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Paid ads or content: what does a visitor cost?

21 October 2026

In what your website is worth we saw that a site is valued on the traffic it keeps. Paid traffic is the kind you do not keep. This post asks what a visitor costs you from paid ads against writing posts, on the same rand budget - and what you have left when the money stops.

Why ads and content pay back differently

Both cost money up front. The difference is how long the visits last.

• Ads buy visits now. Every rand of budget buys a click, and the clicks stop the day the budget does.
• A post takes months to rank, and its visits build up slowly over that time.
• Many posts never rank. Ahrefs found that 96.55% of pages get no traffic from Google at all.
• The posts that do rank keep bringing visits long after you have paid for them - so ads win early and content wins late.

Work out what a visitor costs you

Type your budget a month, the cost per click on ads, what one post costs, the visits a post gets once it ranks, how many months a post takes to rank and how long you spend. The calculator shows the cost per visitor of each, the month content passes ads, and charts visits for a year after the spending stops.

Prefer a full page? Open the paid ads vs content calculator on CalcSA. For one post's visits and earnings over its whole life, the what one blog post is worth calculator goes deeper.

Worked example: the calculator's defaults

A budget of R3,000 a month for 24 months. On ads at an estimated R5 a click it buys 600 visits a month. On content it pays for two posts a month at R1,500 each. Each post builds up over 6 months to an estimated 50 visits a month, then holds.

• Ads: 14,400 visits for R72,000 - R5.00 a visitor, and none after month 24.
• Content: 22,183 visits from 48 posts for the same R72,000 - R3.25 a visitor.
• Content passes 600 visits a month in month 10, and passes ads in total visits in month 18.
• When the spending stops, content still brings 2,150 visits a month, rising to 2,400 as the last posts settle.
• A year after you stop, content has brought 50,400 visits - R1.43 a visitor.

Three more cases, same defaults except the one shown:

• Clicks at R2.50 instead of R5: ads win over two years at R2.50 a visitor, but content still passes them month by month in month 16.
• Posts that get 20 visits instead of 50: content costs R8.11 a visitor and only passes ads in month 19 - ads are cheaper.
• Posts that rank at once, over 12 months: content costs R4.62 a visitor and passes ads in month 6.

Estimates. The R5 cost per click, the 50 visits a ranked post and the 6 months to rank are assumptions, as in the calculator. The model holds a post's visits once it ranks; in practice they fade slowly. Your ad account and your WebCounter pages report show your real figures.

Three years of visits from two years of spending

Same R3,000 a month for 24 months, then nothing. Visits a month from ads, from posts that settle at 50 visits, and from posts that settle at 20:

• Ads are a tap - flat while you pay, zero the month after.
• Content is a slope that keeps going - even weak posts at 20 visits leave 960 visits a month.
• Ads make sense for a launch or a sale; for traffic you keep, the money goes further on posts that rank.

Reading your counter for this

Your WebCounter counter shows visits by page and by source, so you can see what your posts really get. No counter yet? Get your free WebCounter counter - it takes a minute and costs nothing.

• Visits a post gets once it ranks: average the monthly visits of your posts that are older than six months.
• Count the posts that get nothing - they belong in the average too.
• Compare ad clicks with counted visits - if the counter shows far fewer, many clicks never loaded the page.
• Count bots out - some paid clicks are bots, and they cost the same as people.

Sources

• Ahrefs, Tim Soulo, 96.55% of content gets no traffic from Google (2023) - not re-checked at the original for this post.
• The R5 cost per click, the 50 visits a ranked post and the 6 months to rank are our estimates - no single published South African benchmark was found; cost per click varies widely by niche.
• Calculator: CalcSA, Paid ads vs content.

Estimates only. What a click costs and what a post gets depend on your niche and your competition; your own ad account and pages report are the test.