What Is Paid Traffic For a Home Service Business Website?
If you own a contract service business and have been looking for a quick way to increase your website traffic, you have probably heard of paid traffic.
Paid traffic can be a great way to get your website traffic going if you set it up right.
Then, as paid traffic brings customers to your site, you can spend the time building your website content to grow your organic traffic.
But, as you’re working on growing your organic traffic, what is paid traffic and how do you get started? We are going to cover all of that and more below.
The Definition of Paid Traffic For Your Contract Service Company Website
Paid traffic is the type of traffic that comes from different types of ads that you pay for. The price of these ads differ based on the amount of impressions or clicks you get.
“Impressions” are the amount of people who see your ad as they are scrolling through social media or search engines, whereas “clicks” are a measure of how many people actually clicked your ad. It is better to get ads that you pay for by click rather than impression, if possible.
Paid ads can include things like:
Google Ads
Facebook Ads
YouTube Ads
Instagram Ads
Snapchat Ads
Pinterest Ads
LinkedIn Ads
Twitter Ads
These are just some of the types of ads you can pay for to get paid traffic to your website. This method of advertising is quite similar to when people paid to have their ad included in a newspaper.
Readers of the newspaper bought the paper for the news stories, not the ads. However, if they saw an enticing offer in the ads, or the ad happened to be relevant to them, they may have called the number in the ad.
The same goes for when people see your paid ads on social media or on a search engine platform. Your ad needs to be enticing and speak to what the customer needs.
With online paid ads, there is an increasing difficulty that didn't exist with newspaper ads: customers will generally click your online ad and land on your website.
This means that your website has to be optimized to a certain extent before you use paid ads. That way you can ensure that your ads have the best chance at being effective when users reach your site.
4 Ways To Begin Paid Ads For Your Contract Service Business
There are a few ways to get started with paid ads for your contract service business. In order of most effective to least effective, you can:
Have an internal marketing employee set up paid ads
Manage paid ads on your own through an ad management platform
Hire a marketing agency to manage paid ads for your company
Hire a marketing intern and have them set up your paid ads
Each of these options have their strengths and weaknesses. Having your paid ads managed in-house gives you a better chance at targeting the right keywords. Although you may have to spend time learning how to set up paid ads.
On the other hand, agencies typically have more experience working with paid ads on a regular basis. However, they may not know enough about your business to choose the best keywords to target.
1. Have An Internal Marketing Employee Manage Your Paid Ads
If you already have a marketing manager and they would be interested in learning how to set up paid ads, you could have them learn and set them up for your business. If you do not have a marketing employee, you can search for marketers with paid ad experience.
However, if you are hiring a new employee to specifically manage your paid ads, you will want to make sure you vet them properly. Some candidates will explain paid ads in a way that makes business owners think it is foreign concept.
Ask candidates to explain paid ads to you and how they would run them for your business. If they explain paid ads in a way you don’t understand, ask clarifying questions.
If they are not able to answer those questions and make it easy for you to understand, they most likely do not understand paid ads as well as they say they do. Paid ad management and SEO (search engine optimization) is like a puzzle, not a calculus equation - most people can solve it.
If you have candidates that explain paid ads in a straightforward manner, they will be your best bet at getting paid ads to start working for your business even if they have less experience on paper.
2. Manage Your Paid Ads On Your Own With An Ad Management Platform
Another option is to manage paid ads all on your own. If you learn what is required to run paid ads, you have a great chance at making them successful because you have knowledge of your company and the keywords you need to optimize for.
Some platforms you can start managing you ads on for free include:
Google Ads
Facebook Ads
Instagram Ads
However, while the platform may be free to use, you will still have to pay either by impressions or clicks on your ads.
3. Hire a Marketing Agency To Manage Your Paid Ads
Marketing agencies have experience with paid ads, in that they manage them every day. But, they don’t always have as much time to dedicate to marketing your business exclusively.
For instance, at max, you will usually get 4-8 hours or less per week of an agency’s actual time and focus (unless they are working on a special project for you). The other 32 hours of the marketing advisor’s time will be spent on other clients.
As a business owner you probably understand how they can’t solely focus on one client, since your organization also services multiple customers.
However, the amount of time an agency can realistically dedicate to your business is a factor to consider when weighing your options of how you want to execute your paid ad strategy.
Agencies will also usually have less time to learn about your specific business, so they will be limited in their knowledge of what keywords will work, unless they have previous experience working with your industry.
Even when providing around 4-8 hours of work each week, some agencies will charge as much as a full time employee’s salary. This can make the price they charge less appealing than hiring an in-house marketing specialist to manage paid ads.
4. Hire a Marketing Intern to Set Up and Run Your Paid Ads
Another option you can consider is hiring a marketing intern to learn about paid ad management and then have them run your paid ads for you. In some instances, interns will be unpaid. In other instances, interns will be paid, but not cost as much as a salaried employee.
The reason for this is that they are usually directly out of college or in college and may not have as much experience working in the field as someone who has been working in the field for 1 to 2 years.
However, that doesn’t mean that they are not moldable or unable to learn a skill like paid ad management. In fact, you may be lucky and choose an intern who ends up being even better than other SEO candidates after they learn about paid ad management under your supervision.
If your intern has a strong desire to learn, they can definitely pick up paid ad management and run a successful paid ad strategy for your company.
How to Increase Your Contract Service Company’s Paid Traffic Through Paid Ads
There are many ways you can increase your site’s traffic through paid ads, but it will differ slightly based on the type of company you have. Some strategies that work in general include:
Creating ads with specials and deals centered around seasons.
Getting paid ads for keywords that you have not had luck ranking on the first page for.
Creating paid ads around keywords that you’ve recently created content for that you want to increase traction on.
Using paid ads to highlight things that you always offer, like good financing options or warranties.
When picking content for paid ads, you will want to think of how you can add value to prospective customers. Through doing this, you are more likely to gain leads from your ads because customers will see your ad as the solution to their issue.
Use Paid Traffic to Supplement Your Contract Service Company’s Organic Traffic
Paid traffic can be super effective if you know what information to focus on and how to execute a paid ad strategy.
Using paid ads to increase your paid traffic is a good way to increase traffic to your site while you grow your organic traffic. Want to learn more about organic traffic? Read “What Is Organic Traffic For a Contract Service Company Website?”
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