"Guaranteed Web Traffic" - Really?

On behalf of an advertising client, I recently launched a campaign with one of those "guaranteed Web site traffic" services. We were initially going to try MegaWebPromotion, but reconsidered after reading this forum discussion. So, we opted for Blazing Traffic, which promised 20,000 targeted visitors for only $26 (I should have been suspicious when a $16 upcharge was required to get English language visitors; given the narrow niche-market nature of the site, the ability to read English is an awfully minimal requirement for "targeted visitors").

At about a quarter of the way through the test, here are the results: overall site traffic up a whopping 2% (within rounding error). Conversions: flat. Incremental revenue: 0.

In fairness to the folks at Blazing Traffic, a couple of measures of visitor quality (average time spent on the site and percentage of visitors adding the site to their favorites) rose slightly -- though it isn't really possible to tell if this is due to the campaign or to other changes recently made to the site. Also, the campaign is less than 25% complete; it's possible that the next 15,000 visitors will act completely differently from the first 5,000 (not likely perhaps, but possible). Finally, services such as Blazing Traffic may work better for consumer campaigns than in the b2b world.

If the experience changes, I'll post again.

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Terms: guaranteed Web site traffic, MegaWebPromotion, Blazing Traffic, guaranteed visitors

The Internet Web site marketing portal: WebMarketCentral.com

Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentral.com