- Targeted traffic is an online audience that fits an advertiser’s profile of a potential shopper or user of their service. It generates intentional ad clicks and is one of the biggest expenses for digital advertisers.
- Non-targeted traffic doesn’t represent a specific demographic and usually comes from random web browsing.
Zero-click traffic is traffic from web redirection (URL redirect). Users who are visiting a page with one URL end up at a page with a different one. The visit isn’t the result of any clicks on behalf of the user, and is therefore called zero-click.
A pop-under ad is an advertisement that shows up in a new window, underneath the website you’re currently visiting. These ads are big drivers of zero-click traffic, because the user ends up visiting a website without having to click anywhere.
A pop-up ad is an advertisement that shows up in a new window, on top of the one you’ve currently opened.
If a website is inactive or never existed in the first place, its owner can monetize the website’s name (parked domain) by showing advertisements to the website visitors.
Ad networks are essentially platforms for traffic monetization. They connect publishers (owners of websites with existing traffic) to advertisers who are looking for an audience.
The price of web traffic depends on how many advertisers want to buy it and how much they’re willing to pay for it. These auctions run in real time and every advertiser bid raises the price of traffic, immediately. That’s why governments bidding on their own web visitors would instantly increase the cost of advertising to its people and reduce the amount of malicious advertising.
Quality advertisers are often not well-informed of the potential uses of non-targeted traffic, or are overly protective of their brand reputation. Commercial avertisers don’t want to be associated with websites (publishers) that provide cheap (non-targeted) traffic, as they fear this could result in being flagged by Google’s algorythms which determine a website’s authority (reputation). One concern related to Google’s algorythm, for example, is bounce rate.
For this very reason, government advertising is uniquely suited to cheap traffic – it normally requires an audience targeted only by location (country) and belongs to .gov websites which aren’t reliant on the Google algorythm for reputation.
Ad publishers provide the ad space and audience for web advertisement, through a website, app, parked domain or other type of digital property that they have ownership of.
