Buying Traffic - Purchase of Bulk Clicks

Part 3 of a 3-part article on lead generation and how to buy traffic. We discuss 3 ways of getting traffic directly to our site, and share the results here.

At the bottom of the article, we present a short list of methods that we would recommend for proven ways to bring traffic to your site.

Part 3 Purchasing bulk leads / traffic / clicks

We suspected this was a crazy idea to start with but we had to try it, in order to find out if this sort of traffic works. The answer is that it does not work, and that it is a pure and simple scam.

We purchased targeted traffic, 20,000 targeted visitors from the US, and 20,000 targeted visitors from the UK. The Price was approx. $20 for the US visitors and $45 for the UK visitors.

We chose that the visitors would be targeted from categories like 'webmasters' 'software' 'business', etc.

What happened was that we did indeed receive a lot of traffic which did not appear to be strictly "human". What we observed were indeed "humans" browsing from computers, but their clickstreams were strange, it looked as if a program/script was opening and closing windows dozens of times (always our homepage).

We confirmed that buying targeted bulk traffic does not work.

In truth, the traffic resembled more of a dos attack than 'targeted traffic'. The "visitors" landed on our homepage, clicking / refreshing up to a hundred times. We recorded the same 100 or so ip addresses clicking thousands of times on our index page. It was obvious that nobody was reading our content. Had we not been prepared, our servers might have over-loaded / crashed.

So our conclusion is that somebody has built a diabolical way of inducing clicks that look like people. We suspect that there were real peoples' computers, or that people in some way had their computers on, for example, being "paid to surf". We do not know how the traffic was actually generated. We suspect that this sort of technology is being widely abused to send traffic to, for example, sites where Google adsense listings are displayed. In other words, that people purchase these clicks, and send them to their affiliate or partner pages.

In this case we requested a refund, and a refund was very promptly issued - no complaints there. A relatively cheap lesson, and a disappointment if nothing else.

In Conclusion - what works and a short list of recommendations

We have presented 3 ways to generate leads, and bring targeted traffic to your site.

1. We conclude in favor of PPC campaigns.
2. Paid inclusion in newsletters and technical / marketing sites can also be beneficial, but requires good planning and realistic expectations.
3. We do not recommend the purchase of bulk traffic clicks.

We have not named companies in these articles, however if you would like to know who we are referring to, simply email us.

Here is a list of proven ways to increase your website visibility:

1. work on your pagerank and site optimisation (more)
2. develop and add content to your site on a regular basis
3. develop one or more PPC campaigns (more)
4. submit your site to portals, search engines, etc

previous: Part 2 PPC pay-per-click campaigns
previous: Part 1 Buying Traffic - paid newsletter inclusion