Google Ads, Meta Ads or a Traffic Platform: Comparing Cost per Visitor

The three big options sell different things, which is why comparing their headline prices is misleading. Google Ads sells intent: a person searching for your category right now. Meta and TikTok sell attention: a person scrolling who might be interested if the creative is good. A per-visit traffic platform sells arrivals: a real human who lands on your page. All three can be worth the money, but only in the right role.

Google Ads is the strongest channel when demand already exists and the search query is commercial. You pay per click in an auction where competitive queries are costly, quality scores move your price, and loose match types can spend your budget on searches that were never relevant. You also pay for clicks, not visits, so a slow or confusing landing page quietly raises your real cost per visitor.

Social platforms give you cheap attention and expensive production. Meta and TikTok reward creative that stops the scroll, need a steady stream of new variants, and perform best for awareness, retargeting and products that are visually compelling. They are weaker at reaching someone with a specific question, and their targeting has become broader over time, which makes them a poor fit for narrow, low-volume audiences.

A traffic platform occupies a different slot: fixed price per real visitor, no auction, no charge for impressions, and visitors from the countries and topics you choose. You trade fine-grained control over exactly who arrives for a predictable cost and immediate volume. That makes it the cheapest way to test pages, markets and offers, and a good baseline to compare everything else against. RealTraffic charges a flat $0.05 per real visit from a prepaid balance, so you can see the number of visitors a hundred dollars buys before you commit it, then measure what those visits did in your own analytics.