Paid Traffic

Paid traffic is visits arriving from a paid ad — a search ad click, a display banner or a social campaign — where each entry was paid for.

Unlike organic, paid traffic has a direct cost, so its volume alone is not the point — the volume-to-cost ratio is what drives the decision. Its identifying line is UTM: a paid click almost always arrives tagged (medium cpc or paid), and if the team tags poorly, part of the paid traffic gets lost in Referral or Direct and ad ROI is miscalculated. The key point is that a web analytics tool knows the count of paid entries but not the ad spend; the spend comes from the ad platform. So any cost metric such as acquisition cost is built by placing the analytics entries beside the ad-platform spend, not from one tool alone.