My Paid Traffic Experiment

Original Source: http://www.scribblescratch.com/paid-traffic-experiment-is-it-worth-it/

Hi guys,

Thought I would publish my paid traffic results for anyone thinking of buying traffic. As I am writing this the advert in the top left is for paid traffic so I think this experiment may be relevant for a lot of people.

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Have you ever seen advertisements for 10,000 targeted visitors for $10. Usually I just brush those adverts aside, reminding myself of the old adage “you get what you pay for”. But it occured to me $10 is worth about 4 adsense clicks on some of my high paying keyword sites. Surely out of thousands of visitors I could manage to get enough clicks to easily cover my small investment. Well it was worth a shot and so I set up an experiment to see if there was something in paid traffic.

The first thing I had to do was pick a traffic company. I searched the term “buy traffic” in google and chose the company that appeared first in the paid advertisemnts. My thinking was that if they could pay the most for promotion they must be one of the most successful companies and successful companies generally deliver the best product/services. The company was revisitors.com. One thing to be careful of though, was the fact that Revisitors sold subscriptions to paid traffic as opposed to one off services. In hindsight this is probably how they could afford to be first in Googles ads.

The Experiment

My test subject for this experiment was a forex blog I have sitting around gathering dust. It does have some traffic and adsense clicks (very minimal), enough history to compare the results of the paid traffic. For the safety of my adsense accounts (as I have publised my adsense statistics further down) I have decided to not make public the URL of my test subject. So for this site I purchased a package from revisitors which consisted of 2,500 U.S visitors in one week. I chose the visitors to come from the investment category as it was the most relevant category to my niche. The package cost me $22 so that is the amount I need to earn in adsense revenue to break even.

Control

Before we see the results we need to compare them to something. So here are the stats for the site up until I paid for traffic. Over a period of 3 months the stats for the site were:

• Page Impressions: 284
• Clicks: 21
• Click Through rate (CTR): 7.39%
• Page eCPM: $42.32
• Total Revenue: $12.02

Obviously I would not expect that type of CTR for paid traffic but it is important to know what stats real traffic generates so to compare with the paid traffic.

Results

Below are the adsense statistics after I paid for the visitors. These stats are for the first 5 days following my first visitor from revistors:

• Page Impressions: 961
• Clicks: 1
• Click Through rate (CTR): 0.10%
• Page eCPM: $0.41
• Total Revenue: $0.39

Conclusion

Where oh where do I start? Well I guess I should point out I stopped the experiment a couple of days early. The result was fairly obvious at that point and I wanted to cancel my subscription before I forgot. As I mentioned previously I did not expect a high CTR with paid traffic but I did expect something higher than roughly 1 click per thousand visitors. For my $22 investment I got a return of 39 cents so its fairly obvious to see this as an abject failure. Perhaps I could of tried several companies or found a company that specifically deals with forex visitors so it may be a bit soon to make a complete judgement on paid visitors, but gut instinct tells me this result is the norm not the exception.

 

most paid traffic is useless, also im pretty sure Google adsense dont like it either and could lead to a ban

 

any one gained from paid traffic?

 

It depends where you buy it from and the niche.
Most people say that AdWords is the best.

To be honest that's not always the case.
In some niche's I can convert $50 spent at AdBrite into $300.
Other times when I spend $100 at AdWords it converts into $200-$300.

But like I mentioned above it all depends on the niche. However some people say that PPV traffic converts well. I haven't personally tried this but it might work. Here is a good read about PPV traffic http://bryn.me/2009/01/05/you-can-make-bank-with-ppv-advertising/

 

Whatever the source is, paid traffic is really a very bad idea. As posted above, that can even make you get banned from adsense and all.

I'd better do some simple optimization tricks than this paid stuff to get good traffic.

 

Thanks for the experiment/article. I'm sure it will help a lot.

 

Appreciate the feedback. Not sure of your chances of being banned by google I think the area is a little grey. But in the end in my experiment anyway no one clicked on the adsense so I doubt there is much risk.

 

cheap traffic is useless and will get you smart priced. There's no cheap traffic and these guys are either using PTC or robots

 

It actually can be useful if you need a lot of views to something in order to make it worth anything, such as a Youtube video. Most paid traffic does not allow video views though but if you look around hard enough (DP isn't the only place to get it) you can find some that allow YouTube videos and require the people to view the site for at least 1 minute.

Expecting to get any direct money from it is not really feasable, but it is helpful for a view count. (some article sites are benefited from high view counts too).

Edit: If your concerned that your paid traffic is robot and not human, there is a really big give-away that is usually in the sales thread. People who are overly concerned about things like re-directs or videos because they "Slow down the servers" are usually sending robots. With PTC is doesn't matter if the page is loading the entire view time, it still constitutes as a view from that visitor and the information is being sent from your server to the visitor. It has no effect on their server.