digg story

This is another article I published on P2L last year that was just a really fun little project I did on using traffic generating services. This was a real service I tried out and all the content below is based on my personal experiences. Enjoy!

Does it work?

My quick answer to this is no, it doesn’t… not even a little bit. As the owner of P2L, one of my many jobs is to make sure people know about the site and that I develop it’s affiliate and partner programs. I have seen literally thousands of traffic scams, ranging from viral marketing programs to wholesale traffic buying.

Well I’m a curious guy, so I decided to nibble at a few of these programs and see what kind of results I would get from them, especially the cheap yet “Reputable” solutions. In this article, I’m going to talk about wholesale traffic… You’ve probably seen it before: 15000 visitors to your site for $9.99! Guaranteed!

Well, they’re not lying, but the traffic is completely worthless. As an experiment, I purchased 1 package from 3 different traffic whole salers. All of them were pretty much the same thing – 15000 to 25000 visitors for $9.99 to $12.99 guaranteed.

Now even if you decide to try one of these programs, here is a HUGE difference… you will notice an enormous price difference between “traffic” and “targetted traffic”. Targetted traffic is about 10x the price, but obviously targetted traffic would be quite a bit better than god knows what, which is what I’m buying.

So I tried out these guys and 2 of them actually had no tracking of any kind on their site. How the heck was I supposed to know how much of the guaranteed traffic was delivered?? I asked them and they told me to look for a certain referrer URL in my logs. I did notice tons of traffic in the logs coming in, but not from their URL. The fact is, they were resellers for another company.

So anyhow, my stats go way up and the traffic seems to be pounding at the door of P2L. Now here’s the interesting part… with all 3 programs, the web stats were the only numbers that went up. There was ZERO increase in tutorial views, submissions of any kind, new user signups on the forums etc… absolutely no sign of a burst of activity. Whats more interesting is that my Google Ads did not record any increased impressions!

For those of you that don’t know, each time a site page loads with the google ads, it’s considered an impression. Isn’t it interesting that these people were sending me thousands of people a day to my main page yet my impression numbers stayed the same?

I was also amused at how vague they are about how your traffic is delivered.

here is my communication with one company regarding the topic:

My Email to them:

Good afternoon,

I just bought a 20000 visitor package, and I am now wondering how are these visitors shown my site? Is it in a small pop-up, text ad etc… I dug around the site but I don’t see anything about how sites are brought to the potential visitors.

Their response:

The webpage that the URL you supply us points to will be shown in full. I see that your homepage will be shown. We supply hits through our network of partner sites. If you have anymore questions, feel free to reply to this email.

So I wrote them back and continued to get the “We show it through our partners” routine… they all answer that way.

Another good one was after I paid for the service, I never received any confirmation except for my paypal receipt, saying that the campaign will start in 24 hours. A couple of days later, still nothing, so I write them asking what was going on… here what I got:

Hello and thank you again for your order. Periodically, when network volume is down we wait until the volume is up again to start your campaign. It has now started. Feel free to reply to this email if you have any further questions.

Hmm.. so the network traffic went back up just as I happened to ask about it? Interesting…

Anyhow the nightmares are many and it’s obviously a business that is completely full of manure.

Buying 20K visitors for 10 bucks truly is too good to be true. If you’re ever debating to try this kind of campaign, hopefully you read this and forget the idea entirely. I am looking at some other interesting “Traffic generators” that are actually free, and I will let you know how those experiments work out. As it stands though, there’s just no matching the quality traffic you get from your affiliates.

All the best,
Dan

digg story