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Having direct traffic is like having cotton candy at a fair – you sometimes desperately want it yet can easily do without it once you taste it. In a way, direct traffic is almost synonymous with returning visitors, in that it doesn’t affect your SEO ranking for the worse and comes straight from the target audience. For many, it reduces the number of irrelevant visitors, as all that matters is getting relevant traffic. On the other hand, it also means there is not much in terms of new traffic to the website and wider exposure.

These are all fine points, yet direct traffic can be a valuable tool in your media efforts. Beyond the usual direct domain typing or clicking on a bookmark, there’s a much wider pool of traffic at play here. Basically, anything that analytical services like Google Analytics can’t determine the source of or referrer. Clicking a link from an offline Microsoft Word document? Check. Clicking a link from a social media app? Check. Internal workers? Also, check. These and other instances show direct traffic you’d do well to have tracked. While you won’t be able to accurately track all of the said traffic, there are ways to maximize that range. That is where a premium ad network like SelfAdvertiser steps in.

What Makes SelfAdvertiser’s Direct Traffic Different

In today’s highly competitive online marketing world, everyone is looking for their spot under the sun. With the rapid expansion of online businesses, it seems everyone is able to offer some type of traffic service, no matter the quality. As a company that’s running a decade-long business, we have based our services on the needs and demands of our clients. Traffic-wise, this means one thing – delivering direct traffic of the highest quality.

Forget bots and fake traffic, we have real quality sources you can use to drive success. SelfAdvertiser has its own direct traffic, acquired by our media buyers team. That’s our own dedicated traffic, not just exchange traffic you see for the most part on the market. Here are just some of the things that are specific to our service:

“Zero-Click” Campaigns

Just like the importance of having a good offensive formation in football (sort of like CPA advertising in marketing), having quality traffic sources is paramount to having success in the media business. When talking about direct traffic, that usually means a combination of bookmarks, favorites, and typing domain names. The first two are classic examples, while domain names carry a bit of a welcome change from the routine point-and-click process.

Namely, a visitor manually enters the URL of the website and if misspelled, gets redirected to the advertiser page. In this case, the user goes straight to the landing page immediately after domain submission. This type of PPR (pay per redirect) is called “Zero-Click” and it’s obvious to see why. There is no need for further interaction or an ad creative to entice the visitors, making it a great solution for buying tons of clicks and keeping acquisition costs to a minimum.

Now, you may be wondering how “zero-click” campaigns make us any different from the rest of the bunch. Our platform contains massive amounts of domain traffic inventories, packed with the most frequent and common mistyped domains of worldwide popular brands. Seamless redirection turns a misspell of “yuotube” to Youtube in a flash. Did you notice that we actually misspelled ‘misspell’? Not automatic in this case, obviously. It’s important to note that this high-quality traffic has low bounce rates and is entire PPC safe. In addition, it is 101% (we go the extra mile, er, percent) trackable on Google Analytics.

Targeted Audience

The benefit of using an ad network is the ability to reach a wide selection of websites and audiences. Access to different websites can do all sorts of wonderful things for you like weeding out the unprofitable traffic. However, without the necessary tools in place, the optimization process will not be possible. This is what separates a good ad network from a winning one – the ability to get the traffic based on targeting.

An example of SelfAdvertiser targeting options

At SelfAdvertiser, we are well aware of this and that’s why we have a keyword tool designed to assist the advertiser during the targeting process. The “zero-click” model allows keyword targeting just like you usually do when targeting URLs. The subsequent visitor will momentarily be redirected to your landing page, without disturbances from banners, concurring ads or other windows.

The same goes for the PPV model or pop ads. While these can be viewed as a redirect, they are usually not perceived as one. Nevertheless, the same principle is valid all the same. Ultimately, this allows you to effectively target and optimize your campaigns, either through the “zero-click” model or pop ads. Both kinds of campaigns are a part of our Self-serve platform.

Since there are more than 20,000 direct publishers from various verticals at play here, things are bound to get a teensy-weensy competitive. The built-in Bid-Per-Source feature allows placing different bids for different sources when performing campaign optimization. As the name says, you can customize a bid for any source based on its performance (raise bids for sources that provide more converting traffic, lower for less performing sources or simply pause the underperformers).

Building Authority

Whatever the real reason may be, direct traffic means people remember your domain and willingly return to it. In itself, this can be construed as showing a certain level of authority, out of which your ranking will be influenced. For instance, Google ranks the most authoritative pages to correlate to a specific search query. The amount of direct traffic you receive goes in line with the number of links and overall online presence you maintained and developed over time, as well as your authority and trust. The more direct traffic you attract, the more chances you have it will influence your ranking one way or another by building your authority.

As there are so many factors that impact the quality and relevancy of direct traffic, getting a healthy dose of it on a regular basis becomes harder. While it looks like the most straightforward type of traffic in the history of the Internet, it’s closer to being the most misleading one. Ad networks like SelfAdvertiser have the means to rid you of confusion and deliver the results. The bottom line is that direct traffic is always good as it results in the targeted audience, which, in turn, comes through branding. And now you know where to get it.