Would you like a 14.56% Conversion Rate?

One of the questions I receive from clients on daily basis is about the difference between our traffic building solution and the hundreds of other solutions offered by companies online. There are a couple of points that are worth mentioning. While there are authentic companies that do offer traffic increase techniques, there are too many others who are flat out rips offs! I am more concerned with the credible companies that operate in the same space as we do. To start with, our solution is about 10 times more expensive compared to other online companies. Some of these companies promise to deliver close to 10,000 targeted visitors to a site within one month for less than $100. Not a bad deal if they can actually deliver on their promise.

 If you Google the term “increase site traffic” you will see many PPC ads for that term.  The companies that offer some what credible solutions rely on what is called the “redirect technology approach.” I will use an excerpt from a company called Redirected Visitors to explain the technology.

Everyday we purchase abandoned domain names that have traffic on them. These domain names had a previous website on them that fits into our targeted categories. Basically, all we do is redirect that traffic coming from these websites to your website. When you order a campaign, one of our IT specialists will visit your website and, whether you specified a target or not, we will target it further so that we send you the very best visitors

So, assume that there was a site which at some point sold widgets. That site had established traffic. If the site is abandoned, Redirected Visitors will purchase that site. Now, Redirected Visitors will own that traffic was hitting the abandoned site. If your company sells widgets and you purchase a campaign from Redirected Visitors, they will direct any traffic coming to that site to your site. Sounds good until now. The premise is that the traffic you will be getting is targeted.

The best thing to do is to put the solution offered by Redirected Visitors to the test. I wanted to purchase traffic that deals with increasing site conversion rate. Redirected Visitors offers many packages. I decided to go with their Traffic Option 3 which offers 10,000 visitors.

Since generic traffic is not helpful, I expected the site to allow me to specify the term or the type of site I am looking for. However, the site offers a drop down for the category of traffic I want. The drop down lists general types of sites, for example: advertising media, business, agriculture, etc. Nothing to deal with conversion specifically. 

That is the first differentiating point between our services and other companies. Since I wanted to test the services, I decided to go ahead and continue with my purchase. I am not sure which category is best suited for increasing site conversion rates. I thought that either the webmasters or the advertising media will be most interested in our services. For the purposes of this test, I went ahead and chose webmasters.

As part of the order, Redirected Visitors offers an option for boosting traffic by submitting the site to search engines, directories and blog search engine submissions. In all honesty, I think services like these are a waste of money which I will discuss this point in another blog. I opt out of that option.

On the checkout process I am asked to supply my credit card number. But I notice that the bill is under the name M Dady Ltd. It might be just me but I do not like buying from one company and getting billed from another. A quick Google search for “M Dady Ltd” gave me this link on Ebay.

the link was interesting to say the least. Here is something from the text:

My experience with using Ebay began on a particularly drunk evening 06/03 when i attempted to purchase a vehicle immobilizer for my pride and joy 

I am not even sure if I should continue this order or not. The second link on the Google results was from ripoffreports 

Ouch….that does not sound good at all. You know what, I think I am going to save myself the $30 I was going to spend on this test and look for another company.

I went back to Google to do a second search. This time, I choose a company called HandyTraffic. Instead of wasting time going through the order, I decided to Google the company. And the result? Another problem again.  This time thanks to a report on webmaster forums.

I probably don’t need to warn people here off of them, but I was dumb enough to waste a little money on them recently, so I thought I’d mention my experience with them. I paid $27 for 5000 “unique” visitors. I figured that even if it was worthless, I would only lose $27.

Well, the traffic I’ve gotten from them has been totally worthless, so at least it was cheap. My average visitor spends about 3 minutes on the site, whereas all of the HandyTraffic visitors I’ve gotten have stayed less than 1 second.

So lesson learned, fortunately this one was cheap compared to some others. I just would highly recommend staying away from them if you’re ever considering it.

Okay, this is not going well. My third search on Google gave me a link to a company named Intelligent Web Marketing. Once again, I Googled the company and the results are disappointing, yet again.  

No. Not at this time. We signed up for their service in July for 1 millions hits per month for three sites. Their records showed more hits coming to our site then we were getting. When I called them they said they had a glitch and their system was counting blocked ads. They turned off our account until the problem was fixed and promised it would be fixed the next week, one week went by and it was not fixed, another week went by and it still was not working. We asked for a refund on our American Express and was told that they would deduct what hits we actually received, how would they know this. I was told they would not issue a credit back to our card but would mail us a money order which we never received. I called them two weeks later and they were going to mail it again. Still haven’t received it. We are disputing the charges. I hope this helps your decision.

As I went down the list of companies that offer this kind of service I came to one conclusion. For me, I know I am not going to use any of their services. Here are the two questions that I keep thinking about:

• Why does Google allow companies like these to advertise on Adwords?
• Would you use one of these companies?

Tags: increase-site-traffic, online-marketing
Posted in Business