. Why is it important to get targeted traffic? I will give you an example right away so that you understand this better.

So, let's say I have a website. Or even not from me, but just from some webmaster. A site on the topic of web technologies, site building, etc. The site contains articles, possibly videos and other content. But sooner or later the webmaster will decide to make money on the site. There are a lot of options for earning money, you can even assume what he will do (put a banner, start advertising some paid courses and affiliate programs, connect contextual advertising, etc.).

All this is good, but let's think about whether he will be able to make money if people with completely different hobbies and interests visit his site? Even if the flow of such people is very large, it is unlikely that it will be possible to make serious money on them, because this is not the target audience of the project.

And who, in this case, will make up this target audience? Basically, these are men aged 20-40 years, interested in site building and who want to learn how to create sites on their own. It is among such a public that the maximum interest will be - people will subscribe, click on classified advertisements, even buy something somewhere (books and lessons on site building).

From this example, 2 simple conclusions follow:

Targeted traffic is a flow of people who can be attributed to the target audience (target audience, if abbreviated).

It is targeted traffic that can generate income

The fact is that today it is very easy to get traffic to the site by itself - it will be enough to go to some buks (advertising service) and order surfing there. For 30-50 rubles, you can get up to 1000 page views of your site.

Yes, but will the traffic be targeted? No, people who are absolutely not interested in the topic will visit your site. It is possible that 5-10% will be somehow interested, but 95% of people just stay on the page for 10-60 seconds (how many are set) and leave.

How to get targeted traffic?

SEO optimization or writing texts for the requests of search engine users

This is a very, very good way to get targeted traffic for free. How? Everything looks something like the one I describe below.

Let's say you want to make money in the farming niche. Your target audience is summer residents and gardeners. One of the options to get this very targeted traffic is to create a website (blog or just an informational website) on which to write many useful articles.

These articles need to be tailored for specific keywords that people enter into a search engine. For example, “how to plant potatoes correctly”. Here you take and write under this key and others like that.

After some time (usually several months), articles will start appearing in the search engine and people will find them by typing various queries into the search engine.

Of course, in this case, I miss many details (how to write, what to do in addition to this), but my goal in this article is simply to describe seo optimization as an option for producing targeted traffic. With this approach, your target audience will come to your site 100%, because people will find you through a search for queries that they themselves entered.

And then, when the site is visited by 50 people per day, you can gradually monetize it. For example, sell various books and courses on farming on the site, sell goods (various seeds, tools for working in the garden).

Pros of SEO. The ability to receive hundreds and thousands of unique targeted visits to the site is absolutely free due to the fact that you will have many useful articles on your project.

Minuses. It will take a lot of effort (if you do it yourself) or money (if you hire others to do the job). The result will not come in 1-2 months, you will have to wait at least 6-8 months until the site becomes more or less stronger. And then, at first, you should not hope for big earnings.

Contextual advertising (Yandex.Direct, Google Adwords)

In fact, this method of obtaining targeted traffic is in many ways similar to SEO, because the traffic itself also comes from the search engines Yandex and Google. But here you have to pay for it. Pay for specific clicks on your ad.

For example, you want to sell some kind of product for a summer residence. The advantage of contextual advertising is that you can create an ad and launch an ad right now and get the first clicks in an hour. And maybe the first sales.

But the disadvantage in this case is that you have to pay for advertising. This is just one side of the issue, in addition to this, you will need to understand at least a little about contextual advertising in order to be able to create an advertising campaign, create ad groups, select keywords and set other settings. In short, much more will have to be done.

So, contextual advertising for a beginner is difficult. But only for the beginner who does not want to learn. Because in fact, there is nothing extra-complicated in creating and configuring it, you just need to start acting (it is corny to watch a couple of videos on youtube, read the official help).

Minuses. The need to figure out what's what (how to set up, how to create ads, track statistics). The need to pay for advertising. There is a great chance that on the first attempts you will not win back your money.

Targeted advertising (VK Target, Instagram, MyTarget, etc.)

Many popular sites allow you to place targeted ads. In general, target is translated as a goal, so it is obvious that targeted advertising can bring you targeted traffic.

Because the social network Vkontakte, for example, is visited by millions of users every day. And if your ad is shown to each of them, the money on the balance will disappear very quickly, but you will not get any return, because the ad was shown to those who were not interested in it.

In other cases, on the contrary, you will need to select a very, very narrow target audience, which will include only those who might really be interested in your offer.

Minuses. Again, you have to pay for ad placement. You also need to deeply understand this topic. Namely, how to select the target audience, how to compose ads correctly, etc.

Banner ad and ad line

Nowadays, many webmasters and bloggers have systems for selling advertising on their websites, with the help of which you can automatically purchase advertising on this person's resource.

This is one of the most simple ways traffic extraction, because here you practically do not need to analyze anything - just find suitable visited resources on the subject of your advertising and try to purchase impressions there (banner or ad line). The cost of payment is different in each case.

If on the site you need you did not find an opportunity to buy advertising automatically, you can try to find the webmaster's contacts and write to him directly with an offer to place an advertisement.

Placing posts in social. networks

A fairly simple way to get targeted traffic is to create an advertising post in which to describe your product in an attractive way, and then buy posting in some popular community.

For almost any product / service, you can select dozens of communities in which the target audience will be located. However, don't think that buying sponsored posts and making money from them is a simple matter, there are some things you need to work on:

As you can see, there are many issues to be resolved.

Outcome

Do not think that these are all ways to get targeted traffic, but if you continue to write further, it will turn out to be too cumbersome article. In the end, I would like to recommend that you do not try to master everything at once - it will not work. Better try to learn how to effectively extract targeted traffic from one source. When possible, move on to studying another source, etc.

By the way, in the article, I was the first to analyze this method - SEO optimization. It compares favorably with the fact that you can receive targeted traffic for free, but not immediately, but when your site / blog is promoted in search engines.

So, still not so many people know how to properly promote sites in search engines. And if you know, you will get a great advantage, since you can create your own projects and bring them to good traffic (from 1000 unique visitors). And, accordingly, for a good profit.

Yes, all this will not happen in 1 week or even 2 months. If you are advancing in the search, it takes time. Still, the prospect is good, isn't it?

So, we just have a course that is devoted to the effective promotion of a personal blog and its withdrawal to a profit of 20 thousand rubles in a year after its creation. Here's a look for you. The information from the course can be used not only to promote a blog, but also an information site.

Consider a hypothetical situation: you've built a great website, a great mobile app, or a great online store. You also have clients who are loyal to your traditional, non-digital business and have written many compliments about you on social media.

“It doesn't matter how beautiful a site is: if no one comes to it, good luck building your internet business,” - John Brandon, editor of Inc.com.

It was, of course, a joke about customers dutifully following their favorite brand from offline to online - if everything were so simple, the Internet industry with a turnover of billions of dollars would become absolutely useless.

Your landing pages / sites may be awesome, but most likely, by default, they are in the "dark corner" of the Internet, where traffic is as rare as the appearance of a Loch Ness monster in front of astonished bystanders.

So what do you do?

You should consider driving new visitors to your landing page or eCommerce site. You need to build your own traffic acquisition strategy. There are a number of options for this, from paid advertisements to content marketing. We'll cover these topics, but first a key concept needs to be explained:

Connect with the audience.

You must use your traffic acquisition strategy to connect with your target audience - the people most likely to become paying customers.

Even if you are new to internet marketing, you have probably read a lot about blogging, paid advertising traffic channels and social media marketing. IN this manual a different approach is taken - we will provide the holistic view necessary to create a powerful marketing strategy.

Traffic acquisition is much more than search engine marketing (SEM) using Google AdWords: it is one of the most important marketing techniques to reach your target audience.

Clients are needed, not just traffic

Marketers often group traffic into different categories: traffic that converts into sales and traffic that is unusable. Traffic that converts in the long term and traffic that converts in direct response to conversion action. There is "junk" traffic, good traffic, targeted traffic. What does all this mean?

Some kind of traffic is more valuable to your company than others. But this distinction is always subjective and depends on the unique needs of your business. As has been emphasized many times throughout this guide, you must understand your marketing goals: from this perspective, you will be able to determine the traffic you need.

This means taking a step back to see the big picture and understand your customer acquisition goal.

What target audience are you hoping to attract?

First of all, answer this question. The next step is to determine where exactly the people you want are grouped on the Internet. You may decide that the most direct and productive way to generate leads is to reach your audience through Facebook or LinkedIn. You may decide that you need to expand your blog's readership.

The Speak2Leads cloud service, for example, is in the very early stages of launching a traffic acquisition strategy. As part of this process, the company launches a blog on its website featuring posts from top-selling industry leaders.

But here's the problem - the site does not yet have a wide audience. Speak2Leads regularly publishes new content, so over time, the blog will certainly have readers. But this process does not happen by magic, and the problem of attracting an audience will not be solved overnight - it takes time, dedication and patience. Realistically, it takes 6 to 8 months for a blog to show itself as a lead generation factor.

At the same time, Speak2Leads granted the rights to publish their texts on third-party sites ( syndicated content) such as Business2Community, a website with an established audience of small business owners, entrepreneurs, and business executives. And that's not all - Business2Community, in turn, syndicated this content to the Yahoo Small Business marketing platform.

Publish your content initially on a blog, then expand your audience by distributing the original content. The idea is to find an audience that is much larger than yours and establish a substantive connection with it. One way to do this is by posting ads on social media. Another way: distributing branded content through a major online publisher.

This distinction leads us to important point: Distribution is the heart of internet marketing. To direct visitors to the site, you need to position the brand outside the Internet... This current concept applies to almost any marketing environment.

Eagle Rock Brewery has grown its craft beer customer base through partnerships with local restaurants.

Eagle Rock Brewery's marketing practice embodies a concept previously adopted by Estee Lauder to create its cosmetics business - it distributes products through department store chains, i.e., in places where target customers are likely to spend money. Today, Estee Lauder's international empire is worth billions.

The main difference between buying traffic and more traditional distribution methods is that you have to do more than just go where your potential customers are likely to be. Attract them to your landing pages / sites and motivate them to come back.

Understand the key drivers of internet traffic

Key driving forces - drivers - traffic usually falls into one of two categories - paid and free.

Free traffic includes visitors coming to landing pages / sites through organic search, word of mouth from referrals, social media posts, viral videos, news agencies that track your company's online activities and link to your site.

Paid traffic includes users who go to your web resource through banner ads, social media ads, paid blog posts, etc. If you find it difficult to understand which content is paid and which is not, pay attention to the words “with sponsored support ”or“ from our partners ”. Companies are required by law to indicate when advertising is paid.

One of the most famous online marketing myths is that free traffic is better than paid traffic. This is not true - both types of marketing require a significant investment of time and money. In other words, "free traffic" is not free at all - you still need to invest time and human capital in developing a sound strategy and implementing it.

The next two paragraphs provide a general overview of free and paid internet traffic drivers. Let's start with the big picture and go deeper into the details.

Use free traffic drivers

There are several major sources of free visits in online marketing. These include the following channels:

Public Relations:

To gain attention from media channels, establish relationships with journalists. To act in the best interests of the brand, connect with top bloggers in the industry and give them your content to post.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO):

Develop a strategy for increasing your site's position in search engines. When potential customers are looking for information on the Internet, your brand should be at the top of the SERP.

Social media:

Blogging:

Share your knowledge and expert opinions through the blog. This will make you a reliable source of information for existing / potential customers.

Video marketing:

Create engaging videos that explain your offers and tell your brand story. Branded videos also have some entertainment value and create a “viral effect”.

Content syndication:

No audience for video or text content, what does your company produce? Put content on your home site and distribute it through websites or video channels (such as YouTube) that have a wider audience. Some viewers or readers covered by your content will go to your landing page or website

Create a subscription base:

Attract visitors just once is not enough... Encourage them to come back again and again. A list of email addresses will help you achieve this goal. For example, you can send notification to subscribers about new blog posts (see example below):

As we mentioned in the previous section, the term "free traffic" can be misleading. No magic - companies still need to invest time and resources to build a traffic acquisition strategy through the channels listed above.

Take the Speak2Leads blog as an example. As we mentioned, the brand syndicates its own content with third-party media channels including Business2Community and Yahoo Small Business. The company also promotes its blog posts through salesperson discussion groups on social networking site LinkedIn, social knowledge sharing service Quora on CRM-related topics, and to some extent on Twitter.

Although the blog is relatively new, these posts send a small amount of referral traffic to the Speak2Leads site. Speak2Leads content is shared by members of LinkedIn groups interested in reading these posts. Readers who liked the article share a link to it on social networks.

If a company decides to syndicate content, the article is republished by Business2Community and Yahoo Small Business, directing referral traffic to either Speak2Leads directly or via social media.

The cost of the actual web traffic is zero. But building this "marketing engine" requires payment:

• Hiring a content strategist who oversees editorial policy and builds relationships with a content syndication partner (Business2Community).
• Writing time, often costly (the CEO's time spent on an article is paid at a higher rate), or the direct cost of hiring a copywriter or editor.
• The costs associated with building a social marketing strategy, as well as the individual costs of conducting promotions in social networks.

But your team's skills will lower your marketing costs. A case in point is the story of Dollar Shave Club, a Santa Monica-based subscription-based start-up men's shaving kit.

CEO Michael Dubin had some experience as an improvisational actor. So Michael and his colleagues made a funny "viral video".

Result? Millions of dollars in venture funding and 5,000 new customers signing up to deliver shaving sets within one day of the campaign launch - all thanks to a video that cost just $ 4,500.

Don't expect great video or great copy to drive traffic to your web resources overnight. Enchanting success stories - as shown in Hollywood movies - are rare, especially in online marketing. Take a lesson from Karen Cheng, founder of the video channel Dance in a Year (roughly translated, Learn to Dance in a Year).

So, Karen studied dance for a year and documented this process on video every day. On early recordings, she moves like a new dancer. As the video reports continue, you can see that Karen's movements become more and more polished. On the final recordings, she dances like a real professional.

Karen's videos tell an amazing story of patience, dedication, and performance. They give strength. They are inspiring. This is why this "home movie" has over 6,000,000 views on YouTube today.

What looks like luck at first glance is actually part of Karen's carefully planned marketing strategy.

“I put a lot of effort into marketing and it started long before the first video was released. It was not an accident that it went viral - it was the result of labor, ”- Karen Cheng in an article for Fast Company magazine.

Here's what Karen writes about her marketing moves:

2. On the second day, bloggers who had seen Karen's video the day before began retelling her story through new media channels: Mashable, Jezebel and Huffington Post. These blogs have generated significant traffic growth for Karen's video channel. Expanding the range of traffic sources increased the number of views to 800,000 per day.

3. The popularity of the video pushed Karen to the YouTube homepage. This chain of events helped Karen reach 1.8 million views on her third day.

The video also helped connect with potential sponsors of Karen's project. Among them - Lululemon and American Apparel - two brands from which Karen wanted to get info support. The offer did not go unanswered: the companies posted her video on their social accounts.

Among other things, Karen released her video on Tuesday, guessing that on Monday, potential viewers would likely be catching up at work for things they didn't finish before the weekend. Her tactic was to "catch" the audience in the offices at the right time, keeping the entire week available for the ad to grow in popularity.

The beauty of strategy lies in two aspects:

• Marketing and distribution of the product is relatively cheap.
• The strategy applies to any quality unique content, including eBooks (eBooks) and blog posts.

It's also important to understand the “echo effect” caused by this marketing initiative: If you enter “learn to dance” into Google, Karen's video will be at the very top of the first SERP.

Key planner google words (Google Keyword Planner) reports that this phrase refers to highly competitive search terms - in other words, there is a tense battle for the attention of users asking search engines "How to learn to dance?"

Karen's video, promoted by the high social and PR activity of its creator, is in the top ten best search results. This high SERP ranking generates a strong residual effect and drives up traffic.

"How to learn to dance?" - highly competitive search query

When attracting visitors to your site for the first time, take care of their return immediately. Sending out emails is an inexpensive and powerful way to achieve this core marketer's goal. This is how the PassivePanda blog grew its audience from zero to 350,000 unique visitors in a year.

If you ever feel confused in your marketing practice, remember that people are the heart and soul of your marketing strategy. You must fight for the love, support, and attention of your audience.

Buy traffic? - Also a great solution!

Paid marketing channels are powerful traffic drivers. These include online banner ads, search marketing campaigns on Google, Yandex, Bing, and retargeting campaigns that target users who have visited your landing pages / sites before.

Buying paid traffic is a powerful strategy when you need to build brand awareness or drive customers to landing pages / eCommerce sites.

With enough care, the online advertising ecosystem will dramatically improve your company's bottom line. But if you spend your advertising budget without setting your ultimate goals, then buying traffic will not be beneficial.

Small business owners and startup organizers are often hesitant to buy traffic.

Why?

On the one hand, they are skeptical about online marketing in general. On the other hand, they do not want to risk their funds. But by ignoring paid marketing channels, you're missing out on users.

Facebook, for example, launched an ad program in which marketers acquire traffic on a CPI (Cost Per Install) basis. Users install applications directly from the Facebook mobile platform, and advertisers pay for each such action.

In addition, in terms of costs, this method of acquiring traffic is more than competitive - sometimes the cost of a visitor costs less than $ 1. Facebook isn't the only mobile advertising platform - there are a number of options available to equate the amounts your target customers are willing to pay with the prices needed to achieve a level of profitability (positive ROI).

And here's the thing: Companies that avoid the risk of investing in paid marketing channels are probably doing it wrong. Contrary to what our instincts tell us, marketing is not a waste pipe for money. Done right, marketing becomes a reliable profit driver.

The Harvard Business Review, one of the most respected online business publications, published an article titled End the War between Sales and Marketing. The meaning of the article is clear from the title: both business units are included in one team, the power of which multiplies when sales and marketing are equal in importance and work together.

When your marketers know their job, they don't even need to spend on budget. This is a controversial point of view, but it needs to be made public. If your marketing department is a money sink, then it is probably best to dissolve it. Otherwise, why pay into the void?

The trick, however, is not to spend a million more effectively. Start your tests with a small investment in marketing (called “budget”) and increase your budget gradually. Here's what business owners will be especially pleased to know - testing can even start with a hundred dollars. Yes, you will lose them, but the trick is to save the data you collect about which pricing models, targeting options, and ad networks are best for you.

The AdRoll cloud service allows you to develop and launch a new retargeting campaign in just 3 steps. In fact, you get $ 60 as a gift for a two-week trial.

One more step - and a new retargeting campaign will be launched

With the presence of online media giants like Facebook and Google - as well as thousands of small companies - the PPC marketing industry is valued at hundreds of billions of dollars. And rest assured: these numbers are constantly growing (we will dwell on the methods of successfully buying traffic in the next posts of the Online Marketing for Beginners series).

Inbound marketing as a pull mechanism for your company

Inbound marketing is a term that has been recent years popularized by the Boston marketing company HubSpot. This term is catchy and memorable, but what exactly does it mean?

In a nutshell, inbound marketing is a kind of "lever" that directs traffic to your landing pages and websites. It is a marketing discipline that encourages business leaders to position their companies as “pull” rather than “push” market mechanisms.

Examples of inbound marketing include branded content (distributed through blogs and video channels), social media, and giveaways / free sample products. Inbound marketing is optimal for companies positioning themselves as opinion leaders in a certain field and valuable sources of information.

As with any marketing initiative, quality is critical. If the content is bad, no one wants to read or watch it, share links to it (because there are many others on the Internet - good - texts, videos, etc.). The only thing your company can't do is fake authenticity marketing message. So focus on value, not gimmicks that potential customers see right through.

Key findings

1. Marketing makes your web resources more visible on the internet.

2. Traffic by itself does not work. You have to invest the time and energy to connect you with the right audience and bring visitors to your landing pages.

3. Acquiring traffic takes time and resources. Invest them in strategy and back up the plans with action.

4. Marketing generates income. If there is no measurable return on investment, you are probably doing something wrong.

5. Don't jump to the conclusion that paid traffic is inferior to organic traffic. Well-organized PPC campaigns are very effective.

6. Concentrate on the quality of your products and marketing content. If it's blindingly good, there will be an “echo effect” that translates into free social media marketing and repeat visits to your landing pages / sites over time.

7. Consumers feel cheated from miles away. Show them the respect they deserve. Start with targeted customers and work the conversion path backwards to refine your marketing strategy.

High conversions for you!

Based on materials:

You will learn:

• What is the attraction of targeted traffic to the site.
• In what ways is this possible.
• How to drive targeted traffic to B2B.
• Due to which it is possible to attract targeted traffic from social networks.
• What methods of attracting targeted traffic are used by scammers.

What does it mean to attract targeted traffic to a website?

Attracting targeted traffic to the site is the way to high earnings for the owner of the web resource. Traffic is a flow of unique visitors who have visited your web resource within a certain period of time. It is important to understand: the more the total number of visitors to your site per day, the more your earnings. Attracting targeted traffic directly affects the increase in profits. In this case, profit can be obtained both from the sale of goods and services (direct benefit), and from advertising of other people's goods and services (indirect benefit).

The main task of specialists who are engaged in attracting targeted traffic is to increase traffic to your resource, because the success of website promotion on the Internet depends on this indicator.

Main traffic sources:

• search engines;
• social networks;
• forums, blogs and other Internet sites;
• direct visits to the resource (URL input, browser bookmarks).

The total traffic to a web resource is the total traffic, that is, attracted from all used and possible sources.

There is not only incoming traffic, but also outgoing traffic (for example, a resource visitor clicked on an external link located on your website page). Target and non-target traffic is also distinguished. If we talk about targeted traffic, then in this case the visitor comes to the resource with a specific purpose, which your site will help him realize. Non-targeted traffic consists of those visitors who came to your web resource by accident, for example, via an external link from another source (by clicking on an advertisement). The main goal of the owner of any website is to attract targeted traffic.

To organize the accounting of targeted and non-targeted traffic, you can install special counters. Here are the most popular statistics services today:

• Yandex.Metrica;
• Google Analytics;
• LiveInternet.

So, targeted site traffic is a flow of visitors interested in goods, services and information posted on your resource. Such visitors perform some targeted actions (make a purchase, call the office, leave a request, and so on). Attracting targeted traffic is also called website promotion.

If the owner of the resource does not attract people to the site and does not begin to wonder what kind of visitors they are, what they are interested in, then sooner or later, even with high rates in statistics services, the overall result will be reduced to a minimum. It is important to understand that it is not enough just to increase traffic: it is also necessary that this traffic helps to solve the problems facing the site owner. It is the attraction of targeted traffic that is important, and to organize such an attraction, you must immediately look for an interested audience, and then the financial success of your Internet project is guaranteed.

Really working ways to attract targeted traffic on the Internet

1. Blogs.

Search engines index information from blogs the fastest. In addition, popular blogs (both paid and free hosting) gather an audience interested in your proposal. To promote on blogs, you can use not only your own platform for publishing interesting materials, but also other people's resources. As part of this approach, partner bloggers simply host review posts with links to your site. Of course, this method of attracting targeted traffic is not free, but the costs in this case are much less than when using other methods of website promotion.

Closely related to blogging is podcasting, which can also draw attention to a resource by quickly delivering a message to the target audience.

1. Thematic forums.

It is not enough to leave a message on the forum to attract people from there. It is necessary to establish good contact with forum visitors: share information useful to them and respond to messages from other members of the forum. You should not openly invite people to visit your site, this can lead to negative reactions and cause your ban. However, if you communicate correctly with members of the forum, you can earn their loyalty and arouse interest. This will ensure you attract targeted traffic: new interested visitors will come to your web resource from the forum.

1. Social media.

In modern society, almost everyone uses social networks, which is why traffic from Facebook, VKontakte and other social media is often more than from ordinary search engines, and at the same time the audience is more targeted. There are several ways to promote a website through social networks. To attract targeted traffic, you can, for example:

• create and promote an account;
• create a community and / or group;
• use targeted contextual advertising and so on.

With any chosen method, an integrated approach and significant costs (especially labor) are required. Today, the level of SMM is quite high, so it may be more profitable to order a promotion service through social networks in a specialized company, relying on competent SMM specialists.

1. Mailing lists.

The traditional way of attracting targeted traffic is sending by email. However, before choosing a provider for organizing such mailing, be sure to check how the system works correctly, whether the legal requirements are being observed. Such mailing not only ensures the attraction of targeted traffic, but also supplies you with a constant audience that will visit your resource regularly. Your site will be visited by target users who are really interested in the information posted on it.

1. Videos / webinars.

Any form of video message in which you personally address your target audience (an interesting video on YouTube or a webinar) provides a good level of targeted traffic attraction. Moreover: a well-edited and interesting video may well turn viral and cause a constant increase in traffic.

1. Press releases.

This is a traditional method of disseminating information, and it does not lose its relevance and effectiveness in the modern world. Today there are a large number of resources where you can write about your site or offer. The more visitors your chosen resource has, the more effective it will be to attract targeted traffic.

1. Information support of conferences, seminars.

If you have a news site, you can try to become a partner of various thematic events: you publish news, and in exchange for this, a link to your resource appears on the official site of the event. In addition, you may be provided additional features: place your information on advertising stands, include in e-mail newsletters and so on.

1. Offline advertising.

A good way to attract targeted traffic is to post information about your resource at metro stations, on TV and radio. The cost of such advertising can be significantly lower than you thought.

1. Publishing articles on thematic sites and mailing lists.

Try to find as many resources and subscriptions with similar topics as possible. Talk to the resource owner about hosting your article. To get the green light, make your article useful and informative, without aggressive ads. Tell us about yourself and your web resource in the author's section, which will be below the main article. In the same block, you can specify a link to your site, an email address for feedback, and so on.

1. Signature in the letter.

If you regularly communicate by e-mail and correspond frequently, be sure to add a small ad unit to your signature. Inform about the project, tell us about promotions and current contests, invite the interlocutor to go to your site.

1. Viral content.

This method will allow you to attract targeted traffic for free. Users organize viral mailing voluntarily: they send messages to friends, post information on their website - in general, they distribute content in every possible way on the world wide web of their own free will. Video files, audio clips, presentations, interesting articles, images, advertising messages about a promotion or discount can become viral. Alternatively, you can use viral content other authors with their permission.

1. Your recommendations to friends and acquaintances.

This is a free way to attract targeted traffic, but, of course, you should not expect impressive dividends from it, because your friends are unlikely to buy goods from you regularly. But for the first sales, this option is quite suitable. Friends will also help form the backbone of your loyal and loyal readership. So, this method should not be neglected. In addition, if in reality few people can boast of hundreds of friends, then in the online world this is a frequent occurrence. You may well attract a large number of acquaintances on social networks.

1. Free bulletin boards.

The world wide web is rich in promoted services with free ads, where you can post information on a daily basis. Such resources are visited by a large number of people. All you need is to create a personal profile and regularly add ads, offering services or products from your own website. Try to design your posts in a bright and high-quality way: a good design will contribute well to attracting targeted traffic.

1. Buying traffic.

Buying traffic means a special advertising campaign, within which broadcasts take place on popular, promoted sites for a certain amount of money. This will ensure the systematic attraction of targeted traffic to your resource. There are several formats that can form the basis of such an advertising campaign:

• Banners - graphic blocks that are installed in separate places on the site. Banners are placed for money; you can buy space for them not only on promoted websites, but also on social networks.
• contextual advertising - a text message that pops up in search engines and sites and corresponds to the subject of the user's request. This method of attracting targeted traffic is quite expensive. To order advertising, you need to use the services of popular search engines such as Yandex and Google.
• Pop-up ads looks like an ad that appears randomly in certain parts of a web page.
• Teaser advertisement - small graphic blocks filled with interactive content and decorated as brightly as possible. Most often, the image is accompanied by attractive text that makes the user want to click on the ad.

Practitioner tells

How retargeting drives targeted traffic to your website

Roman Kumar Vias,

marketing Director, Qlean.ru

Retargeting allows you to focus on those who have already visited the site before. If a client visited your site, but did not take any action (did not look at prices, did not choose services, and so on), then he is "caught up" with the help of banners and text ads. However, to understand exactly where this user left your site, you need to place a special code on the web resource.

This code can be obtained from the social network Facebook. To do this, go to the "Your advertising" tab, select the "Audience" item and click on the "Create audience" button. Then copy the code and paste it into the site page to record and collect information, and it will start working when the user takes any action.

For example, when a visitor visits the start page of a company's website, the code assigns cookies. If a visitor leaves the resource to another site, he recognizes cookies and shows thematic banners. Moreover, such advertising has its own peculiarity - it does not annoy the user, because this is not an annoying offer, but just a friendly reminder.

In our case, customers left for different reasons and at different stages of the funnel. We have developed a flexible return system.

Service selection.At this stage, there are three options for the reasons why the client left the resource, and our actions in accordance with these reasons:

• if the visitor could not find the information he needed, we try to attract him with the help of banners demonstrating the advantages of our service, as well as with the help of useful articles about home cleaning;
• if a visitor suddenly doubts the safety of our services and the decency of the staff, then we explain to him the complexity of the process of gradual selection of our employees, thanks to which we screen out about 97% of applicants;
• showing clients funny pictures (picture 1)that are personalized (thanks to this they evoke a lot of positive emotions and are well remembered). Our target audience is mostly young people who love humor and adjust in a friendly way with its help.

Determination of the price.If a client leaves the site at this stage, it means that he did not like the service or the price for it. Such visitors can stay on our site thanks to discount banners. Product margin determines the final discount. In some cases, we provide a 10% discount, and sometimes - 30% at once (Figure 2).

Thanks to retargeting, you can not only show the user single messages, but tell related stories. It becomes possible to link advertising messages together, showing them one after the other in sequence. For example, 10 days after the first visit of the client, you can demonstrate discounts, after 15 days - a list of services and benefits of the service, after 20 days - make a special offer.

For example, within the framework of one promotion, we placed a banner with a countdown that told the client “Hurry up to take advantage of the discount within 15 minutes”. This formulation subconsciously pushed our visitors to action. This allowed us to increase the conversion of conversions to orders by 40% (Figure 3).

As a result, we were able to return 15% of potential customers to the site and turn 8% of them into real ones.

Practitioner tells

An example of attracting targeted traffic using cycle rickshaws

Sergey Lapin,

first Deputy General Director of SPSR Express

If a company needs new clients in no time, then guerrilla marketing may be the right solution. The creative action will definitely be remembered, and the viral effect will give the speed of spreading information about the brand among consumers. Also, the partisan action allows you to save your advertising budget. That is why we have decided to run an unusual advertising campaign.

In the winter of 2015, we started cooperation with AliExpress, an online hypermarket of Chinese products. We were engaged in the delivery of goods to buyers. Six months later, we studied the partner's delivery data and noticed that his audience in Russia is residents of the regions. Already in September 2015, the share of sales of this hypermarket in the Moscow market was 30–40% of the sales in the regions. We concluded that the most solvent clients are located in Moscow. Representatives of this audience are mostly young people who follow fashion trends and are ready to order modern products from China.

This hypermarket known today was faced with the task of arousing the interest of young residents of the capital. Previously, such actions were not held, since the company at that time was not so long ago working on the Russian market. We decided to organize the attraction of targeted traffic to the store through guerrilla marketing, since interesting promotions are not particularly costly in terms of finance and at the same time are guaranteed to attract the attention of visitors.

We focused exclusively on young people. The discovery of our action was an unusual channel for delivering information and the ability to kindly joke about the difficulties of translating product descriptions from Chinese into Russian.

We were looking for an idea using the brainstorming method. Employees of the marketing department gathered and began to discuss which advertising channel would be able to attract potential customers and at the same time would not be very expensive. For example, placing billboards in the center of the capital would not bring us closer to the goal, since consumers rarely look at billboards. Therefore, we decided to place an advertisement on special posters that were attached to tricycles - cycle rickshaws. For a month our promoters rode these bicycles around Moscow.

The choice of this channel was due to two reasons:

• cycle rickshaws all evoke associations with China, and since we were advertising a Chinese store, such a semantic connection bore fruit;
• due to the fact that the cycle rickshaws moved throughout the city, we were able to reach a very large number of representatives of the target audience and thereby ensured the attraction of targeted traffic to the store.

Since our target audience within the advertising campaign was precisely the youth, we decided to use self-irony as the main advertising tool. That is why incorrect translation of product names from Chinese into Russian became a non-standard "highlight" of the action.

Due to incorrect translation through online services, product descriptions in Russian are reflected incorrectly, and very serious errors occur (picture 1).For example, instead of "dual-core phone" - "phone down the drain, two cores." This became the subject of user jokes, and there was a lot of resonance. We were not taken aback and used this factor, making it the basis of our advertising campaign. For this, two-sided banners were made with funny and even ridiculous translations of the names of goods from the online store. (Figure 2). Each banner had a QR code that anyone could scan using a smartphone. This allowed people to go straight to the AliExpress website and place an order for the item whose ad was scanned.

The action was attended by 11 cycle rickshaws that moved around Moscow during September 2015. We set three main tasks for our promoters. Rickshaw drivers had to:

• distribute promotional materials with information about our company and our Chinese partner;
• travel around the areas where young people gather (Center, Vorobyovy Gory, Gorky Park), from 11:00 to 20:00;
• stop periodically for passersby to take pictures of posters, QR codes and pedicabs.

During the campaign, more than 60 thousand people turned to our promoters with additional questions about the Chinese hypermarket and express delivery options. We covered 3 million people. In September and October, more than 50 materials about our action were published in the media. Casual passers-by stopped to take pictures of cycle rickshaws, shared posts on social networks, told about the Chinese store and our action to family and friends. The frequency of brand mentions on the Internet has increased significantly. We also succeeded in attracting targeted traffic to our resource - + 23%. The data for the AliExpress website was comparable to this figure. These are users who switched to an online resource using QR codes. The budget of the action was 1 million rubles, but all expenses paid off in three months.

Attracting targeted traffic to b2b

• "Signed" domain names (corporate, "product" and directly indicating the scope of your activity).
• Industry sites, trading systems (b2b sites) and specialized sites. The most popular b2b platform is b2b-center. Allows to carry out 43 types of trade procedures - both for the purchase and sale of goods and services. The customer and the supplier in this system interact within the framework of the trading procedure. That is, the customer announces the beginning of the auction, then the participants automatically receive an invitation to this auction. At the same time, the supplier has the opportunity to independently find tenders of interest to him in the "Marketplace" section, using the search by the name of the ordering company, the number of tenders or the classifier of the purchased products, and apply for participation in suitable procedures. The supplier can also announce its own tenders for the sale of its products.
• Various kinds of ratings and catalogs. To get acquainted with all the diversity, you need to thoroughly explore the vastness of the Internet. There are many rating sites like b2b-expert.
• Sites of thematic communities, Internet forums, conferences. Working here, you can get not only pleasure from pleasant communication, but also direct financial benefits. However, no self-promotion is allowed here. Otherwise, you will simply ruin your reputation.
• Non-core sites your target audience visits. Go to blogs that have already written about other b2b products.
• Mobile advertising.Basically it works according to the CPA model. This is a payment model for online advertising, in which only certain user actions on the advertiser's website are paid. You need to register as an advertiser, determine the advertising budget, the type of targeted action (for which you will be charged) and the cost of this action. The most popular networks today are: Begun, Wapstart, Exelo, Everad, Admitad.
• Content Marketing. An important component of this type of marketing is search traffic and its attraction. It is possible to adapt the home page of the site only for a certain (limited) number of search queries, but competent content marketing (with an emphasis on SEO) can ensure the attraction of targeted traffic for other key queries. To do this, you just need to select the necessary keywords and generate content around them.
• Cross-promotion. Look for companies with a similar target audience, but not your direct competitors. Here are some more helpful ideas:

Exchange blog posts with partners (guest posts);

Place banners of each other on your resources;

Host joint webinars;

• Podcasts. In modern society, time has long become the most important value. Many web resource owners simply do not have time to write an article or make a video to attract targeted traffic. Podcasts (audio recordings) can help you make your life easier. Just cut and post them on your website (PodFM, Podster).

Methods that promise to easily attract targeted traffic, but in fact turn out to be a waste of money and time

It is not always that managers independently ensure the attraction of targeted traffic to the company's website. Quite often you have to hire outside specialists. How do you find a reliable contractor so as not to harm your wallet and website?

To choose the best option for attracting targeted traffic to your web resource, you need to know the options for “black” and “gray” schemes for cheating visitors and understand all the consequences of the frequent arrival of “left” users to your resource.

What could be the problem in principle? For example, you ordered to attract targeted traffic to your site and are ready to pay a commission for this to partners, and they take and "dilute traffic", taking your money without providing real buyers.

Arbitration schemes are divided into legal and illegal. The basis for this division is the source of attracting targeted traffic.

Legal (white) traffic - these are all types of traffic that are not prohibited by the community and the state (this does not always coincide).

Simply put, with these methods of attracting targeted traffic, real visitors come to your site, which you expected. They are interested in the content of the site and make real purchases, which means they generate reliable statistics and bring you profit.

Illegal (black) traffic - these are methods in which users (and sometimes just bots) come to sites, knowingly not interested in a targeted action that is useful to you. In other words, you pay for them, but they don't pay off in any way. At the same time, there are various movements on the site, but there is no conversion.

Affiliates are making a pretty good profit from using cheap illegal traffic. It is simply served under the guise of a stream of “hot” target customers who should be interested in the offer and who you are waiting for on your website.

Here are the main schemes that are common among dishonest affiliates:

Every visitor who wants to earn at least a little is invited to make a transition to a certain web resource (possibly yours), for an action on this resource (registration in the game, forming an application, like, and so on) you can get the promised couple of kopecks.

The result is an imitation of activity on the site, but the owner does not gain anything, since it is impossible to monetize such a visitor in the future.

To avoid such an unpleasant situation, regularly communicate with webmasters and advertisers, watch for suspicious statistics. If in Yandex.Metrica you see a large number of refusals when switching from certain resources, this is the first sign of deception.

Be sure to track user returns. If visitors from some resource constantly register, but no longer return to your site, then this is a fraudulent scheme of pseudo-professionals.

2. Fake call center.

In this case, to implement the scheme, a huge number of virtual numbers and SIM-cards are recruited, through which order applications are confirmed. It seems to you that targeted traffic is being attracted to your website and there is a conversion into sales, but in fact there are no characters confirming the purchase. In addition, you waste time and money sending the order, and it is returned back, since the specified addressee simply does not exist.

To avoid this kind of cheating, use a delay in payments (hold). The fact is that in "black" call centers the numbers are most often active only for 15-30 minutes. Of course, giving feedback to the client immediately and calling back instantly is a good tone for a store site. However, this is exactly what the scammers are counting on. Therefore, if in doubt, then you should make a test call after a few hours or days. If you nevertheless attacked scammers, then the number will no longer be available.

In the case of sending physical goods, pay commission only after receiving payment from the client.

3. Cheat using iframe.

This method is considered to be relatively new and overrides the cookies of webmasters. In this case, cookies are hung on all site visitors without exception, and the conversion takes the form of 1: 10000.

To do this, use the following HTML code: