This is a long term debate amongst advertisers. Should you choose to try and gain as much traffic from PPC as possible to your landing page or gain as high a quality traffic instead? Depending on your PPC campaign’s objective, the answer will vary. Some advertisers will find it more useful to have thousands of views on their landing pages whereas the campaigns wanting conversions such as for the web user to buy something will want high quality traffic that is more likely to end in a conversion. 

 
 

What is Quality in PPC?

Quality traffic is traffic that has been specifically targeted to your landing page. This will result in the following benefits:

• You are more likely to get a conversion. 
• They will not ‘bounce’ straight away from your landing page but will instead spend time reading through the content and browsing around it.
• They are more likely to share the landing page socially  gaining you extra free targeted traffic.

However, the consequence of such targeted traffic is usually that it will cost more money meaning to gain this traffic, you will have to increase your CPC. I will, at the end of this article, display an example which will hopefully win the argument of quality over quantity in PPC.
 
 

What is Quantity in PPC?

Quantity traffic is just traffic in its most basic form. You do not care who your traffic are, where they come from or their interests. The only objective for your campaign is to get as much traffic to your landing page as possible.  The only benefit of quantity traffic is that its cheap (compared to gaining the same amount of traffic from quality traffic). You will find that, in some circumstances, you will pay cents for clicks on your adverts.
 
There is a problem with this. Advertisers think that if they get more traffic to their landing page, their conversion rate will decrease (which is true). But, because of the increase in numbers, they think they will actually gain more conversions than if they had targeted their campaign at quality visitors.
 
 

The Example

If you feel quality traffic is better than quantity traffic, then all is good and you won’t have to read this example. However, if you feel that quantity traffic will provide more conversions than quality traffic, then think again and read on…
 
I am going to create two metaphorical PPC campaigns:

• One aiming at quality traffic. The CPC for this is high at $1 and because it is quality traffic, the conversion rate 30%. 
• One aiming at quantity traffic. The CPC for this is low at $0.20 and because it is quantity traffic, the conversion rate is low at just 5%.

Each campaign spends $100 on their campaign. This means that:

• Quality campaign will gain 125 visitors and therefore 30 successful conversions.
• Quantity campaign will gain 500 visitors and therefore 25 successful conversions.

Both campaigns have spent exactly the same amount. But, because the first campaign targeted quality traffic, the price per conversion was actually less at $3.33 / conversion  compared to the quantity campaign at $4 / conversion. This is an important message in terms of how to use PPC. When you are requesting the bare minimum from PPC, then quantity traffic is fine. For all other campaigns, stick to quality.