Marketing automation is all about return on investment. There are lots of factors that influence this return, but right at the start of that chain of factors is traffic to your website.

You need people into your sales funnel to convert them, and you need traffic to your website to get people into your sales funnel.

Marketing automation isn’t about getting any traffic, however. Instead, it’s about getting the right traffic.

After all, 100 highly targeted website visitors is much better for your business than 200, 300, or even 500 non-targeted or poorly targeted visitors.

Google AdWords Targeting

One of the best ways to get traffic to your website as part of your marketing automation campaign is Google AdWords. This is because AdWords is a direct response marketing tool.

In addition, it has an excellent targeting feature – keywords.

To get the best results, you should target your keywords very carefully at the beginning of your campaign, keeping the number of keywords low while also having a restrictive keyword-match strategy, i.e. exact match and phrase match.

As you start getting data from your campaigns, you can start expanding the keywords you use, testing continuously as you go.

By getting the keywords right from the beginning and then expanding in a controlled way, you will get a more targeted audience to your website.

Also Read: 11 Common AdWords Mistakes that Will Cost You Money

There are also three other key areas of your AdWords campaigns that you should look at to help refine your targeting even further:

• Geography – restrict the geographical targeting settings to only cover your catchment area. Be very critical and clear-minded when doing this. For example, are people really going to travel long-distances while by-passing competitors to buy from you? If you don’t have a compelling reason that will make them do so, you should stick with your main catchment area.
• Advert text – carefully wording the text in your ads will also help to zero in on the right people. This means being specific about what you offer and why people should click to your website.
• Negative keywords – continuously building your negative keyword list is also crucial to ensure you don’t pick up accidental, non-relevant clicks. This is particularly important as you start to expand the match types and volume of keywords you use.

Other Traffic Sources

Google AdWords isn’t the only method you can use to get targeted traffic to your website to fuel your marketing automation campaign. Other methods you can use include:

• Organic search – using SEO, local search, and longtail keyword targeting to bring traffic to your website organically.
• Social media – a carefully built and nurtured social media audience can also be a fantastic source of traffic.
• Offline marketing – you can also have success with offline marketing. Sponsoring an event taking place within your industry is one example, as is attending networking opportunities.

The Right Traffic is the Starting Point to Marketing Automation Success

Whatever traffic acquisition methods you use, targeting that traffic as much as possible will improve return on investment as well as the overall result you get from your marketing automation campaigns.

Also, when you have the right traffic visiting your website, you can devote more of your time to optimising other elements of your campaign.