Paid and Free Traffic Acquisition Models

Traffic acquisition is the method by which you drive traffic to your site. All traffic has to be acquired via some means. It is pointless expecting people to happen on your web site by chance : they will either be referred to it through word of mouth, click on an advert, or be driven to it as part of a bulk traffic campaign.

PPC & Free Traffic Acquisition Models

These are advertising based. We're all familiar with the model - a potential visitor sees an advert, is attracted to the site, visits it by clicking the link, and then converts (we hope) to a customer.

Pay Per Click (PPC) exchanges, of which Google AdSense / AdWords is one, offer the possibility to pay a set price per click. This makes it very easy to manage the total cost of acquiring the traffic. However, competition means that this can be an expensive way to acquire traffic. However, the upside i that the traffic will usually be pretty responsive; and you don't pay if nobody clicks your advert.

Services like Traffic Swarm are great, in that they offer a PPC model, but for free. The way that this works is that you earn credits by visiting other people's sites, which can then be used to display your own advert. It is a little self-serving, but as long as you are offering something original, that is of use to fellow Traffic Swarm users, it can be very effective.

Bulk Traffic Acquisition Models

Bulk traffic is slightly different, in that the cost of acquisition is fixed on the number of visitors generated; regardless of the way that they are generated. So, one could be paying $40 for 1,500 visitors without them having chosen to visit the site at all.

How does this work?

It's easy. A bulk traffic service sells popup, redirected, and search engine traffic. They either pop a site up in a window, redirect traffic from a defunct domain name in a similar business area, or redirect it from search engine results tailored to specific keywords. This means that the quality of the traffic varies, and, more importantly, it's passive traffic.

Crucially, this means that the visitor has not elected to visit the site - they're being forced to do so.

However, this may well work for some - and the low cost CPM (cost per thousand) often makes it worth testing out. The service of choice as far as the KeywordCracker is concerned is Revisitors. They offer a professional service, and deliver exactly what they promise. As always, your mileage will vary depending on how compelling your sales letter is, and the nature of your niche.

CPC and CPM

CPM is the cost per thousand, and is a reasonable measure of the cost of traffic acquisition. It is the figure usually quoted by other online advertising channels. A CPC of five cents is a CPM of $50. This means that, in order to attract 1,000 visitors to your site, using PPC, you will pay $50.

On the other hand, using a bulk traffic service, the cost will be substantially lower. However, remember that PPC visitors have chosen to visit your site, based on your advert copy. Bulk traffic visitors, on the other hand, have had little choice but to land on your sales letter or web site. Subsequently, they may be less inclined to stay, depending on how compelling your offer is.

This will affect the conversion rate. PPC traffic, and fre.e traffic that is sourced from search engines or advert based services will offer a higher conversion rate than bulk traffic, but bulk traffic can produce very quick results if it is correctly targeted.

And that's one of the reasons we use Revisitors - they offer the possibility to target the bulk traffic to offer the best chance of traffic conversion at a very low cost of acquisition.