Which Ad Type Is the Real MVP? Conversion Ads or Traffic Ads?
Ok, Hyrosians, let’s get into it and discuss what type of ads are better for returns. Are conversion ads better than traffic ads, and if so, why?
Ask yourself, when it comes to advertising, what is the most critical metric for success?
Are you more interested in the number of clicks to your website or the number of conversions from those clicks?
It’s a common debate among marketers, and the answer may surprise you.
Advertising is an essential aspect of any business, and with the rise of social media platforms, the options for ad types have expanded. Two of the most popular ad types are conversion ads and traffic ads. While both serve a similar purpose, they differ significantly in their approach.
As an advertiser, the ultimate goal of advertising is to drive sales and revenue, which is why I believe conversion ads are better than traffic ads, but it’s not for me to decide your business.
So, you need to know which ad type will bring better results.
The first thing to do is decide on what your objective is. Knowing what you need your ads to deliver will help you determine what type of ad is better for your outcomes.
What Is Your Objective?
Objectives matter because they are instrumental in helping you achieve your campaign’s desired result.
With a clear objective and strategy, your efforts will likely be well-spent. It is essential to understand that dreams tell Facebook which action it should try to elicit with our campaigns, such as conversions or video views.
Your ads will then be shown only to those most likely to take the desired action associated with that objective.
For example, if you want more people to watch your video ad, selecting the Video View objective would make sense and allow Facebook to target those viewers who engage with videos.
On the other hand, if you’re looking for people to convert after seeing your ad, choosing Conversions as your objective would mean Facebook will only serve ads optimized towards leading people down an advertising funnel.
This way, you can rest assured that the ultimate goal is always in mind no matter which type of ad you’re running on Facebook, be it videos or display banners for website conversion.
What Is The Difference Between Traffic Ads and Conversion Ads
If you’re wondering, are conversion ads better than traffic ads? The answer is it depends.
The type of ads you run should be focused on the outcome, meaning you determine your ad selection based on what you want a person that comes across your ad to do.
I don’t know why conversions aren’t the only thing to focus on, but that’s just me.
You may be running a content business that makes your only source of income off of ad revenue. I guess traffic ads would be necessary, but even in that example, there are ways to diversify so that you could be selling a digital product or service on top of generating ad revenue. So that’s what I’d do.
So once you decide the outcome you want for your ads, understand the differences between traffic and conversion ads.
The main difference in these ads is that traffic ads target people who will most likely view and click ads, while conversion ads will target people who are likely to convert into customers.
Traffic Ads
Traffic ads are focused on directing people’s attention to an ad and getting them to view and click it. Google PPC ads are more traffic oriented than social media platforms, but it’s all about how you message your ads with content that matters.
This type of advertising is perfect for a business that wants to generate awareness about its brand or services by providing potential customers with information about the product or service.
Additionally, traffic ads can be effective when businesses want to build a big website following quickly.
It doesn’t do much for sales, but if that’s your objective, so be it.
On the other hand, conversion ads take a different approach.
Conversion Ads
These ads target people likely to purchase particular products or services offered. I like to think of YouTube and Facebook ads when I discuss these types of ads because you can scale and get plenty of conversions from these platforms.
This approach lets you hone in on people more likely to take the desired action, like signing up for a call or subscribing to your membership, bringing significantly higher ROI than traffic ads.
Conversion ads also come with greater flexibility since they can be adjusted for different business objectives throughout the customer acquisition lifecycle.
Advertisers can choose their desired customer profile based on several criteria including location, interests, online activity, and purchase history, ensuring that they’re reaching individuals most likely to convert into customers.
Traffic and conversion are essential elements of successful marketing, but they are not equal.
As a marketer, you should focus on a combination of both to get the most out of your campaigns.
The first step is to drive traffic. This involves getting your target audience’s attention and convincing them through various channels such as SEO, PPC, Social Media, content marketing, and more so that they should learn more about what you have to offer.
This strategy will ensure more people come across your brand, but then comes the conversion part.
Once you’ve gained enough attention, it’s up to you to convert those website visitors into actual sales or leads.
To do this, you need effective strategies such as optimized landing pages through A/B testing, retargeting campaigns, email automation, and enticing offers that push people into becoming paying customers.
In other words, it’s all about tracking your ad performance to determine what ads are doing well and which ones aren’t and then figuring out what to do about them.
The only way I know to track ads effectively is with Hyros since it is fully customizable and can follow ad performance from the first time a prospect engages with your stuff.
Still trying to figure out, are conversion ads better than traffic ads. Well, in a nutshell, the two types of advertisements with pros and cons include:
Traffic Ads Pros and Cons
Lower cost per click
More impressions
Lower conversions
Conversion Ads Pros and Cons
Higher cost per click
Fewer Impressions
Higher conversions
So Which One Is More Important?
Well, both traffic and conversion are essential when setting up any marketing campaign.
One without the other results in a much less successful venture, as each needs one other to generate success. And while these two go hand-in-hand, not every mashup will come across like chocolate and peanut butter.
Traffic is essential in directing potential customers to the product or service, but conversion is necessary for those potential customers to be well-spent.
Knowing your numbers is vital to increasing your conversions while cost of acquisition and conversion rates are important indicators, knowing how many people have visited your website’s homepage and the bounce rate shows invaluable insights into the website’s performance.
To improve the conversion rate and reach a successful outcome for any campaign, it’s crucial to invest in traffic generation and sales optimization through A/B testing, for example.
Think about late-night infomercials.
Late-night infomercials used to be on TV and cable, which may have driven many visitors to a site. However, if their home page does not sell their services, that visit was all for nothing.
But of course, with more and more people cutting cable and choosing streaming options, optimizing your landing pages from YouTube is much more important than driving traffic from a video. In other words, it’s about converting.
Optimizing Traffic And Conversion Ads–Where To Spend Your Money
As we discussed, traffic ads are mainly used for brand awareness or increasing website visits.
There may be better ROI for your ad spend.
Generally, these advertisements focus more on gaining attention than a specific call to action and are a great way to drive people to your website and increase visibility for your products or services, but doesn’t do much for your sales.
Conversion Ads, on the other hand, specifically encourage users to take action by filling out forms or purchasing items from your services.
These ads require more customization with compelling content and eye-catching visuals.
They also need detailed tracking to determine if they worked or not, and these types require more work and investment to optimize them and get the most out of them, but they can be very effective in driving up sales.
When optimizing for traffic or conversions on Facebook Ads, it is essential to determine the more appropriate campaign objective.
For those new to the platform or those who have installed a Pixel with a limited number of conversions, traffic campaigns are preferable.
The good news is that you can use this type of campaign to increase website traffic and overall brand or product awareness and provide valuable insights into user behavior to develop other marketing strategies. But I wouldn’t scale these ads too much, instead focusing on scaling ads that produce my sales calls.
Conversion campaigns should be utilized when there has been an increase in event hits with the Pixel and an ongoing flow of conversion events.
With conversion campaigns, a higher cost-per-conversion might be experienced; however, results can be considerably better than those achieved through your traffic ad objective if you set it up correctly.
Ok, so let’s dig a little deeper about which is better, traffic or conversion ads.
Conversions vs. Traffic
If you’re still unsure whether conversion ads are better than traffic ads, let’s consider the differences again.
Conversions vs. Traffic campaigns can be tricky to assess when considering what type of strategy will work best for driving people to a specific product such as Spotify.
Link click campaigns are often ineffective when it comes to cold traffic, with cases seeing over 1,000 link clicks but leading to less than 10 streams on Spotify.
Understanding why this is the case requires examining the difference between conversions and traffic campaigns.
Going straight to Spotify may seem like an obvious choice to save people time and effort, but more successful options exist.
One explanation could be the extra step users need to take with a conversion campaign: they have to leave one platform (such as Facebook) to go directly to another (Spotify).
This drop-off process reduces engagement and decreases the likelihood of people making it through the journey.
For this reason, traffic campaigns that keep potential customers on their original platform tend to yield higher results.
But traffic doesn’t make sense if you’re selling high-ticket items. Unless you’re building the world’s largest funnel, the goal is to book the sales call, and traffic ads aren’t going to be as persuasive, meaning people just aren’t going to book the call.
And many people from traffic ads are simply looky-loos, so they’re kind of like junk in the gears of your advertising. So you’ll get more volume of people, but that means you’re working harder to get to a sale.
Conversions Filter Out The Junk
As advertisers, having fake clicks can rack up the bills. So you must run conversion campaigns with safeguards to ensure false clicks aren’t fooling you.
Fake bot accounts, click farms, and automated programs can inflate link clicks without providing conversions at a desirable rate. A key measure in this battle is using filters that remove the junk, including bots and click farms, created to boost performance data.
When any sort of online operation interacts with a targeted audience, such as a landing page used for conversion campaigns, there will be feedback from Facebook users regardless of whether it is from actual people.
In most cases automated accounts or click farms cannot interact with general web pages, so any target conversions from them become almost impossible, saving you from wasted ad spend and Facebook from falsely boosting its metrics.
With this filtering system in place, a positive feedback loop creates trust for validating conversions across all online marketing campaigns.
Ad Tracking Proves Conversion Ads Are Better
Ad tracking is a crucial tool for businesses to measure the effectiveness of their advertising campaigns.
By analyzing the data collected through ad tracking, you can decide which ad types generate the most leads and conversions.
Recently, the data has shown that conversion ads surpass other types of advertisements in terms of effectiveness.
And the most effective tracking software I have come across is Hyros, which lets you customize your reports and will track every touch point that led to the sale, so you have more profound insights than from any other source.
Since conversion ads are designed to encourage a specific action from the viewer, such as signing up for a newsletter or making a purchase using ad tracking correctly will provide the data to help you scale your ads because you can see that a conversion ad is the better option, letting you adjust your advertising strategies to maximize their return on investment.
If you’re ready to scale your conversions by tracking your ads more effectively, you need Hyros. So book a free call today and get your ad scale ROI by up to 30%.