Things to Watch For When Buying Traffic
If you’re interested in using a Traffic Service Vendor remember that it’s a gray hat industry. There are legitimate sellers, and there are sellers hawking resold traffic, bot traffic, or untargeted traffic. It’s a very “buyer beware” atmosphere, and you often have little recourse if you don’t like the traffic you get. Here are some tips you can follow.
Start small. The best thing you can possibly do when buying traffic is take it nice and easy. Don’t go in for a subscription model right away, because you never know how tricky it will be to cancel if you want to stop payments. Don’t go in for a huge amount of traffic, because you don’t know what quality it will be and how it will take to your site. If it works, and only if it works, should you consider getting more. Only once they have proven themselves should you consider subscribing.
Read the terms and conditions. You want to make sure there aren’t any tricky terms about rights transfers or anything else. It’s entirely possible to fight legal terms in court if it comes down to it, but you don’t want to put yourself into that situation.
Avoid using an ad program that bans you for excess bots. AdSense is the big one here; they’re picky with the traffic they detect coming in to your site. If they don’t like it, even if it is more or less legitimate, they have the right to block you from the program at a moment’s notice. If you’re relying on an ad program to make your living, you might want to be very careful about what traffic you buy and from where.
Make sure any money back guarantee is real. The shady sellers out there are liable to disappear when questioned or confronted. Their site works just fine, they’ll take new orders just fine, but the moment you go to request a money back claim, they clam up and won’t respond. Alternatively, some of them will respond, but will point out a clause in their terms for their guarantee that for some reason invalidates your order from the claim. Once again; buyer beware.
Look up current reviews. I’ve quoted a few reviews in this post, but that’s just five or so out of who knows how many. They will swiftly grow out of date, and you never know what changes a company might undergo. Formerly high quality providers might sell their company to someone, only for that new owner to try to maximize profits by dropping traffic quality and customer service out the window. Always look up current information before you try to purchase.
Only run one program at a time, so you can test the traffic it brings. Make sure you’re taking multiple data points before and after your order. You need detailed analytics to make sure you’re getting traffic as promised. If you buy 10,000 hits from Germany, you don’t want to receive 500 hits from Germany and 9,500 hits from India. If you’re buying 10,000 hits targeted to the automotive niche, you don’t want a ton of traffic referred to you from DIY knitting blogs. Don’t be shy about requesting that money back guarantee if the traffic doesn’t work for you. These sorts of businesses would rather have a customer satisfied with a refund than an angry customer leaving negative reviews.
Don’t invest more than the minimum unless you can make a profit. If you spend $70 on 10,000 hits and, in those 10,000 hits, make one sale for $30, you’re out $40. Maybe some of those people will come back, or maybe not. You’d have to do more testing to find out, and if you’re willing to test for two months and $400 in losses to see if they do, that’s your prerogative. We just recommend never buying traffic if you can’t successfully monetize it.
If you’re careful, slow, methodical and low-volume with your testing, you can slip under the radar of programs like AdSense, and you can stay with the program while testing your traffic. It’s only when you have unnatural surges of poor traffic that you’re at high risk.
After all of this, what’s our verdict about Buying Website Traffic? Evidence points to their legitimacy, but there are – as always – a few concerning reviews. Start small, if you choose to order from them, and make sure the traffic they deliver is targeted, legitimate, and on time.
