Worst paid targeted traffic
Open topic | May 28th, 2007 | 3 CommentsPaid targeted traffic, $20 for ‘2000’ unique targeted traffic straight forward to your site. What the hell?! Yeah guys, thats exactly what i thought too when I heard such offers in webmaster forums. We spend hundreds and thousands on advertising to drive traffic, and look, we can get it for $20 umh…smells fishy to me, what about you pal? Was curious pal, was really curious…and I gave it a try pal, i had to give it a try, could not resist to see how fishy this is.
There are two options they can sell targeted traffic to people, 1. to spends loads and loads of time and money in hunting domains with strong backlinks and pageranking and then redirect them to the one that purchases some of the traffic these domains have or 2. you just get that what i call ‘ghost traffic’, in simple words bots.
Hunting domains that are going to expire just for redirecting to your own site needs a lot of time and effort, this is the tough side of the domainers market and if you don’t know what you are doing you will be just wasting time and money. I know what i am speaking, because i used to buy expired domains to drive traffic to my sites, you need to update at least weekly your domain list and redirect them to your site, because that traffic starts to slowly vanish as the time passes. Think about, how much time, money and dedication is required to offer this type of traffic as service, to one, two, three, ten, one hounder customers? How many domain names should be back-ordered daily (yes pal, you need to backorder this type of domains, i told you earlier this is the tough side of the domainers market, they are all doing the same exact thing you are, and wins who is faster and has a better equipment, with equipment i mean domainers equipment. Domainers backorder their domain of interest from two or even three backorder services provider.).
I contacted one of these ‘companies’ (i don’t want to publish their name but feel free to contact me if you want to know the name) and asked some pre-sales questions. The answers did not convince me, my thoughts regard to this service remained the same if not became even strong, fishy! Purchased the cheapest pack, 2500 uniques within one month for $19.95. The account got activated after 24 hours and username and password was given to me for my control panel to check my campaign. In this panel, i was able to see the number of redirected users and the IP‘s of those redirected users to my site. The first time when i logged in this panel i saw 49 unique visitors already redirected to my site, ehmm. The days would pass, the hits on AWstats would appear, but i still did not saw a single visitor to convert in client, or at least a pre-sales e-mail to be sent from those visitors. I gave it some more time, and started to monitor this in different ways. After couple days, i notice the Alexa ranking increase and i started to think that my services suck big time if this is a genuine targeted traffic.
I have a live chat window on my website which became a powerful tracking feature for me on this case. The main use of this Web based live chat software is to make easier to clients to reach the support department or the sales department. This web based live chat has a great feature that gives good informations about the visitors that are on my web site, results such as, referrer site (from where did this visitor found about my site), how long a visitor is on my site, a history of all the pages the visitor has been surfing while has been on my site and also it shows if this is the first time this visitor (IP address) is visiting my website or he is a returning visitor. I was tracking and monitoring the traffic for which i paid for a week or so. I was on live web chat personally for hours and hours, all the visitors that i could find online surfing on my website were visitors coming from those sites where i had paid advertisement campaigns running. Neither one single visitor was referred from the IP/site that i was told the visitors would be redirected from.
Suspecting every day more on this targeted traffic service i had purchased, started a deeper investigation, i took the whole list of the IP’s that were given to me from the control panel and checked them one by one if those IP’s match with the IP’s that have visited my site since the day i purchased for this service. The results were incredible, from 200 and so IP addresses only 1 IP did match, fishy fishy.
I have converted better visitors from the expired domain names i personally tracked and registered instead of the visitors that were redirected from this purchased service.
This has been my WORST investment (even tho i was curious to test this service) that I have ever made. This kind of traffic (if is genuine) could be nice for a site that offers free stuff, free services, but speaking of my own experience for websites that sell products or offer paid services this traffic is impossible (at least was for me) to convert.
If anyone has experience with kind of traffic, i would be glad to hear your positive or negative testimonial for the purchase of this kind of targeted traffic.
[…] other way to spoof the alexa ranking is to buy one of those yucky paid traffic campaigns which I would not recommend you get one for the next […]
ugh! I tried one of these paid traffic places and could not wait until the campaign was over. It was nothing but pooh and it was ruining my stats. Don’t do it!
I have tried paid traffic twice. The first was something like 1k visitors for 3-4$ – awstats showed like more than 600+ visits during the 30-day campaign, while google analytics showed more than 300 as I remember.
The last one was a total scam. 3k visits for 2$ – the control panel url is used for other “providers”, too… the cp did not work as expected, the js menu would not appear, I had to see the source code to check the stats… In 4 days about 1200 visits the cp has recorded, but awstats and google analytics show NONE visitor!!!
They should be using real real bots!!! I am going to ask for a refund at paypal (do not care about 2$, but I do not want the scammers make money). I will post reviews at popular places like webhostingtalk, digitalpoint, sitepoint etc. The welcome email was also from a yahoo address with spelling errors in just 1 line!!!