Don’t Buy Untargeted Bulk Traffic

By admin • April 18th, 2009

Avoid purchasing untargeted bulk traffic for your website, I have found it to be a complete waste of time. Untargeted bulk traffic is when you pay a company a certain amount and they in turn send you an agreed number of visitors. In my experiments with these companies, the traffic quality I received was terrible, and even suspect.

The Pitch

I tried this type of bulk traffic 3 times with 3 different companies and was really disappointed in the end. The typical package I bought was for 20,000 visitors over the course of a few days for about 50 dollars or so. That many visitors equated to only a quarter of a cent per visitor! Far cheaper than any pay-per-click advertising could ever be. I figured the traffic wouldn’t be as targeted as a Google Adwords type of purchase, but with that huge amount, I was bound to still get some good results. I was definately mistaken.

Watching the Logs

The traffic I did receive was a disaster. When monitoring the server logs the first thing I noticed is that the visitors very rarely ever left the first page. This to me meant that it was either a machine clicking the link, or the users had been somehow fooled into coming to my site.

The next thing I noticed is that much of my traffic was coming in from Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia. This particular site was really geared towards people from North America, so that was unfortunate. Pushing deeper into the logs I started to see multiple hits from the same IP addresses over and over. Some IP’s registered 20-30 visits just by themselves. The company I was using considered each of these hits as a separate visitor.

Where the Traffic Came From

I later learned that the traffic I was getting was coming from pop-under spam and adware programs that were installed on various computers. The poor unsuspecting users would be browsing and my website would pop-under on them, and they would almost always immediately close it. Even worse, some of the pop-unders were most likely getting caught by blockers and the users weren’t even seeing my site at all!

In the end I only registered about 17k of the 20k visitors I was supposed to have gotten, even factoring in the multiple visits by the same users. Only a handful of any of the users actually browsed around the website, and not one person clicked on an ad or signed up with an account on the site. Ever the optimist, I actually tried it again with another 2 companies! Basically it was the same results with them as well.

The whole thing was a giant waste of time. I could have used that 50 dollars in a PPC campaign and brought in a couple of hundred highly targeted users to my site. If you are considering using a service like this, I would definately recommend against it. Don’t make the same mistake I did. Good luck!