Is It a Good Idea to Buy Traffic?
To shed light on the controversial topic of buying traffic, we’ve gathered insights from 12 marketing professionals and business leaders. From the perspective of “Bought Traffic Lacks Engagement” to the importance of “Right Placement for Results,” these experts weigh in on the pros and cons of purchasing website traffic.
- Bought Traffic Lacks Engagement
- Hurts Engagement Rates
- Organic Traffic: Long-Term Success
- No Value From Bought Traffic
- Ineffectiveness of Bought Traffic
- Quality Traffic Matters
- Negative Impact on Reputation
- Target the Right Audience
- Focus On Organic Strategies
- Organic Growth and Unique Content
- Drawbacks of Buying Traffic
- Right Placement for Results
Bought Traffic Lacks Engagement
Buying traffic for your website does not differ from paying for followers on Instagram. It may seem like a good idea on the surface, but the traffic itself is hardly enough to warrant its price. What you should look for is engagement. Especially if you’re counting on visitors to make a purchase or book a service—traffic with no action behind it is going to be a waste of money.
Natalia Brzezinska
Marketing and Outreach Manager, ePassportPhoto
Hurts Engagement Rates
Buying traffic for your website will help boost the page’s visibility and make it more prominent on search engine results pages, but it will hurt your engagement rates in the long term. Bought traffic only serves one purpose—to view your page’s content. Upon viewing and leaving the page, this increases your bounce rate and means lower engagement rates, which is bad for your business and will cause no conversions.
Liam Liu
Co-founder and CMO, ParcelPanel
Organic Traffic: Long-Term Success
Purchasing traffic can be a simple and quick answer if you need a boost in website traffic right away. Purchasing traffic can help increase your numbers if your website has low engagement rates, giving it a more trustworthy appearance to prospective customers.
However, while initially, it might seem like a good plan to buy traffic, doing so can cause a significant loss of funds. Although buying traffic may increase the volume of visitors to your website, conversion rates are not always increased. Purchasing visitors may be detrimental to the SEO and the reputation of your website.
It’s critical to concentrate on accumulating authentic organic traffic gradually. Even though it might take longer, using this approach will eventually be more effective.
PercyGrunwald
Co-founder, Compare Banks
No Value From Bought Traffic
Buying traffic is only a superficial means to an end. You may boost your SEO ranking by directing traffic to your website, but that traffic may not amount to too much otherwise. Unlike organic traffic, purchased traffic isn’t actually bringing you, interested users or customers.
These ‘visitors’ are unlikely to care about your content, products, or services. So while they may visit one time, it’s unlikely that you’ll get much actual value from bought traffic, be it as customers, readers, or otherwise. Purchased traffic is just a short-term gain; you’re better off increasing the traffic to your website organically.
Max Ade
CEO, Pickleheads
Ineffectiveness of Bought Traffic
Absolutely not! The purpose of having traffic is to either get new customers or have more traffic so that you can sell ads on your website. Let’s look at both cases:
1. New customers: you have a product or service that you’re selling and you want to get fresh eyes on it. You think that buying traffic will get you exactly that. In most cases, the traffic that you buy won’t get you qualified leads to your website. You’ll end up having a lot of visitors, and no conversions, making the traffic completely useless.
2. Selling ads: if you have a website and you want to earn money from it by selling native articles, banners, links, etc. You buy traffic and get a lot of eyes on your website, but those eyes and those customers don’t become customers of the people that paid for ads, making them unsatisfied with the service they got. You end up at the same spot—where the traffic is useless.
And don’t even get us started on the spam you may receive from this!
Aleksandra Jovicic
Freelance SEO Specialist, Aleksandra Beka
Quality Traffic Matters
It depends on what type of traffic one is looking to buy. Depending on the quality of the traffic, buying it may be a good idea or not. For example, if you were buying high-quality, targeted website traffic from a reputable source, then it could be beneficial to your business.
However, if the traffic being purchased is of inferior quality, irrelevant, and not targeted, then it could actually do more harm than good to your website.
When buying traffic, you should always make sure that the source is reputable and that the traffic is high quality, relevant, and targeted. Doing so will ensure that your business receives maximum benefit from the purchased traffic.
Scott Orn
Chief Operating Officer, Kruze Consulting
Negative Impact on Reputation
Acquiring website traffic is inadvisable since it does not result in genuine, engaged users. Although it may provide a temporary surge in page views, it falls short of delivering meaningful engagement and conversions found in organic traffic.
Inorganic visitors lacking authentic interest in your content contribute to brief site visits and a low probability of return. Purchased traffic can introduce fraudulent visits, jeopardizing your website’s reputation and analytic accuracy.
Burak Özdemir
Founder, Online Alarm Kur
Target the Right Audience
Buying traffic through paid ads is an effective way to drive more traffic to your website. However, it’s important to do this properly through a well-thought-out pay-per-click campaign rather than simply paying for poor-quality leads to your website. Too many poor leads won’t affect your SEO, as Google doesn’t care if your leads are good or bad.
However, it will affect your metrics. Therefore, it’s important to drive your target audience to your website. That way, the increased traffic to your website will help drive more profits to your organization.
Asma Hafejee
Senior Marketing Executive, CMR Surgical
Focus On Organic Strategies
The traffic you receive may not be genuine and can negatively affect your bounce rate and eventually your search engine rankings over a long time. Purchased traffic may not bring in the desired engagement, conversions, or sales that you might expect from authentic traffic. It is better to focus on organic SEO and marketing strategies to attract genuine, interested visitors to your website.
Basana Saha
Founder, KidsCareIdeas
Organic Growth and Unique Content
Buying traffic is almost never a good idea. If you are going to monetize your site, being able to show 100% organic growth is a huge win in the eyes of companies that you are looking to partner with for advertising.
It tells them that your content is good enough to attract viewers without needing to pay for that traffic. Sometimes jumpstarting a sale may be beneficial if you are an E-commerce site; however, even for brands that are selling products as opposed to content (myself included), I strongly advise you to work toward building your site traffic organically.
Paying for traffic is also expensive, and you really don’t need to do it. There isn’t any great secret in driving traffic to your site outside of providing original, unique content. There are definitely ethical SEO techniques you can use and are worth employing, but focusing on creating unique content will drive your organic traffic. It may take longer to get started, but Google will find it.
Brian Clark
CEO and Marketing Director, United Medical Education
Drawbacks of Buying Traffic
I would advise against buying traffic. While it may seem like a quick fix to increase website traffic, buying traffic is not a sustainable solution and can do more harm than good.
First, the traffic generated by buying can be of inferior quality and not relevant to your business, leading to a high bounce rate and low engagement.
Second, search engines like Google penalize websites that buy traffic and may even delist them from search results, hurting your online reputation and visibility.
Instead of buying traffic, focus on organic strategies like creating quality content, optimizing for SEO, and building a strong social media presence to attract high-quality traffic that is more likely to convert into leads and sales.
Ryan Flannagan
CEO and Founder, Nuanced Media
Right Placement for Results
Buying traffic can be an effective way to drive awareness of your product or service, but only if it’s in the right place. Buying traffic on a site where your target segment of consumers is not shopping will not convert to anything—making sure you’re discerning where you buy traffic is crucial.
Adam Shlomi
Founder, SoFlo Tutors
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