The one thing Website owners are looking for is Traffic, but there are many types of Traffic. The one thing to avoid is concentrating so much on getting traffic that you forget to analyze the quality of the traffic. There is definitely a wrong type of traffic which will only waste your bandwidth.

Websites use advertising for different reasons. A global brand such as Coca Cola would more than likely just be strengthening the brand whereas another site may be directly selling a product or building a list. It’s important to remember to track all traffic to make sure that it’s serving it’s purpose and valuable advertising dollars are being well spent.

Quite often the difference between different ad sources is quite apparent. For instance when doing PPC advertising (Pay Per Click) Content Network Ads are very much less expensive to buy than Search Network Adverts. In Search Networks the user types in relevant keywords which then trigger your ads and this is seen as more relevant traffic than the Content Network where you ad appears on an Adsense Publisher’s website and this is seen as not as targeted.

In general it’s considered that most people who click on content network ads tend to be researching their intended product and in the main are looking for free information. It’s been proven that on the other hand searchers who type in (especially long tail) specific keywords are further down the buying funnel and are more likely to click the buy now button. Inevitably this means that to advertise in the Search Network is more expensive but often more effective.

Unfortunately, paying for advertising can eat into profits. In some cases campaigns that are generating a good volume of sales can be rendered unprofitable due to the costs of advertising. However, organic traffic, which comes from unpaid listing on search engines, is free and targeted. The difficulty arises in generating sufficient volumes of traffic. To do this requires being on the front pages of the major search engines for popular terms. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of trying to rank highly for competitive keywords. Unfortunately, many SEO techniques take considerable time to put into place and to affect search engine rankings.

A good technique for getting high in the organic results is to go for less popular long tail key words. There is not as much demand for these and although they produce less traffic they are easier to rank for therefore build up a good list of these and you can a lot of traffic.

Other good forms of generating free targeted traffic include article marketing, email marketing and utilizing joint venture partnerships. The main thing is to avoid traffic generation strategies that cost money, but don’t result in conversions.