Okay, I want to educate some people on this forum about how to tell if the traffic you've purchased is "real" traffic, or bogus. Being a web developer, I think I can provide a little insight. 1) First, don't assume that just because you have received "hits" from a lot of different IP addresses that the traffic is real. Using a proxy service I can easily write a script to grab your page using a large number of IP addresses. So can the people here who are selling "real" traffic. 2) Create a special landing page for each vendor you purchase from. All you have to do is copy/paste your home page into a different file and upload it to your host. So instead of sending the traffic to mydomain.com, send it to mydomain.com/landingpage.html 3) Put a free third-party JavaScript-based tracker on the landing page. Most bots cannot execute JavaScript, and will not register as visitors in the tracking stats. This is not foolproof, as I can also easily automate a real web-browser on my desktop to "browse" to your site through a proxy. That will execute the JavaScript and trigger the tracking code. But it's been my experience that most garbage-traffic vendors aren't using this kind of "visitor"-generation, as it's much more difficult to implement (and slower). I hope that helps some of you guys to post informative reviews of the traffic you purchase here. Jon
yes usually fake traffic comes from bots scripts and referrer would be like site.com/scriptrunner.php?member=567 if it comes from autosurfer..some may get real hits but real people just press a button in the script..and it keeps on surfing automatically and the real visitor just watches it automated and he would be paid $1 for 100 visits..this is especialy whoclaim such type of traffic real n adsense safe....
To me, if an advertiser does not show real referrers from real sites, their traffic is highly questionable at best. Most likely they know it's trash traffic that will never convert, and they hide where it came from because if you saw it you would be angry with them for lying to you and selling you that trash.
Hi, Jon. Thank you for this helpful information. I have purchased traffic in the past six months for a couple of my sites, and have always wondered why there were no conversions, after reviewing my logs. I guess I got *taken* by vendors using the method you described. Going one step further, when we're naming the landing page, do you have any *naming* recommendations when creating that page, that you could share with us? Or, doesn't it make any difference what we name the HTML file? Thanks, Candace
I found that another helpful tip is to use a tracker such as google analytics that gives how long the referred users stay on the website. When I purchased traffic here I found the average time spent on my site was 1 sec but traffic from google adwords is about 3 minutes.
Great post Jon - very informative. Tell me why somebody who knows this niche inside and out does not compile a list of individuals/companies that are Kosha and who provide what one pays for ? With so much scamming in the world of real traffic surely such a list would kill the scammers overnight. As I see it, it the right person could not only save us DP's money and at the same time money a bit of commission for providing the information. Just a thought !!! Rgds - JB
anyone selling traffic in the "traffic" section of this forum, is probably scamming. If you want to be sure that your traffic will get conversions go through a well known company such as adwords, yahoo or msn.
Not all traffic companies are scammers on DP. You can tell if traffic is real or not by trace routing the IP addresses of the visitors. Fake traffic will have very high percentages of anonymous proxy addresses or dead-end/not-in-use IP addresses. If the traffic is being generated through an auto-surf exchange or if the traffic is being auto-refreshed, you will be able to tell by the length of the visits. If you see that all of the visitors are staying for exactly the same duration of time, then odds are is that auto-surfing or auto-refreshing is to blame. Auto-surfing and auto-refreshing is not exactly 'fake' traffic, but auto-refreshing traffic is unethically generated traffic.