The good and bad of buying traffic This is just my personal case study that I have ran, I am not a big supporter of buying traffic, but I made a 900% return on my expenses with two trials, and thought I would write up a summary, as I see many people wasting money on other ways to buy traffic (link exchanges, traffic trades, website scrolling scripts, etc). Feel free to make a comment on the blog posts, as I give a sitewide link for my top commentators.
Interesting article. Not sure if every site can use the advertising you used but it does work from some sites.
could you provide a little more info in this thread? I am interested in the post, but after the first few sentences my eyes couldn't take the bright orange background anymore.
Interesting to see this work out for someone. At least with this place we know the ads go to Adversal publishers and not off into space!
I have fixed the CSS stylesheet to have the text be black rather than white. I hope this helps! PS: I am waiting for my coder to reply about the sidebar looking messed up in IE. That will be fixed ASAP. Thanks!
@rockdiesel: When I ran my proxy websites nearly a year ago, I monetized the extreme amounts of traffic with popunders (You click a link and a “popup†window opens behind your active window). I know these can be pretty annoying, but rightfully so, even when using my own website, I had to manually open the popunder window, reading the site, before closing the window. The reason a lot of big name companies still use popunder and popup advertising is because it still works. If you have an excellent product for sale, you can get many sales for paying dirt cheap prices for this traffic. The company I used to publish popunders on my proxy sites was Adversal, so I emailed the owners asking if I could do the opposite… buy popunders. They responded quickly saying that their advertiser website was TrafficTaxi.net. I bought 10,000 unique popunders from Australia and 10,000 unique visitors from Canada because both countries speak English, and the advertising rates were cheaper than US traffic. The total cost was around $60, and resulted in 9 sales for WordHugger at $60 each. I have since stopped buying this traffic for WordHugger, but you can easily see that if you have a good product for sale, you can make (in my case, 900%) money back on your expenses. I would not recommend doing this if your product is not unique, or if you are only monetizing your websites through Adsense or other CPC (cost per click) publishers. If you are not selling a product, then I would highly recommend NOT to be buying traffic. If you have experimented with popups/popunders as well, feel free to let me know your outcome in the comments. I also want you to know that I do not recommend buying traffic from any of the top sites you find on Google searches or webmaster forums, because most are not popunders, but are actually the useless traffic as stated in the top paragraph. Good luck buying traffic!
Hi Raithe, sound interesting, thanks for the info. Why stop buying this traffic with that sort of return?
Interesting article, good study topic you should really keep doing it, 9x your investment is not all bad .
Sorry, I was meaning to say I have moved my paid popunders from WordHugger to my new site rssHugger this month, and then I will do a little bit for each. Hopefully, rssHugger will receive 9x ROI like wordhugger, but after all, that is what the case study is for. After this month is up and I have started my case study #2, I will keep you guys informed.
Raithe, Thanks for the post. I have a question for you. I run a blog and have an average of 45 new rss subscribers (feedburner stats) every day. But when I look at my site stats, my traffic doesn't seem to increase accordingly. This has been going on for months. By now there must be at least 5,000 rss subs sucking on my feed. What gives? Sam
@Sam Bowen: I have no idea. With feedburner, you can then easily see how many people click on the posts, or if you are getting a huge portion of just views, then you know that it is just bots crawling your RSS feeds. My blog is fairly new, and for every 25-30 posts read through an RSS, I generally get 5 clicks. Although every blog is different, if you are seeing hundreds (or thousands) of views through your RSS, but few clicks, then you know the traffic is not actual humans. There is thousands of possibilities as to where the subscribers are coming from. Many blackhat SEO websites scrape popular blogs and repost the feeds as there own, or it may be someone registering lots of emails (blah+1@gmail.com) (blah+2@gmail.com) etc. I don't really know what you should do. Sorry.
Buying targeted traffic is well worth it if you have the right keywords in Adwords. Buying bulk untargeted is pointless.
I just purchased some pop-under traffic yesterday. The campaign is set to deliver ~200 uniques a day. Since this is my first day with the new traffic I don't have enough stats to compare to my baseline. Nice post. Michael
Hey bud ... thanks for the info .... Pop under and pop up traffic has worked for me real well (I do mobile offers mostly) Gonna try out TrafficTaxi for sure ... but yeah they look shady, design wise ... I'm not saying they are shady ... but they do look it ...
Oh I totally agree. Their website looks like a piece of crap... but I have made $500+ from Adversal popunders on my proxy websites, and I know for sure that people viewed them... so I figured... might as well go with what I know works. EDIT: Yay 1500 posts!