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Category: news website.
Region: Kazakhstan.
Campaign duration: 1 month.
Monthly budget: $3000 (including agency’s service fee).
Driving traffic to the site is an easy job these days. There are various resources and tools like Google AdWords and Yandex.Direct. All we need is to summarize it all and get desired traffic. But, is the received traffic coming from the target audience? I can’t brag about ROI in this particular case, as its central figure is one of the largest news websites. The key goal is traffic. Not any traffic, but the high-quality traffic at low cost. Initially, the client carried out the advertising campaign independently, which allows comparison. The client only had Google Display Network advertising set.
- Search Advertising Campaign.
- Display Network Campaign.
- Remarketing campaign (GDN).
- Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA).
- Dynamic Search Ads (DSA).
- Video Campaign.
So, How to Drive Cheap Traffic to a News Site?
The news website we worked with is an infotainment site, and even though GDN seemed to fit perfectly, the greatest value was added by search advertising campaign. The runner-ups are GDN and remarketing. Thus, we chose the following promotion strategy.
Search Advertising Campaign
Keywords are chosen according to the general subject matter of the site as well as its sections.
GDN and Remarketing GDN
It is important to limit the ads frequency for unique users and regularly fill in the rotation with text and graphic ads announcing the hot news. An additional requirement is the regular moderation of advertising platforms to avoid accidental clicks, which are common for game-related resources. If the site does not permit setting up remarketing lists by URL, sections should be marked out using DataLayer. It will allow skipping the showbiz news for users who are keen on politics.
Video Advertising
It’s necessary to maintain the “freshness” of the ads and avoid annoying the users with the repeating promo.
Remarketing Lists for Search Ads
Campaign contains prepositions as keywords. Therefore, with virtually any search query, the user is informed of recent news in Google search. 
In this case we used both users’ lists and those from YouTube.
Dynamic Search Ads
Although we received a lot of traffic, Google’s bots are absolutely unconstrained when it comes to keywords formation, which is why it’s important to keep track of search queries. Since the site does not allow tracking indexes like ROI, it is important to obtain information about the user’s interaction with the site.
- Users who wrote a comment.
- Transitions to the social network groups (Vkontakte, Facebook, Odnoklassniki, Twitter).
- Users who pressed “Like”.
- Users who subscribed to RSS.
Now, let’s compare the account performance figures for the same period (23 days in July and September). 
So, we got a significant CTR increase along with a minor cost per click increase ($0.02 to $0.03). Traffic quality indicators are definitely pleasant to see. 
Afterwards, we managed to recover the cost of clicks to $0.02 and now this CPC remains unchanged. 
Main indicators showed positive dynamics during the campaigns’ duration period. To clarify – the data from Netpeak Client Dashboard. 
Conclusions
CTR — increased by 304,98%.
Bounce Rate — decreased by 57,78%.
Number of Pageviews per Session — increased by 30,36%.
Average Session Duration — increased by 623,23%.
Many believe that bringing in cheap and high-quality traffic to news site is a myth. We have proven it’s real.
Comments (2)
Thank you for the valuable case study!
Excellent ideas presented for news site promotion. Thanks!
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