I want traffic on my site! (I know everybody wants that) Lets say I want to pay some person for the traffic they send me. Is there a program that would calculate the amount of visitors originating from that person ? I mean I know awstats and Ganalytics can do that but would those tools be reliable ? What if that person put a program to simulate traffic to my site ? Is there a way to check that ? Any thoughts ?
Well my question is more about how to trust a PPC campaign!! Sorry for the confusion. Title a bit misleading I guess!
It's hard to, really. AWstats does a fairly good job with it. If you're looking to purchase traffic, I've been using trafficdeliver.com for two of my sites, and they have delivered (unlike TrafficMother, who I used before).
I am not into buying that kind of traffic!!! I was thinking I give someone a certain cost per click coming to me. But how can I trust the stats ?
If your really paranoid you could always create a script that monitors any suspicious activity. id say google adwords is reliable as G does its best to get rid of false clicks.
Well I am thinking about traffic from regular blogs and sites not google Adwords. How do you trust the traffic they send you and not think its just an automated traffic generator ? @vitaminp what script would that be ? Do you know one ?
It depends on the quality of cours,e if the site is very targetted to your needs and you can assume a lot of those people would be repeat visitors...
I dont know one specifically, but you could just setup a basic script that logs incoming user information onto a database - IP, hostname, timestamps, etc. then some basic coding would allow you to find multiple entries (ie. people who have used the incoming link more than once) AND/OR use cookies to determine if the user has already used the incoming link -- you can differentiate between regular users and paid users by putting a var in the affiliate links such as mysite.com?action=affiliate
Why not pay for ads using a more traditional time based model. Then you could use CTR and conversion metrics to determine which ads should be dropped or renewed. In the end a model like this should be more efficient in that you will likely find several ads that have a lower CPC than what you would pay as a flat rate.
The only way to answer your question is to look at your business. For example, I recently offered $5 per clickthrough on a highly specialized site. I was turned down because they wanted to sell me a banner for a month, which turns out to be a money loser, I already tried it. By analizing my click-throughs from that bad experience I found that I would come out ahead if I paid $5 per click-through. If the new traffic is the same quality as your existing traffic then you could look at your profits-per-visitor and easily see what the maximum you could pay. In summary, the only way to tell is to know what your return-on-investment is. Usually the only way to tell this is to run some trials. best regards wiz
I say try doing the method you want to go with, if you see some sales or adsense increase then you know you are getting real visitors. If nothing happens you are getting scrxxed. Cancel it and try something else.