Vipul’s blog

What do you think is the most important factor for the success of any internet site? Yes, you guessed it right, it’s the user or traffic (as some people call it). It doesn’t really matter how good your site content is unless you have the user visiting your site and using your content and services.

There are many mediums to get the user to your site:

• Offline Campaign (TV, Radio, Print and other media)
• Email Marketing
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Banner Advertisement
• Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Campaign

Now, lets look at all of these mediums one by one.

Offline Campaign: This has been a traditional medium of advertisement and getting the attention of users towards your product and services. But this is also the costliest medium and it has it’s own issues apart from the higher cost. First and the foremost is the target audience you get from this medium i.e. people of all ages view/listen to your ad e.g A child to a 60 year old (may be more) and all of them are unlikely to be your target! Lets take the example of a university which wants to promote it’s degree courses and in that case their target would be anyone between 20-25 years of age. Another negative point with this medium is: people might not recall a particular ad/service when they actually need it.

There is no doubt that this is a very good medium for Branding but certainly not recommended for getting the user to your site.

Email Marketing: A very good medium for getting user feedback for your product and services but certainly not to get user to your site.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Most sought after source of traffic generation. But it takes it’s own time and a lot depends upon not only the content of your site but also on how much SEO compliant your content is. It requires huge initial investment in terms of adding lot of quality content keeping serach engine optimization in mind and hiring full time SEO consultant to guide you through this process. Moreover, there is no surity that search engine indexes your website pages and shows in the top results when user searches for the content available on your site. This also requires changing your strategy as and when search engine changes it’s algorithm to index and find the best content in response to user query.

Essentially, this is the medium one should be aiming at and working on actively but with a long term view. You can’t build SEO optimized site overnight. Hence, you can’t rely on this medium to get user to your site if you have a new site or don’t have much content.

Banner Advertisement: An online medium similar to offline campaign but much more cost effective and unlike offline medium it provides you some control over your target audience e.g. advertiser can run a banner campaign which is targeted towards everyone in the age group of 20-35 years. But again this will be shown to all the users whether they need the services you offer or not e.g. a user checking emails might see a banner of university courses on top of the page where as that user might not be interested in any course.

This medium combines the branding and traffic part so it’s ideal for a situation when advertiser is interested in both branding as well as traffic. This medium works on the CPM (cost per milli) model i.e. advertiser pays a fixed amount for every thousand impressions regardless of whether anybody really clicked on your ad and visited your site or not.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Campaign: This is the most cost effective medium of generating traffic. The beauty of this medium lies in the fact that your ad is shown only when a user is looking for the services you provide. Moreover it works on PPC (pay per click) model as the name says i.e. advertiser pays only when user clicks on the ad!

This medium comes with it’s own limitations as not everyone would be searching on Google or any other search engine when he/she requires any service. So, if you rely only on this medium you might lose out on lot of your potential users.

I have tried to put all the popular medium of generating traffic in simple terms. And as always your comments are most welcome to improve my understanding. From my experience I have seen that a blending of PPC and Banner works well in most of the situations and there too much focus should be the PPC to make it cost effective.