Awarded at Toronto "Ultra Advanced SEO Symposium" Nov. 2005.

The different ways to buy traffic

Offline vs online...

William delves into this complex subject - Online is a very different world to offline and the rules are completely new.

Traditional means of buying traffic offline mean using normal advertising channels and then hoping that your message has been sufficiently powerful to drive a user to sit in front of their PC and remember the URL (web address) of your product or company.

Sadly, unless you are an HP.com or IBM.com this kind of brand awareness simply does not exist online.

Have you often heard how many people berate the Internet as a failed exercise when it comes to marketing purposes?

For instance, Volvo have released their new S40 car. The website quoted and punted on their adverts is www.volvocars.co.za - which is great IF you recall this from the advertising campaign. But if you go to Ananzi and type in 'Volvo' you don't find their website. And if you type into your browser www.volvo.co.za you are redirected to www.volvo.com, at least at this moment in time.

Even to a non marketing person this is suicide on the Internet - all but the die hard Volvo fanatic will have given up and bought an Audi - if cars were things that were bought online.

Perhaps Volvo will not suffer sales fall off simply because cars are big and expensive and rely on a lot more than a good website to sell. BUT, if the choice between two cars is close, you never know if the website might push the customer into the hands of a good salesman to make the difference in closing the deal. BMW have a far better chance - they are ranked number 2 on Ananzi for 'BMW' - better than Audi or Mercedes Benz in fact.

Now, if you were considering a new car like the Volvo S40 you might want to compare it with Audi, BMW and Mercedes... Making it more difficult than it needs to be for your potential customer is not what I personally would regard as good marketing.

The point is that even for big ticket items, relevant traffic to relevant websites is important. Some one considering a new Audi who wanted to bench it against a Volvo would have a tougher time online finding the www.volvocars.co.za site than they should be subjected to.

So the lack of traffic to www.volvocars.co.za is likely to be blamed on the poor adoption of the Internet by South Africans.

It is complete nonsense of course. Online, the site might as well be invisible - it ranks nowhere on South Africa's premier local search engine - so the only chance it does have of attracting traffic is via paid for traffic offline and paid for traffic online.

Offline has its place but common sense thinking coupled to the fact that 80% of all traffic sent to all websites is courtesy of search engines would dictate that using offline marketing to punt a website is pretty much a waste of money, time and effort.

Of course, keep the "for more information visit our website at www.wesellgreatcars.com on your advert - but focus on traditional communications rather than online communications.

Which brings us (finally!) to online advertising...

There are several ways of communicating your website presence through paid for advertising. There are banner adverts that you pay to have displayed on high traffic websites in areas where you are most likely to attract your target audience.

There are Pay Per Click campaigns PPC such as Google's Adwords. These campaigns are unique in that you only pay once your advert has been clicked.

There are spam e-mail techniques - and we have all been the victim of this at one time or another. Pop up adverts sometimes fall into this category with their annoyance factor.

But by and large the two most popular ways to buy traffic (advertise) online are via PPC and banner adverts. Typically PPC is more powerful and more effective as the campaigns are typically under your direct control. For instance, you can measure exactly how many clicks you got - and since you know what each click cost you, you can work out whether it is a profitable campaign or not.

PPC also has the advantage that you can customise each advert to each specific niche market - quickly and easily. And of course you can test different adverts against each other to see which ones perform better.

Banner adverts can also be measured via the number of exposures your banner had and how many clicks you got - you can see the percentage of click throughs on a banner ad and work out your cost per visitor that way.

Banner ads have the disadvantage in that it is considerably more work to target a different banner to a different market niche - say if you were selling apples - you wouldn't want your banana banner displaying on an apples web site. So you would need two, or hundreds of different banners.

Because the online advertising world is exactly measurable to the last cent you can make some powerful deductions as to how to get the most bang for your advertising buck.

You can rest assured that we hate buying traffic so that when we do we like to spend as little as possible but still obtain the best possible click through rates...

We are ethical South African search engine optimization practitioners based in Johannesburg, Gauteng. Internet marketing efforts in South Africa are still in their infancy. Search engine marketing and search engine positioning is built around 3 basic concepts - organic search engine optimization, optimizing for PPC (pay per click) campaigns and site functionality. All three areas must work together to succeed.