If you haven’t added paid traffic to your T-shaped marketer toolbelt, you’re missing out. Paid search marketing is a proven marketing strategy for getting instant results and dialing in the four Ps of marketing: product, price, place, and promotion. Let’s talk about the benefits of paid traffic.

#1: Speed to Market

The first benefit of paid traffic is speed. To illustrate what I mean, let’s compare paid ads to search engine optimization. You may think this is an unfair comparison, but it illustrates my point perfectly. Search engine optimization or SEO is the process by which you try to get your content to rank in the search engine results pages or SERPs. SEO strategy includes keyword research, meta data, backlinking, and all kinds of technical elements. Most people view organic traffic as any traffic you don’t have to pay to get in front of. With organic marketing, it can take three months to get a piece of content to appear as a search result. In other words, to rank organically.

#2: Analytics You Can Actually Track

Another of the benefits of paid traffic is the analytics that back it up. With organic marketing, social media marketing, and especially email marketing, there are limited data points, and those data points are being taken away from us because of privacy first initiatives. With paid traffic, the advertising networks – Google AdWords, Facebook, Bing ads, etc. – have to give you this information because you’re paying for the traffic.

#3: Optimization of Every Element of the Campaign

With paid advertising, you can optimize everything with minor tweaks. You can’t optimize or change these variables outside of a paid ecosystem. Again (beating a dead horse), because you’re paying for that Facebook ad, Google ad, Bing ads, whatever, the network gives you opportunities to enhance your ad campaign. When you pay attention to the data, you see exactly where the disconnect is. Then you can make minor tweaks to improve the performance of your paid search ad long term. The ability to optimize your campaigns is one of the strongest benefits of paid traffic.

#4: Enhanced Customer Targeting

One of the major differences between free traffic and paid traffic is targeting. With paid traffic, you get to decide who you put your ads in front. This is an amazing benefit, especially given how much information these ad networks know about people. From a machine learning perspective, this data is important. Why? All the ad networks are reverse engineering intent. They want to understand why people do what they do. They want to know what makes people buy. You can take advantage of machine learning through targeting.