Paid traffic is visitors who reach a site through advertising a business paid for directly: search ads, social media ads, display banners, video ads, and similar formats, as distinct from organic traffic, which arrives without a direct per-click or per-impression cost.
The core tradeoff against organic traffic is speed versus durability. A paid campaign can put a site in front of a target audience within hours of launching, which makes it the faster lever when a business needs visibility now, a product launch, a seasonal push, testing a new market, rather than waiting months for organic rankings to build. That speed comes at an ongoing cost, though: traffic generally stops the moment the budget does, while organic rankings, once earned, keep producing visits without continued ad spend. Most mature marketing strategies run both in parallel rather than picking one, using paid traffic for immediate, controllable volume and organic for the longer-term, lower-marginal-cost channel that compounds over time. Google Search Console and Google Analytics both report on it, though Search Console focuses specifically on organic while paid performance is usually tracked through the ad platform's own reporting alongside Analytics.
