Pay per click advertising is the most used form of online advertising because it provides the best results at the lowest price while giving advertisers the most amount of control over their campaigns. For this reason, you will tend to find that advertisers approach PPC from all different angles: some advertisers use PPC to gain short term traffic while others might want long term traffic. This makes clear that PPC can be approached a numerous amount of ways making it much easier to create unique campaign for your unique situation. Here are some approaches you will tend to find advertisers take when they use PPC.

Short Term Traffic Campaign

There are lots of campaigns out there that simply want traffic fast and quick. This is effective if, for example, you are in the introductory stage of your product’s/service’s life cycle. You are giving whatever you are trying to advertise lots of of coverage over your target market in a short space of time.

This approach to PPC has it’s drawbacks though. To gain traffic thick and fast, you need to make sure your adverts are getting coverage. This usually means increasing your CPC so that you outbid all  your competitors to give your adverts maximum impressions (the more impressions you get, the more clicks you gain and the thicker and faster the traffic rolls into your landing page).

Therefore, you can look at short term traffic as being quite expensive but a necessity depending on what stage your product/service is at in it’s life cycle.

Long Term Traffic Campaign

A long term traffic campaign’s objective is to maintain a consistent flow of traffic to the landing page. This, in turn, usually results in a unfluctuating cash flow forecast for your campaign as a whole: you tend to make the same revenue consistently.

The great thing about long term traffic in PPC is that it is consistent. There is nothing worst than having a campaign which is unpredictable. By this, I mean one day you could be gaining lots of conversions and then the next day nothing. Long term traffic, in PPC, also makes it much easier to foreshadow into the future or extrapolate data so you can plan well ahead into the future of your campaign (whereas short term traffic campaigns are about gaining traffic in the present: not the far future).