It’s a bold statement to say that pay per click advertising is the best source of traffic for bloggers, for advertisers: for anyone online. You have a think about it – there must be hundreds of different ways you could gain traffic to a website or specific page (being a landing page). What makes PPC stand out from the rest? It’s not free…so why do so many people use it? To take a look into why PPC is the best source of traffic online, I will look at other ways an advertiser could gain traffic online.
 
 

Organic

The number one way for blogger to gain traffic, organic traffic is simply where you create a high quality unique article which search engines then display when people search for it. This is a great way to gain tons of traffic. But, at the same time, it can be extremely unreliable. There is never a specific formula to tell you if your article is going to gain organic traffic or not. This is because there are many factors which influence this:

• Number of search queries from web users for keywords in your article.
• Length of article.
• How much you have ‘SEOed’ you article.
• If it has an image.
• The website it is being published on.

The list can literally go on and on. As well as this, Google’s algorithm updates being Panda and Penguin have made it increasingly hard for advertisers to use SEO instead of PPC (which makes sense as 95% of Google’s revenue comes from Adwords). To sum up organic traffic then:

• It has the potential to gain you lots of traffic.
• It is unpredictable and unreliable whether you will gain traffic.
• Google’s updates are making it harder for advertisers to succeed with SEO.

Social Media

Another source of traffic which some advertisers pick over PPC is social media: inparticularly Facebook and Twitter. However, there are problems with these too. Pay per click advertising is famous for being extremely cost efficient providing traffic at low CPCs. With Facebook and Twitter, the CPCs are usually a little higher and also less targeted. For example:

• On search engines, the web user has typed in what s/he is interested in.
• On a website, the web user has clicked onto an article s/he is interested in.

On Facebook or Twitter, the chances are that they are procrastinating more than anything (because most people resort to social media when trying to waste time and procrastinate). This makes the point that to gain he most specifically targeted traffic to a webpage, the only and best way is through pay per click advertising.
 
 
From looking at two other big sources of traffic, I hope it has made clear that PPC is the number one method to gain traffic. Although paid traffic, the conversion rate of PPC traffic will be in a different league compared to the two other sources above making it the cheapest form of paid traffic online and much more reliable than free traffic such as organic.