Traditionally we have not had to worry too much about generating customer eyeballs on our digital content above and beyond organic sources of traffic.
Organic traffic is views of your content received through non-paid methods, such as a standard search engine result (organic search) or a normal social media post, such as a Tweet or a Facebook post (organic social).
Paid traffic is where you pay to inflate the amount of views you receive through these means.
However, this is changing as third-party accommodation providers become noisier in the digital space, using paid marketing strategies to try a) retain customers across demographics they have traditionally fared well in, b) compete amongst themselves and university accommodation and c) try and win customers from new demographics such as first-year students.
Therefore if demand/competition is an area of concern it is worth considering whether to compete in these spaces in order to try and neutralise their potential gains, as well as gaining additional new customers ourselves.
Understanding organic vs paid methods
- Organic Search is where you rely on a search engine’s algorithm to place your content in search results according to how their algorithm interprets your content according to what the user types (known as a keyword). You can only influence it through search engine optimisation.
- Paid Search is where you pay to appear in more prominent positions in those search results, again according to what the user types. Usually this is at the top and bottom of the page with listings that look similar to Organic Search results, but a small ‘Ad’ label to denote the position has been paid for.
- Organic Social is where you use social media in a very similar way to a personal user. You build followers on the basis of the strength of your brand, product or content. The more people that interact with your content, the more exposure you are likely to have to other like-minded people – all of which are hopefully potential customers. Occasionally pieces of content receive exponential exposure compared to most normal pieces – known as going ‘viral’.
- Paid Social is where you pay to promote your content to a wider audience, without relying on the interaction described above. Often Paid and Organic can work hand-in-hand, for example by seeding content with a boost of paid views, but then allowing organic growth to take over as more and more people interact. Generally all paid social is marked as such, through a ‘Sponsored’ label.
But wait – with social it’s not quite that simple. A lot of Paid Social is designed to look organic, for example by seamlessly blending into a user’s feed. Some however look more like traditional ads (known as Paid Display), for example by appearing in a sidebar that normal social users can’t access. And then some ‘organic’ content can be turned into paid through features such as ‘boosting’. Given social media ad platforms generally take the same content and morph it into all these placements, we will consider any ads on social media sites to be Paid Social.
- Paid Display is a category that kind of straddles these two categories because the main player in the market is Google. This is where you pay to have an add appear on real estate on other websites – a bit like a traditional newspaper or magazine. You’ll see any UK news website full of these ads – including some of ours if you hit them at the right time of the year! Most of the time these ads are static images, but increasingly they are animated, or a mix of text and images that adjust themselves responsively.