Martech hub

How To Buy Direct Web Traffic (The Right Way)

How To Buy Direct Web Traffic (The Right Way)

Are you trying to find the best way to buy direct web traffic to generate more leads for your business?

Every website owner wants to see their traffic increasing over time.

Assuming those visitors are genuinely interested in your product or service, then it should result in more leads and higher conversions.

Organic SEO is one way to achieve this. But if that doesn’t work (or you’re looking for more immediate results) then you may want to explore paid options.

That’s why in this post, we’re going to explore how to buy web traffic the right way and what to do next to maximize your chances of profiting from it.

But first, let’s take a closer look at what direct web traffic is.

Section linkWhat Is Direct Web Traffic?

The definition of direct web traffic is website visits without a referring website or from an unknown source.

Chances are if you’re looking to buy web traffic, this isn’t exactly what you had in mind. After all, it’s more beneficial to know where your visitors are coming from to improve your digital marketing strategy.

Don’t worry if the term direct web traffic doesn’t mean what you think it did. However, it is important to understand this term so that you can learn more about your audience when you view your traffic sources inside a web analytics platform like Google Analytics.

There can be various reasons for this, such as:

  • A visitor typing a URL directly into their browser’s address bar
  • Traffic from an offline document, like a PDF
  • Visiting a bookmarked webpage
  • Clicking an HTTP link on an HTTPS site
  • Traffic coming from untrackable social networks

Before we move on to why and how to buy direct web traffic, let’s quickly go over the other traffic sources you might see in your analytics platform.

This way, when you start paying for traffic, you’ll know exactly what the data means.

Web traffic sources

Section linkWeb Traffic Sources

To help website owners understand how people are finding them, web analytics platforms segment website visitors by the following sources:

  • Direct: Traffic that has an unknown source or referrer.
  • Email: Traffic that has come from email marketing campaigns
  • Organic: Traffic that has come from a search engine, but hasn’t been paid for.
  • Paid search: Traffic that has come from a paid listing on a search engine.
  • Referral: Traffic that has come from another website.
  • Social: Traffic that has come from a social network.
  • Other: Any traffic that the source or medium cannot be identified by your web analytics platform.

While tools like Google Analytics generally do a good job at segmenting most of your web traffic, they are never completely accurate.

That's why if you want to better understand how your audience finds your site and what content is responsible for driving that traffic, then you should be utilizing UTMs.

We won’t go too deep on this topic here, but in short: a UTM is a small snippet of code that you can attach to a URL to measure the performance of a campaign or piece of content.

For example, if you’re running a holiday promotion you can use UTMs to track precisely which social media post or email resulted in the most conversions. By knowing what worked and what did not work, you will be able to make more data-driven decisions in the future.

🔍 If you’d like to know more, then you can check out our ultimate guide on UTMs: What They Are And How to Use Them The Right Way.

Section linkWhen To Buy Direct Web Traffic

There are many reasons why you might want to buy web traffic. Some of the most common reasons are to:

  • Generate more sales from an online store
  • Increase the number of subscribers to a newsletter
  • Raise brand awareness for a new product, service, or promotion
  • Inform the public (e.g. government, health services)
  • Bring users into a remarketing funnel

Whatever the reason, you should always have a clear goal in mind - it should never just be “to get more traffic”.

Some people wrongly think that more visitors = more success.

If only it were that simple...

Seeing your website visitors increase might give you a warm feeling inside, but if you’re not attracting the right kind of visitors then it isn't going to positively affect your bottom line.

Want a bigger return from your digital marketing campaigns?

Receive your free sample report direct to your inbox and see how Metrics Watch can make your reporting more effective!

If you’re spending money to gain more traffic, then you really want to see a good return on that investment (ROI).

That’s why it’s important to set a clear goal and pre-qualify your paid traffic through proper segmentation and targeting.

Now let’s take a look at some of the best ways you can buy web traffic.

How do you buy direct web traffic?

Section linkBest Ways To Buy Direct Web Traffic

There are many ways to buy web traffic for your site, each with its own strengths and weaknesses.

Some of the most common ways are social media ads, paid search ads, using content distribution services, and digital display ads.

Let's take a look at each one in more detail.

Section link1. Social Media Ads

Running ads on social media is one of the most common ways to buy web traffic. Depending on which platform you choose to advertise on and the keywords/audience being targeted, it can also be very cost-effective.

Social media platforms offer marketers tools to create campaigns with advanced targeting features to help get your ads in front of the people who are most likely to perform your desired action.

Example of a Facebook social media ad

Some platforms like Facebook even let you create landing pages within the app itself, helping you pre-qualify your traffic even further.

Although currently targeting options are becoming more limited due to a public shift towards online privacy (such as the privacy changes introduced with Apple’s IOS 14 update), social media advertising still offers a way to reach millions of daily active users for any budget.

Section link2. Paid Search Ads

Another common approach to buying web traffic is through pay-per-click (PPC) advertising on search engines like Google or Bing.

While it’s true that 70-80% of internet users ignore paid ads on a search engine results page, the first five results account for more than two-thirds of clicks - ads included!

Example of paid search ads

Depending on the keywords you’re targeting, Google Ads can become expensive. For example, the average cost per click (CPC) in 2022 for a listing on the Google Search Network is $1-2, but the CPC for a competitive keyword can cost much more (e.g. targeting ‘Insurance’ can cost a whopping $54.91 per click).

But to give you a rough benchmark, the average ROI from Google Ads is around 200% for small businesses. This means that typically they are earning $2 for every $1 spent!

With PPC campaigns, it’s important to consider where the user is in their customer journey so that you can target them with the right messaging at the right time - when they are most likely to convert.

Section link3. Content Distribution Services

Another way to buy web traffic is to use a content distribution service. A service like Quuu Promote makes your content easily accessible to content creators who can then share it on their social media.

Quuu Promote homepage

This strategy is similar to boosting a post on Facebook, but instead of being promoted from your profile, it’s being shared by other users.

A service like Quuu vets submitted content, and if it meets their guidelines, it will become available for content creators in your industry to share with their followers.

This lets you tap into different audiences paid social media ads and leverage the influence of content creators.

Section link4. Digital Display Ads

You can also reach pre-established audiences by purchasing ad space on third-party websites and email newsletters.

These are great for brand awareness campaigns and can be very effective if you have a solid grasp of who your target audience is.

Example of a digital display ad

The downside of digital display ads is that most users have developed some amount of banner-blindness due to the constant bombardment of these kinds of ads online.

However, there are plenty of opportunities to get creative and many companies are still seeing impressive results, with 68% of marketers saying that display advertising is “very important” or “extremely” important to their overall strategy.

Section linkSo, You’ve Bought Direct Web Traffic: What Next?

Once you’ve begun generating more traffic for your website, it’s time to start looking for ways to increase conversions and ROI.

By measuring the performance of your ads over time, you’ll be able to track what’s working and what isn’t.

This lets you make data-driven decisions and optimize your campaigns based on what kind of ad creative and copy are attracting the highest converting traffic.

You can increase your ROI even further by using UTMs. The data gathered from these let you drill down further to see exactly which exact ad on which platform generated the highest converting traffic.

From here you can reallocate more of your budget to this ad and try to create similar ads to replicate the results.

And for tracking your data, there’s no better tool than Metrics Watch:

Metrics Watch homepage

Metrics Watch is an email-based reporting tool that sends your data directly to your recipient's inbox.

Choose from a library of readymade templates, or create your own professional marketing reports fast with a drag-and-drop editor.

Metrics Watch integrates with your favorite marketing channels, so you can track the data from all your paid ad campaigns with ease:

  • Google Analytics
  • Google Ads
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • Mailchimp
  • And more…

But the best part is how data is shared!

Metrics Watch displays your report in the body of the email itself to save you time and make your data as accessible as possible.

Metrics Watch: email-based marketing reports

This eliminates the unnecessary friction that comes with other reporting tools that hide data behind PDF attachments and links to 3rd-party dashboards. Instead, Metrics Watch lets you view your data any place, any time, and on any device.

Ready to try it for yourself?

Start your 14-day free trial of Metrics Watch, 100% risk-free (no credit card required).

Start Your Free Trial Today!

And that’s it for today! This has been our guide on how to buy direct web traffic the right way. If you enjoyed this article, be sure to check out these other posts:

These additional resources have even more information to help you track the performance of your paid marketing campaigns and increase your return on investment.

Start sending automated reports today

Start your free trial, no credit card required!