7 ways to get ad-clicks from cold traffic
So you’ve noticed an increase in your website visitors but yet the number of ad-clicks on your website remains the same or the change is so marginal that you started thinking if it is worth it to use the services that offer cold traffic to your website? Well, the short answer is yes. But first, let’s learn the difference between the different types of traffic.
Types of traffic
There are three different types of traffic: cold, warm and hot. Cold traffic are visitors of your website that has little to no knowledge of your business, products or services that you are trying to offer. Its often the cheapest form of traffic and you can buy it from sites such as Simple Traffic.
Warm traffic are people that visit your website that are either a returning visitors, subscribers, or came due to a recommendation from someone that they trust but haven’t yet purchased whatever you are trying to offer.
Finally, hot traffic are your website visitors who previously have clicked on ads or products you are advertising, they trust your business and more likely to interact more with your content and ads.
So why is cold traffic good for your website? It is because cold traffic helps you generate thousands of visitors to your website. However, receiving a visitor is one thing, but to make them stay on your website and click on ad that you offered requires your skills and ability in hooking them to your website. The first and foremost important thing is to hook the cold traffic into your website. You need to first grab their attention keep them on your site, and give them a reason to click on those ads.
1. Give out free offers
One of the most effective ways to hook your website visitors is to attract those visitors to a page that is offering something they will perceive as being of value for free such as free product, free e-book, or any other free resources in exchange for their contact details. Who doesn’t like free offers, right? While this method may not result in an instant ad-clicks, you can use their contact details to send them targeted information through drip campaign or traditional newsletter. This will help build a relationship with your visitors, increase their level of trust and confidence of your website. Once you’ve successfully done this, your visitors will be more likely to come back to your website and click that ad of yours.
2. Use videos and images
Have you ever heard that saying “A picture is worth a thousand words”? As cliche as it sounds, it can be beneficial to use image to hook people to your website. Not only that a picture can convey information or ideas quicker and more effectively than words but also because humans are visual creatures and images are the first thing we see.
An even better way to hook people is by using videos on your website. It helps increase user experience and the time people spend on your website. People are more likely to watch a 3 minutes video than reading a three-minute text that roughly translate to 390 words or a page long. Once you’ve hooked them visually on your website, it is more likely that they will click on that ad of yours.
3. Don’t be afraid to play with colors
As previously mentioned, humans are visual creatures. Therefore, using the right color becomes a crucial factor in hooking visitors to your website. It can grab visitors attention as people notice colors before words. Using bright c on specific section on your website helps navigate your visitors attention to it.
When choosing the right color for your website, a little knowledge on color psychology could help significantly in ensuring that the color that you pick fit the target audience for your website. For instance, if your website target audience are women, try to use blue, purple, and green as women tend to prefer those colors and stay away from gray, orange, and brown. Important note is to try to keep the use of color to a maximum of two to three colors. Now that we’ve hooked people into your website, the next step is to know how to advertise correctly on your website.
4. Position your ads
The position of your ad also plays a significant factor in determining whether people will click on the ad or not. Sidebar ads perform well on the homepage and archive page. For individual post, position your ads under the first paragraph rather than on the side of the page as it has been proven to be more effective to increase ad-clicks and visits to your website. However, do not put it right under the title as readers hate advertisement which distract them from reading your content. You want to hook people first on your website with your content and gain their trust to click an ad on your website.
While it is tempting to have as many ads as possible on your website in a hope that people will click on every single one of it, the likelihood of that happening is very unlikely. Moreover, having too many ads could results on unhappy readers. As the saying goes, quality over quantity. It is better to focus on ads that are relevant to your website rather than having plenty of irrelevant ads.
As a general rule, you should put 2 ads inside the post and 1 outside the post. When creating an ad strategy, consider your user first in order to make sure the ad tailored your readers.
5. Create interesting or meaningful content
Last but not least, provide a good content for your website. People will be more likely to stay on your website and click on ad if you provide interesting or meaningful content. Great content is the key to warm up the cold traffic and makes your website visitors come back for more which could result in an increase in ad-clicks in the future. You can even cooperate ads into your content, just make sure you do it tastefully. Do not overload your content with affiliate links but rather tries to create a content that goes around or well with products or services that you are trying to promote. If you are not great at writing or just dont have the time, you can normally find cheap writers here.
6. Use on-exit-intent popups
A great way to hook a visitor before they leave your website is with a on-exit-intent popup. These little boxes suddenly appear on top of your content when the visitor moves their mouse over the close button.
A quick google search will list many different companies that offer plugins and scripts to create these on-exit-intent popups but we recommend GetResponse. Just make sure to include something of value in the pop up to keep them on your site, like a free ebook or a engaging video.
Just note that these popups do not work with all browsers and do not work if the visitor uses keyboard shortcuts to close the window.
7. Grow a subscriber base or community
The problem with cold traffic is that the visitors may just not be interested in your website right now. But if you can pull them into your community by collecting their email address or getting them to follow you on social media then maybe you will be able to pull them back to your site another time. This is the basic principle of warming up traffic.
If you run a blog you should always encourage visitors to follow your social accounts, and if you are ready serious about warming up the traffic and getting repeat visitors then you should also create a mailing list and allow people to subscribe with their email address. As mentioned above, on-exit-intent popups are also a great way of collecting email addresses.
Other things to consider...
Only target relevant people
It’s important to consider who you are targeting. You should make sure that the visitors you target can at least read and understand the text on your site. So when you buy cold traffic you should always target countries that both speak the language(s) your site is written in, and may be interested in reading what you write. For example, a blog about traveling to Canada may not be that interesting to Canadians. Choose to target countries that would be interested in your content and can understand it.
Do the same when targeting devices, if your website is not mobile optimized then just target desktop computers. The same goes when considering which browsers to target. Your website may look great on Google Chrome, but does it still look good on Safari? You can find out with a browser comparison tool like browsershots.org. Whenever possible, only target browsers that display your website correctly.
Make sure your site loads fast
The #1 reason websites loose cold visitors is because of slow loading speeds. If a visitor has not seen or heard of your website before, why would they want to wait several seconds for your site to load?
The average website loads in about 10 seconds, but to ensure you do not lose visitors you should aim for less than 3 seconds on both desktop and mobile.
Google Page Speed Insights is a really great resource for custom recommendations to improve your websites loading speed. Every website developer should aim to increase their websites loading speed to minimize loss of visitors from all sources. As a bonus fast loading speeds also usually increase a websites position on search engines.
You can learn how to speed up your website here, or just hire an expert from $5.