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Beware! Are You Really Buying Visitors? by Mitch Cohen Webmaster WARNING: Be careful when considering advertising with companies who promise you guaranteed visitors or hits for a certain amount of money! Note to SiteRightNow.com customers: The type of campaign discussed in this article are prohibited in our terms of use on SiteRightNow.com. The reasons for this are discussed in the article below. Running these types of campaigns may result in a suspended website until the campaign is stopped. The other day I received an email from one of our SiteRightNow.com customers. He wrote that he thought there was a problem with his hit counter, because it wasn't doing anything when he clicked the button to check his stats. What I discovered was that the hit counter was working fine. It was just taking much longer than usual to calculate all of the new hits he was receiving. This customer went from getting about 10 hits a day to getting over 2000 hits in one day! At first glance, I thought this was great. I congratulated the customer, and I asked him what he did to increase his hits. He informed me that he had just purchased 10,000 targeted hits from a company who advertised they would guarantee 10,000 visitors to his website for $89. I thought to myself that this service sounded promising. 2000 hits a day was tremendous for a new website, and this sounded like something we should check out for other customers. Well, after examining the offer closely, I discovered that the advertising was extremely deceiving. I am writing this article as a warning to others so you are aware of what some of these companies are really doing:
It is vital to point out that no one "visits" your website by choice with this type of advertising. Your home page just "pops up" when the user enters or leaves the website that they really intended to visit. You are not paying for real "visitors", in my opinion. I think most people will just close these pop up ads without looking at them at all.   I really don't have anything against running Pop Up ads, as long as you understand what you are buying. What I have a problem with is that there are an increasing number of companies out there who make it sound like you are buying "Pay for Performance" advertising when you are really just buying "impressions". For those of you who are not as familiar with these terms, "Pay for Performance" is where you only pay when someone CHOOSES to visit your website by clicking your ad or search engine listing. You can read more about this type of advertising in my article about Buying Your Way To The Top. This is incredibly different than running a banner ad campaign that charges you by the number of impressions. Buying "Impressions" is just another way of saying that they charge you for the number of times they show your ad. When you purchase a campaign by the number of impressions, you are charged the same amount whether people choose to visit your website or not. If you buy 10,000 impressions, your ad is guaranteed to show 10,000 times, but it's possible than no one will ever actually click your ad and visit your website. There's nothing inherently wrong with impression advertising as long as you know that's what you are buying. Many companies who are working on their "brand" awareness are not as concerned with the number of clicks on their ad. They just want to get their name out there, and impression advertising works well for them. I have a hard time seeing how these companies can get away with using terms, such as "guaranteed visitors" or even "guaranteed hits". I suppose it's a question of semantics. I don't know what you think, but when I read that I am going to get "10,000 visitors", I'm expecting that 10,000 people will actually come to my website! I'm not expecting that my home page will just be shown in a pop up ad 10,000 times. They are counting a visit (or hit) each time your ad shows in the pop up window. Out of 10,000 pop up ads, it's hard to say how many people will actually choose to visit your website by clicking your ad. I think it's safe to say you aren't getting 10,000 visitors! You may be getting less than 1000, and in some cases maybe even less than 100. What is even more amazing is that I have seen some of these companies come right out and say that they are not selling impressions. Well, that's not exactly true. What they are really saying is that they aren't selling banner impressions. Again it's a matter of semantics. They claim that since they are showing a large pop up window, it's not the same thing as showing a smaller banner ad window. Here's a quote from one of these sites: Question: "Are these Banner Impressions? Answer: No. These are real people visiting your site. The visitors are exposed to your web page and your offer, not to a tiny banner or mini pop-up. We deliver the traffic to you. It's up to you to sell your product or service to them." As I see it, they are selling impressions. You can call it "Pop Up Window" impressions instead of "Banner" impressions, but it's still the same thing to me. All I am saying is be careful. With strategic placement of a single word, such as "banner", these companies can get away with statements like the one shown above. In summary, these companies are running a typical banner ad campaign for you in a larger window. Your ad is larger than a normal banner, but it's a far cry from having someone choose to visit your website. You are really paying for the number of times your ad appears in the pop up window. As a business owner running an ad campaign, you may not be aware that most companies "host" your ad on their own servers. Typically, if you were running a banner ad, it would load off of the website where it is running. By placing your real home page in a Pop Up window, you are in effect hosting your own ad! Why does this matter? Well, this eats up your own bandwidth. Many hosting companies charge you for how much bandwidth you use. The advertising companies know this. They get charged for bandwidth also, so they figure if they can get you to host your own ad, they can save a ton of money by keeping their own bandwidth down. If your hosting company charges for bandwidth, you may find yourself paying extra so you can run this type of campaign. For companies like ours, these pop up ads can be a serious drain on bandwidth reserved for our paying customers. This struck a nerve with me as a Webmaster after I realized what they were really doing. Remember at the beginning of my article, I was talking about the customer who started getting 2000 hits a day? Well, since his home page was used as the ad, it was recording a hit everytime his ad appeared in the pop up window. To the website owner, it looked like he was getting an incredible amount of new traffic. He was getting traffic, but it was from the marketing company showing his pop up ad! In the Webmaster world, we would call these companies "leeches" who take bandwidth from us and our paying customers, when they should use their own bandwidth for their own service. It is very likely that we will ban this type of advertising on our service altogether. (Note to SiteRightNow Customers: these types of campaigns are prohibited in the terms of use and may result in website suspension until the campaign can be stopped). If you decide to run pop up advertising, ask if they will host your ad for you, so it doesn't have to run off your own website. Unfortunately, for most people, buying guaranteed traffic probably doesn't do them much good. The worst part is that I think you never really get what you thought you paid for, which are real hits from real visitors who really visit your website. If you want to talk about this issue, please visit the HitsTalk.com forum. | Return Home | Start Talking | Submit for FREE | Buy the Top | SearchEngine Secrets | Mitch's Warnings | Make a Website | |
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