Buying website traffic

Paul Green looks at why it makes good business sense to buy website traffic.

There is a new website traffic paradigm that has become dominant in UK online marketing over the last year.

In 2014 I could have given you 10 or 20 different ways to generate good quality traffic. These days, you should focus most of your effort on just two sources. In fact, I now recommend you put 80% of your resource for new client marketing into Google, and the remaining 20% into Facebook. There are other ways to get traffic, but these two are the simplest, fastest way to get the right people to your website, at the right time.

Google has managed to hide the pay per click adverts in plain sight. They used to have an orange box around them at the top of the page. Not any more. Now they have a tiny little yellow label that says ‘ad’. Most people don’t see this, and so click on the adverts without realising that’s what they are doing.

Whereas once to be at the top you had to rely purely on search engine optimisation (still important), it’s now easier to buy your way to the top of Google’s listing by outbidding your competitors for the adverts.

Facebook is pulling off a similar trick. With 1.44 billion users and an average daily user session of about 20 minutes, it has discovered how to put more of the content each individual person wants to see directly in front of them, which means they are less likely to see what you are publishing. Most practices are realising that fewer people are seeing their Facebook content.

Making it work for you

While many practice owners will be floundering about thinking small, saying ‘I’m not paying £2 for a click…what a rip off’, you can think bigger. There is a very solid business case for buying traffic, if you look past the initial transaction and think about the big picture.

Imagine it costs you £2 per click, and it takes 10 clicks for you to get a private client. There’s an assumption there that you have a website that is efficient at converting traffic into clients. Ten clicks to get a client means 100 clicks to get 10 clients.

Let’s say you have an initial consultation fee of £70, so your 10 new clients spend £700 with you. The initial transaction sees £200 spent on traffic, and £700 revenue in.

That’s where most practice owners would stop analysing. They might see that the cash has been replaced, but there’s no great profit, so would switch off pay per click advertising.

But the real results lie in the bigger picture. Because the true value of a client to your practice is not just what they spend today, but what they spend in the long term.

Lets imagine you and your associates are good at talking about cosmetic work with new clients. So good, that one in 10 new clients say yes and sign up for teeth whitening immediately. A conversion rate of 10%.

And let’s assume the average spend is £450. Now it’s looking interesting. And it boosts the overall revenue picture to look like this:

The devil’s in the detail

£200 out, £1,150 in. That looks better, doesn’t it? But there’s more. That’s just taking into account first year revenues. Most clients will stay with your practice for many years.

What’s the average lifetime value of a new client to your practice? It’s probably higher than you think. And that’s the ultimate long-term big thinking: ‘If I spend £20 on traffic today, I’ll get my money back at the initial consultation. Make some profit within a year. And generate thousands in revenue over the next four to five years’.

You can get a free copy of Paul’s book, The Root of the Problem, posted to you by visiting www.dentistsmarketingbook.co.uk.