I' sure that you have seen those ads often advertising that they can send you 10,000 visitors for only $9.95US or even 1 Million. But do they really work? Have you been tempted? After doing Review: “Blast your ads” to x Millions, I decided to see if that other method would work and paid $9.95USD for non targeted traffic. You will pay a little more for targeted traffic. It did not take 24 hours before I started receiving visits. I waited a few days to give it a chance and gather some results. Show me the numbers First, I went to see how much they had send me from there control panel: 327 visits updated in real times. I then proceeded to freeze the campaign so that my tracking tools could keep up. Google Analytics is always a few hours late. After one day, I went to see how much Google Analytics would show: 47 visits "What is this?", I asked myself. I emailed them and they replied: Our traffic is from multiple sources and it goes through several servers. Because of this, the traffic may fail to appear in your webstats or other counters. However, you should see most of the traffic in your RAW Access Server Log. Rest assured that real traffic is being delivered, we do not use fake or unethical tactics to deliver traffic to our clients' sites. I went ahead and checked my RAW log: 197 visits. A little better but still not 100%. I should mention that it's from the 1 domain I knew. Perhaps, some were from direct access/other unknown domains thus could not be easily counted by me. I also noticed an average of 2 seconds per visit. I emailed them again about that. They are using pop-unders, pop-ups, exit pops, and traffic exchanges. About 10% of the traffic is generated by traffic exchanges. However, the remaining 90% of the traffic is generated by pop ads. Pop-ups and pop-unders that are blocked by pop-blockers are not counted as a visit. As far as visits that are recorded less than a second, visitors do have the choice to close the pop-ups as soon as they appear. This would account for the brief visits. They don't send you all the traffic at once because it would crash your site thus the campaign will take many weeks. I had to use IE because the service I was using was giving me frame errors in Firefox. I still prefer Firefox ;) Conclusion Does it work? Somewhat but it's hard to know. The fact that the raw log is so different from Analytics don't help either. To this date, I got 15% from Analytics and 52% from my raw files from the number they show in their control panel. Does it worth it? No and Yes No, if you want real visitors to your blog or site. Yes, if you want to artificially increase the site stats before selling it. It does however raise an ethical point about real traffic. They are a lot of companies in that field and buying from 4-5 companies would make it easy to cheat a buyer. It's something that buyers should be aware. At least, most webmasters are honest. I did not mentioned the companies because I'm sure they mostly work in the same manner. Because I already paid for it, I will continue the campaign in case I get a few real visitors from the traffic exchange. If you see this and did come from unorthodox means(Pop ups, pop unders...), please, leave a comment here. You will have more real traffic with ViralPosties. ;)
Keywords: Blogging, Money, Review, Traffic