As you know the intent of this series is to cover all tactics and techniques to generate traffic to a website, so we will touch both free and paid methods. Today I want to talk about a paid one, the so called targeted traffic deals.
The Concept: Do a quick search on Google for “buy traffic” or “targeted traffic” and you will see an immense number of sponsored results. Those are basically websites that sell targeted traffic (or so they claim, but read on).
The amount of traffic and cost vary. Here are some examples that I gathered: “250,000 real visitors for $69,” “10,000 targeted visitors for $39,” and “10,000 visitors for $9,99.”
As you can see they have solutions for all pocket sizes…
Basically, therefore, these websites will send you traffic in exchange for money.
Does is Work?: Hardly. The trick of this business is that they make the impression that they will send real Internet visitors to your website, but most of the times the traffic will come from popups, popdowns, traffic exchange and get-paid-to-surf schemes. Here are some disclaimers that I collected from those websites:
“Client understands that HIT COUNTERS on your site DO NOT ACCURATELY REPRESENT THE NUMBER OF VISITORS SENT TO YOUR SITE.”
“The client understands that if the visitor viewing the the ad closes it before it finishes loading (due to network bandwidth, high impact graphics, animation or lack of interest on the visitors part etc.), IT WILL COUNT AS AN AD VIEW ON OUR SYSTEM, WE HAVE SENT YOUR SITE TO THE VISITOR AND HAVE THEREFORE FULFILLED OUR OBLIGATION.”
I also found it interesting that most of those websites have an identical Terms of Service. Either they are copying from each other, or someone owns them all.
How to get started: Don’t. I have considered purchasing those services in the past, but they always sounded too good to be true. Guess what, probably they are.
The techniques and methods used to delivered the “targeted” traffic are so cheap that the overall results should be close to zero.
One of those days I will take one shot for the team and order some “10,000 real visitors” to see what traffic I will be able to track from Google Analytics.
Until them I would not recommend anyone to spend money on such schemes, unless it is done for scientific purposes…
Over to the readers: Have you ever purchased one of those target traffic offers? Did it work? Do you think some of them could be legitimate?
Website Traffic Series
- Part 1: Web Design and CSS Galleries
- Part 2: Blog Carnivals
- Part 3: Leave Comments on Other Blogs
- Part 4: Faking A Website Sale
- Part 5: Pulling an April Fools Prank
- Part 6: Using Forum Signatures
- Part 7: Putting A Blog on Your Static Website
- Part 8: Adding a Forum to Your Site or Blog
- Part 9: Buying Targeted Traffic
- Part 10: Email Signatures
- Part 11: Put Your URL On Online Profiles
- Part 12: Email Bloggers to Showcase Your Best Content
- Part 13: Faking a Hacker Attack
- Part 14: Promoting Your Content on Social Bookmarking Sites
- Part 15: Promoting Posts That Link to You on Social Bookmarking Sites
- Part 16: Promoting Your Content on Social Networking Sites
- Part 17: Using Article Directories
- Part 18: Exchanging Links with Partner Sites
Ah, one thing to review:
If they could sell you large traffic, why does their website had low rank of Alexa? Why do they need to use Google Adword earn each customer, or do they waste? Because if they own their real competence in Selling big traffic, they never need to pay for Google Adword anymore.
My friend tried this about a month ago. His site was display as a popup. He got 2,000 hits to his website and zero sales. He also got alot of spam from other traffic sites trying to get him to buy traffic from them as well.
I am sooo confused with all this, I have no idea what is a “decent” amount of traffic because there is nothing exactly like what I have on my site out there. We are a resource guide and make money after someone buys an ad on our site. I do not know if we charge enough or if we should put Adsense on the site. Is there somewhere I can go that will help me make sense out of the advertising angle of this business, we are only 9 months old. We are ranked on the first page of the Google search engine for our genre. How do I take advantage of this, or can I even? Help!
You can’t buy targeted traffic thinking more than 2-5% of it will convert. There is a reason that buying targeted traffic is inexpensive. You can get 2000 visitors for about $5. Of course they won’t all convert, but if you work with a quality supplier you will get real human traffic.
These things never do work. I have purchased a few here and there over a period of a few years just to see if any of them can bring me some traffic. After doing it a few times I have opted to no longer do this as it has never seemed to do anything for me because at least 80 percent is not even real traffic and the rest more than likely will just bounce.
Of course not every person that gets to your site via a popup or pop under is going to stay. But that is expected. The reason the paid targeted traffic sounds so good is because its very inexpensive. You can send thousands of visitors to your site for a couple bucks. If even one of those visitors buys something or now knows about your site when before they wouldn’t have its worth it. It exposure. Not saying it works for everybody, but its cheap enough to give it a try.
“Does is Work?: Hardly.”
i would say if you where to buy traffic the best way to go about it is to capture their information when they visit.. for example.. make sure it leads them to a opt-in page and make some stupendous offer that they would be silly to refuse.. that way at least you can get some value out of that visitor and you can market to them over and over
As with anything on the web, not all things are created equal. I know of one instance where expired domain traffic to a weight loss site did generate nearly a new sale per day. Would I recommend the strategy? Probably not. But, sites like trafficswarm.com use full screen popups and they have been around for a long time. People are still using them.
You want to buy targeted traffic to your website? Pay me.
Yes I would recommend adwords as I am currently using a system for a website (WotUThink.com) and the effect has been fairly average indeed.
I read your article,and it helped me to realize things when trying to pursue the dream of my own successful internet business. Getting everything to run smoothly is difficult, but I would like too, if I may, share something on here that helped me with my business and that might help others reading your article. I have discovered the use of MuVar and it has proven to be successful. MuVar is an interesting multi-variate testing tool that lets you break down web pages into sections, create different versions for each of those sections and test how well they perform. It has been proven to work. Thanks for being a great teacher!
I’ve been researching ways of pushing traffic to my sites and it all boils down to effort. These “fast traffic” schemes are no better than “lose weight fast” schemes or “make $10k in one month” pitches. Honest work is the real key to any objective don’t you agree?
Hi Daniel,
Good point.
I tried it to see what the effect would be (call it a scientific test) and while it ran up the uniques and improved the Alexa ranking the bounce rate was pretty much linear to the traffic.
I have never done it before, but I think it would be great if you could post the results here.
I have done this some this last month and I can say the only great thng about this is it boosts your website’s exposure and alexa.,..
@Team ray, digg traffic is not that bad, some people have built large RSS readerships with it.
Any service or product that sounds to good to be true usually is, as much as people do not want to believe this when you are confronted with what seems to be a great offer its sadly the nature of business.
I wanted to try this once in order to get traffic to an adult site. I never did it tough. I’m not sure why. I suppose, I haven’t had the guts to throw my money away.
Even worse than the Digg effect, I should say. Some of them generate the “traffic”, most appropriately called hits, with robots.
This is exactly what stumbleupon ads do. They direct SU users to your site (without popups). I’ve been using it for a little while and the traffic boost is decent, though my stats haven’t skyrocketed (we aren’t putting a ton of money into it, nor are we using the targeting features).
Ah, one thing to review:
If they could sell you large traffic, why does their website had low rank of Alexa? Why do they need to use Google Adword earn each customer, or do they waste? Because if they own their real competence in Selling big traffic, they never need to pay for Google Adword anymore.
Yep, I’ve tried traffic exchange with one of my other blogs, sheer waste, may be this kind of traffic is good for CPM ads nothing more than that!
Hey Daniel!
Save your money to buy traffic from Google Adsense to get more visitors come here and comment with us is better! (Joke ^_^).
Hey! Almost they are scammers. And I never seen any where send you real traffic as they promise.
They send you bots, waste your bandwidth and claim your money first at all.
After those days, if you have enough smart, you’ll see how in your analytics board.
IP: Only some.
Web browser: Same.
Screen: Same.
Time of visiting: Short.
Page view: 1.
That’s all I know. But, I am cock-sure there are some scammers working hard than this noob one that I was try. May be they have many different IP, Web Browser, Windows Screen, view more than 1 page…
I agree. Avoid targeted bulk traffic offers like the plague. Many of them freely admit that they utilize expired domains relevant to your site’s theme to redirect traffic to your site. When’s the last time you took the time to read an expired domain? Exactly.
Hi daniel,
just like the digg effect