It's Time To Stop Demon(et)izing Paid Traffic

Welcome back!  After a relatively long previous post, I’m excited to follow up with a shorter one that I care passionately about.  And that’s Paid traffic.

It seems to be a universally loathed thing when discussing buying advertisements on websites programmatically, so I’d like to unpack it and dig a little deeper – and hopefully provide some insights and maybe even change some minds.  Here we go!

1. What is paid traffic?

Paid Traffic, in the context of this article refers to visitors to a website that a publisher has paid to attract.  How would one do that one might ask?  Easy – a publisher shows an advertisement, somewhere, a user clicks it and then navigates to their website.

Most people think of outbrain and taboola - with native tiles at the bottom of a content well advertising what many would refer to as “low-quality” content (which I think is an elitist way to speak about the things that people read, but I digress).  But, the fact of the matter is that any kind of content, or any kind of experience, can advertise using any number of methods – in fact, via all of the same methods that agencies use on behalf of brands.  Publishers, in this context, are the advertisers.  If it can be part of a brand’s marketing mix, it can be part of a publisher’s.

2. What is organic traffic?

People almost always describe “organic” traffic in contrast to paid traffic.  For the purposes of this article I’m going to lump together a bunch of things that should probably be separate – but really, organic traffic typically refers to traffic that is sent to a website by some kind of “organic” discovery vehicle.

This could be google search – where for whatever reason, Google’s search algorithms choose to send traffic to the website because they think it will satisfy the intent of the user typing their prompt into the search engine.  It could also be a social network or facebook – where a user shares an article, a given audience picks it up, and Facebook decides that this article will enhance the user experience of certain audiences in facebook and will show it to them (this is rarer nowadays).  

But the notion behind organic traffic is that some kind of content discovery platform is choosing of their own volition to send traffic to the website, typically with basically zero control exerted by the website itself.  Sure, there are things like “SEO” – where a content creator tries to guess what the organic platforms are going to recommend to their users, but at the end of the day these algorithms are purposefully opaque and unpredictable.

3. Other types of traffic?

There are other types of traffic that I’d refer to as “owned” – and what I mean by owned, is that the publisher has direct control over their relationship with the user.  The two that jump to mind here are “direct/type-in,” which refers to users that type the URL of the website directly into the browser, and e-mail/newsletter, where the content creator promotes content directly using a unique identifier with their user.  Push is also probably in this category.

4. Why should I care about paid traffic?

We typically hear about paid traffic in the context of ad fraud (bots) or MFA (bad user experiences).  However, I would like to make the argument that paid traffic is one of the only things on the web that provides content publishers with control over their own destiny.  

This is because the primary difference between organic traffic and paid traffic is incentive.  Here’s what I mean : 

Organic

Organic Traffic Provider (OTP) has some kind of “discovery” service it provides to its users where it provides them with content > The more appropriate the content is to the desire of the users the more they use OTP’s application > If content provider can guess what kind of content will perform well for OTP then OTP sends traffic to website

In this relationship, the content provider is valuable to the OTP to the extent their content makes users want to use the OTP application more.   The salient point, that should not be lost on anyone creating content, is that if OTP could produce their own content they would (see zero-click search) and their dedication to their content creators is entirely self-serving with zero financial commitment.  In fact, OTP often runs ads next to the content they’re promoting, creative all kinds of perverse incentives as we’ve seen with the latest google scandal https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ (ironically, link chosen because it’s the first search result on google, what a dark twisted world we live in).

Paid

Paid traffic source (PTS) has their own content / application that they want to make money from by displaying ads (PTS and OTP are often the same company, but the two sides of the businesses rarely interact).  As a business line, they are incentivized to make as much money as possible > They allow advertisers to place ads on their application, ostensibly in a perfect-ish market the advertiser that pays more gets to show their ad > the user clicks the ad and goes to to advertiser defined landing page, if user has high post-click/action value, advertiser is willing to pay more > advertiser pays more gets more clicks

In this relationship, the incentives are fundamentally different from the OTP side of the house.  The user’s behavior and engagement with the advertisers is advantageous purely to the extent that it generates additional advertising revenue for the paid traffic provider – which means that the decision making power actually lies with the advertiser.  Or in this case – the PUBLISHER! – because in this workflow, and in the world of paid traffic, the publisher is the advertiser.

 This means that control over traffic flows is actually governed by the market – and imperfect as it may be, it is meaningfully more egalitarian, transparent, and scalable when compared to the OTP flow by virtue of the fact that market forces are highly influential over what ads get displayed on a page.

Of course paid traffic sources will exert controls over what type of advertiser are allowed to advertise where, etc, but the more artificial controls they insert into the market the less money they will make to the extent that they don’t start losing users – and the users aren’t using their platforms for the ads, they’re using them for something else, so we no longer have this strange relationship between traffic allocation and user satisfaction.

What does this all mean?

To me, this means that demonizing paid traffic is literally one of the worst things we could be doing.  Paid traffic is the method by which publishers can take control of their future – they can successfully advertise whatever content they may have to audiences that want it, and then find ways to properly engage with those audiences such that they make more money from their users than they have to spend to get additional users. PTS providers have to make money – and as we’re seeing, in a battle between user experience on these platforms and money, they often choose money.  It’s a lot easier to alter search results without considering the downstream effect on publishers than it is to turn down advertising dollars.

This means, in my opinion, the solution to all of this mess on the open internet is very simple – publishers need to become sophisticated advertisers, and paid traffic (and properly executing paid traffic strategies) is the foundation to breaking the dependence on organic discovery vehicles.  We’ve already seen the appetite for the migration to the inbox with the meteoric rise of substack – there’s certainly appetite for direct engagement with high quality niche advertisers of content – and publishers owning their paid strategy and scaling is a foundational brick in the wall. By having a strategy to reach new users and build relationships with them, website owners create sustainability, safety, and scale.

It also means that it’s important that publishers and content creators have tools to treat their businesses more like advertisers and brands treat theirs – a focus on ROAS and LTV – which is why we created Gamera (please enjoy my shameless plug of my new company – https://www.gamera.ai/value-analytics/overview.html )

The Caveat

Bad paid traffic exists.  Bots exist. Fraud exists. Bad website experiences exist.  These are all separate problems from “Paid Traffic” that often get lumped in with them.  But I see no reason why “Paid Traffic,” outside of MFA concerns (which are really ad density concerns), would be any more likely to subject an advertising campaign to shenanigans than organic traffic.  Sure, it’s not a great sign if all of a websites users are churned-single-session-clicks – however, there’s nothing inherently wrong with this as long as they aren’t bots and the site performs for your campaigns.  It’s perfectly possible that traffic source is an optimizable parameter for your campaign as a brand — lovely! So are a million other things. These need to be handled algorithmically, and more signal is generally always good, so there’s no need for you to really have an opinion about any of them, leave it to your machines. So don’t fear paid traffic!  Fear fraud and things that hurt advertiser performance.