I realise this has probably been asked before but I couldn't generate any decent search results for it. Could anyone give me a quick low down on Google Adsense and traffic from purchased sources? I've seen it mentioned before that it's against the TOS, but can't identify where in the TOS it explains that... I've also read a lot of articles in the past that mention using bought traffic as a good way of bumping up adsense revenue too. Also I've seen people mention that it has to do with the Referer information that google adsense collects. But consider this: #1 vistor clicks result in search engine which lands them at your page (free) #2 vistor arrives redirected in some way from an advertising network (paid) #1 your page url is sent to adsense as referer #2 your page url is sent to adsense as referer
Purchsed traffic is generally of low quality and it has been associated with click fraud. IMO it is better to stay away from them
I would agree that purchased traffic is going to be lower quality. It's untargetted for starters... Anyway, I'm still interested in this talk about purchased traffic being against the Adsense TOS. The referer thing still has me confused, it's mentioned a lot of places... yet browsers don't send referer more than 1 level deep, and the adsense iframe is loaded within the content page so it receives the content page as the href. Otherwise it wouldn't know which page to crawl to get context & keywords for displaying the ads.
purchased traffic has the potiential of 'inflating advertisers' costs' (a phrase which is plastered all over the TOS), because all they do is come to your site without doing anything (invalid impressions). if your purchased traffic has a good conversion rate, that'll be overlooked.
You're right there is strong emphasis on "inflating advertisers' costs". But I still don't see how (assuming the traffic is real and legit) how it can inflate those costs. If people are interested in the ads they'll click on them, if they're not they're highly unlikely to click on those ads. I can understand how it could inflate costs if you sent an email to 10,000 subscribers and mentioned the advertising and how it "keeps the site running" making some indirect hint that you could use a little help. Then I'd agree that's breaking the TOS. Also: I still see a lot of people mention the fear of "blind referer" as being a reason for having problems with Google. Can I straighten that up by saying that google can't actually log directly where your traffic has come from before it lands on your page. If you think otherwise, please explain why.
Does Adwords count as 'purchased traffic?'. That what I use, but I consider it necassary in order to have my siite seen, otherwise where else would I gain exposure? (btw, I have been indexed and am in the top 2 on google - awesome!) only for the title of my site, but still =)
Adwords. Simple, the more times an ad is shown, the more times that advertiser thinks he is getting good exposure. So using some crappy traffic source shows the ads more times than the advertiser wants it to. Long involved, but advertisers like to see their ads shown, but not shown for the sake of being shown as those traffic sellers just send terrible traffic to your site.
Let me rephrase that. Is Adwords considered some 'crappy traffic source'? Or is that type of marketing a legit, viable source of exposure and traffic?? Thru the major playes and their respective networks Y!, G, etc.
which is why i mentioned that if the purchased traffic converts (here it could mean resulting in a purchase, or returning visitors), then the purchased traffic is legit and helps advertisers.
Another thing- Google rates its advertisers ads on how well they convert to clicks. An often clicked ad moves up in the listings, getting more and better exposure (Google would rather sell two 5 cent clicks than one 7 cent click). I think this is for search ads, not sites, but perhaps the philosophy spills over.