Be careful when buying traffic for your site

[greenlake]

I recently bought traffic - 10,000 US visitors to a domain I use for credit card affiliate.
When insalling statcounter obn this site, I noticed that ALL the "unique visitors" I paid for - are coming from same IP address in Las Vegas NV.
I guess that means the company who sends me "traffic" is just operating software that automatically sends "visitors" to my site.
Am I right assuming this is a scam?

 

[The Critic]

Yup, sounds like a bot. For future reference, bought traffic (and traffic from traffic exchange programs) is almost always completely worthless. It typically comes from bots or popup/unders and rarely goes past the entry page, much less converts. Put your money in AdWords instead.

 

[MikeBigg]

It is likely that they route all the traffic to your site through their own server, hence the same IP addresses.

That said, I agree with The Critic, that kind of traffic is pretty worthless. I tried it once and got zero clicks from the main page in 10,000 visits. That is no-one looked at another page on my site. I really wonder whether any human saw the page.

Mike

 

[G_C]

The only time when I bought traffic, all of it came from the same URL (rotator-something), so I'm guessing it was some sort of an intermediary point which gathered traffic and sent it to the destination - of course, it could've been bots, but since that particular service was started by a NP member (can't remember what it's called, sorry), I was sort of inclined to trust them. That might explain why all traffic originated from the same location for you as well - although bots are definitely a possibility.

In general, I'm inclined to agree - purchased traffic is almost never worth it and I have yet to hear success stories of people using it to gain conversions. Sure, we all see those lovely ads about "Imagine just 1% of your 100,000 purchased users converting - that's $xxxxxxx" - fact is, though, in Internet marketing, 3% conversion rate is considered rather good, and that's heavily targetted traffic we're talking about here (e.g., AdWords campaigns, word-of-mouth etc). So the moment you start dealing with untargetted traffic, the 1% conversion rate that they always refer to is almost too good to be true.