Traffic is an important part of any website. The amount of visitors a website receives can contribute to the enjoyment level of running a hobby site, or can have an impact on the amount revenue a business site produces.
Recently, I tried an experiment with a service I have never used before called redirected-traffic.com that redirects users reportedly from expired domain names.
The cost of the services was $37.00 paid via PayPal for 10,000 unique visitors. I was able to choose the genre of traffic I was interested in from a wide range of categories. I chose “U.S. Premium Visitors Targeted – Marketing for Internet” as my category and entered howtoadvertise.net as my target URL.
The initial purchase was made on Wednesday, October 11th at 2:40pm CST and I received notification via email that the campaign was starting 20 minutes later. Redirected-traffic.com was good about communicating receipt of my payment and the start of my campaign. In the “start of campaign” notification email I was also assigned a login and password and given a webpage so I could check on my statistics.
Although my campaign summary page does not offer a wealth of information abut my visitors, it does provide details like:
- Ad Type: U.S. Premium Visitors Targeted – Marketing for Internet
- Campaign Status: Active
- Campaign Size: 10065
- Delivered: 74 (as of this writing)
- Started: 2006-10-11
- Target Date: 2006-12-11
In addition I’m able to view IP addresses of visitors, split the campaign to multiple URLs, change my initial destination URL, and pause the campaign.
Unfortunately, there was also one other button to “Display Fewer Options” and after pressing it, I’ve lost most of the abilities mentioned previously with no way to revert. I had not planned on using any of the options listed, but it’s frustrating not to be able to toggle back and forth between settings.
I use cookie tracking on most of my web pages to write browser information into a log. Here is an excerpt from some of the traffic I’ve been receiving.
Because I use cookies to log referrer information via javascript, I know most of the browsers visiting my site have javascript enabled. The current visitor count from redirected-traffic.com shows 74 visitors, and that is close enough to my own tracking information.
I’m a little annoyed with the referrer field because I would like to see where these visitors are actually coming from, but there’s not much I can do about that. I was pleased to see that there was a proportionate mix of browsers and IP addresses so that I actually believe these are visitors coming to my site.
Since the campaign is still new, I have no revenue statistics to report on. HowToAdvertise.net is not designed to be a revenue generator and therefore has a fairly low conversion rate. I will judge the success of this campaign by the number of subscribers the RSS feed receives and the number of email addresses added to my mailing list.
In addition, I will be monitoring the site’s traffic using the crazyegg service reported on earlier this week.
More to come as this campaign progresses. If you were re-directed to this article and you think you might be part of the traffic I purchased, please email me and let me know what you think.