Have a question about Advertise.com (which I believe used to be ABCSearch). I have a currency site that I'm monetizing thru Adsense and a Clickbank forex vendor. I wanted to sort of "work out the kinks" with a load of low-cost $0.01 PPC traffic. Advertise.com has been great for this, but ALL of the traffic I'm getting is from AskLots.com, which as far as I can tell is something fishy. There's essentially nothing at the site, despite having a decent Alexa rating, and the site MyWOT.com lists them as a phishing site. So my guess is that it's some kind of traffic from spyware or something. I DON'T think it's automated bots, because the IP addresses are right across the country, and my direct traffic has gone up during this campaign, which to me suggests that some people initially come thru Advertise.com but then return on their own. Then again I don't understand automated bots, so who knows. My question is - does it matter? Assuming it's REAL visitors, just ones that didn't get there through a normal way (Yahoo, Google, or Microsoft), should it matter for conversion rates? Assuming that the users who somehow come through Advertise.com/Asklots are somehow being tricked into using the Asklots search engine, aren't their clicks once they get to my site still worth the same as anyone else's? I have to admit there's been very low conversion to my Clickbank forex program, but then this is the first time I've tried it so I'm not sure what to expect.
Same thing happened to me, but it was still determined to be bot traffic using 'zombie' computers across the country.
Hey Kevin, I thought this at first, but asklots is just the referring domain for all of the advertise.com clicks coming from their network of thousands of traffic sources. Nothing to be worried about imo. -OG
Appreciate your comments and would like others - as your experience directly conflicts. It's really, really hard for me to believe that AskLots has "zombie computers" in like 300 different cities across Canada, in click amounts that roughly mirror the population. But the other commenter is saying that ALL Advertise.com traffic of a certain type is routed through AskLots, which I suppose is plausible but I can't find any evidence of a relationship between these two companies and I'm not sure why they wouldn't just disclose this up front. But... my payment per click from Adsense keeps going down, and not a single hop to my Clickbank forex program has even filled out the order form out of about 30 clicks...
My Advertise.com rep says that all of the traffic when you do the low-cost "wide" campaigns comes thru the URL AskLots.com. I guess they use a bunch of partner search, domainer, and publishers to drum up the traffic. So not the best quality traffic, but I don't think it's automated bots. Let me also take this opportunity to mention - they have real reps. This lady returns e-mails 7 days a week within like an hour. And I'm not a particularly big spender, I don't think. So that's worth something.
They do use a lot of partner sites, but here is the truth. In my day job I am responsible for spending millions of dollars for my clients in paid search. That being said, many times I actually have more money than there is traffic within the top four engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask), so I venture out into the second-tier engines (ABC Search, 7 Search, etc.). My experience with ABC Search (now Advertise.com) has always been this. They can drive a lot of traffic (weirdly enough, many times much more than Google) and incredibly cheap prices, but most if not all that traffic will not convert for me. What I see when I look at analytics is this - many different locations, many stay around for more than 1 page view, but next to 0 conversions. So, at the end of the day the traffic is cheap and plentiful, but I end up with something like 40,000 visitors in one month from a site like - http://www.primosearch.com/ (I use Click Forensics to track my traffic from the engines to see where it is really coming from - meaning what partners) while Google may send 20,000. I find that highly suspect. Just my 2 cents Good luck on whatever you choose to do and would love to hear about your results if you go forward. Maybe it is just my industry that does not produce conversions via ABC Search.
... and, today, 8 clicks (about normal by this time of day) and zero earnings. Someone at Google Adsense decided that traffic from ABCSearch/Advertise.com was worthless. So maybe it's bots, maybe it's real, who knows - but if Google doesn't count the clicks, you sure can't monetize thru Adsense anyway. Conclusion: Advertise.com is great for testing out traffic patterns on a site (what people click on) and fine if you're monetizing via CPM, but if you're monetizing on Adsense it's worthless (and probably harmful) traffic.
Very confusing post - what do you mean, someone at Google AdSense decided traffic from ABC Search/Advertise.com was worthless? They are completely different and not related in any way shape or form. Why would Google care what ABC Search/Advertise.com does? What do you mean Google doesn't count the click, you sure can't monetize thru AdSense? Are youtalking about Google or ABC Search/Advertising.com? They are two different companies, with two different programs that happen to both run on a PPC model, so what are you talking about? As to your conclusion - have zero idea what you are saying, maybe everyone else does, but I do not. If ABC Search/Advertise.com is bot traffic how is that going to tell you anything about your site performance? Maybe I am missing something, but your whole post defies logic.
My apologies - let me try to be clearer. I'm still sort of new to this, so perhaps I'm using incorrect terminology. Over the past week, I've been buying $0.01 PPC traffic from Advertise.com (aka ABCSearch). During this time, I was getting about 500 visitors per day, had CTR of about 2%, and was making something like $8/day using Google Adsense. There are essentially no other forms of traffic to the site. Yesterday, I had about the normal amount of traffic, with 9 clicks - 2% at the time I looked in the afternoon. Again, normal for the site. But earnings from Adsense were zero. $0.00 (still zero when I look at "yesterday" this morning). In reading up on this forum, the only explanation for this is that Google decided that the clicks from my site were worthless. And essentially the only source of traffic to my site is Advertise.com. Ergo the traffic from Advertise.com was worthless. I'm not saying that the Advertise.com people use bots - I don't know what they use. But effectively it doesn't matter - if the traffic is considered worthless by Adsense, and that's the primary way I'm monetizing my site traffic, then I can't use Advertise.com as a source of traffic.
Hey Kevin, It looks like you are buying run of network traffic from Advertise.com for $.01 and arbitraging it to your adsense on your site. This only works best when you optimze the traffic buy, by tracking and removing the lowest performing traffic sources. Advertise.com sends each traffic source ID with every click, so I track and work with my account rep by telling them which sources to remove. They even have a self serve optimization system. Like it was mentioned earlier in this post, the Advertise.com network has TONS of traffic but it all works differently dependent on the site. If you work with your rep on optimizing, you'll be very surprised with the performance, I was. OG
Based on my previous experience with ABCSearch i would never touch them again. Paid to click traffic, bots, way too many dodgy partners....you name it.