Paid traffic

Paid traffic is any visit that was bought. The site owner runs an ad on a traffic source, someone clicks it, and the owner is charged, usually per click (CPC) or per thousand views (CPM). The opposite is organic traffic, which arrives for free through search results, bookmarks or word of mouth.

Nearly all search arbitrage runs on paid traffic, because paid traffic can be switched on, measured and scaled within hours. That speed is the attraction. The cost is that every visitor must earn back more than their price, with no free visits to soften a bad day.

Paid traffic is watched closely by the search engines that supply feeds. They want to know which sources are used and whether the ads that brought the visitor were truthful. Paid traffic is also where invalid traffic most often creeps in: a cheap source may be cheap because part of it is bots or accidental clicks. Buying a little from a new source and measuring quality before scaling is standard practice.

An example

Say a buyer pays a native network $200 for 2,000 clicks. The traffic is paid at $0.10 per visitor. If those visitors earn $260 from the feed, the paid traffic was worth buying.