175% more traffic than $ paid for adwords

I've been experimenting with adwords over the last few months and I've noticed a very strange phenomenon.

If I get (pay for) 5,000 Adword clicks a day, the overall traffic to my site goes up by an additional 3,700 unique visitors. This 175% ratio is constant whether the purchase volume is 100 or 15,000.

BTW: The conversion rates scale with the traffic. I’m a little confused but very appreciative.

Any thoughts on what is going on? I’m concerned that I’m going to get a huge Adwords charge 6 months from now for the additional traffic.

-jay
ClassifiedAds.com

 

Word of Mouth?
Clicks Identified as fraudulant (they just increased their security BIG time, and I noticed a huge drop in paying clicks due to that)

 

Also, I recommend you send them an email, just to be sure.

 

I would agree but the other 75% increase in traffic is not coming from google Adword clicks. I've got them all set up with an affiliate code so I know exactly how many I get and I reconcile them everyday just to make sure.

The Adword summary, my affiliate tracking software AND webtrends all reconcile in regards to the PPCs. . . .

Where's the other 75% coming from!!!

The only theory I have at the moment is that my domain is a generic name "classifiedads.com" and people remember it and type it in the browser URL line later??

Any ideas?

-jay

 

Jay,

Thats a great domain man! Congrats, nice site too. Im registering to post an ad. Anyway, your name is very common and easy to remember, not to mention people bookmark AND pass site urls to friends via email, etc.

However, there are people with browsers who click through and for some reason or another the refer information is not passed through or for some reason or another the click tracking failed in G.

 

that domain name will get you lot of type-in traffic.

 

TheBroker,

If you register, please be patient. It's a late-stage beta and I'm getting ready to push a new version out over the weekend.

Thanks for the input.

-jay

 

5000 a day? wow. That's a big adwords bill! I always showed more clicks than I paid for.

 

You should attempt to contact Google in regards to this. Not many other things can explain your incredible increase of traffic and make as much sense as they could.

 

Google says their accounting is accurate.

The charges reflect number of clicks in their tracking system.

I've not used adwords for several weeks while I'm going through a long site upgrade so it should be interesting to see what happens when I crank back up in mid-late Janurary.

-jay

 

Some programs like "stumbleupon" show pages to others on the network that the user is viewing.

I see the same results, and normally I see a 60% increase in uniques from network sharing programs when I use adwords (Does not account for the entire increase, of course, but yet another cause of an increase).

-Greg

 

AOL customers show up on different AOL proxies as they browse your site. That could be inflating the number of unique users reported by your log analysis program. That would still not account for the 75% increase though.

 

Thanks for the suggestion.

I can go back an see if there's an increase in traffic from the aol domain.

I can also pull my registration stats and see if there is an increase in aol subscribers during this time.

It may be a combination of factors.

-jay