Realtrafficsource Review
Sunday, November 22, 2009 at 5:23PM In preparation for the holidays, I've been looking for ways to drive traffic to two new landing pages on Shopobot -- namely our iPod and Canon price guides. I ran across RealTrafficSource.com randomly and I noticed they have dirt cheap rates for driving traffic to your site, so I thought I'd investigate more.
First thing I noticed was the offering sounded a bit shady. Usually if you're buying traffic for a quarter of a cent per click (their cheapest package is 1,000 visitors for $2.50) to $0.0001 per click (their most expensive package) you're going to get a lot of junk traffic. I was wondering what their source of traffic is -- but their website doesn't give much information:
Our traffic comes from our own large network of specialized websites and from expired domains, each with its own narrow market, we have come across during our long experience in the online marketing industry. Because we've been in the business so long, we know where to find the hard-to-get traffic.
Our own network of websites receives thousands of visitors every day. We collect this traffic and, using a special algorithm, deliver it to our customer's website.
Well, fair enough! I thought I'd give it a try -- because if worse comes to worse I'm only out $30.
After a day or so I started seeing hits. One thing I've noticed is that 2/3rds of the hits are coming from Russia, Ukraine, and Romania. Hmmm, odd. Here's what I saw in Google Analytics:
Since you can only really use Shopobot if you live in North America, this isn't exactly what I'd like to see.
On another website I manage an individual user tried using RealTrafficSource.com and didn't find much success. In fact, 100% of visitors left the site immediately upon viewing the page. Check it out in Google Analytics again:
100%? Ouch.
After this has run for a while I'll check my log files to see if I can find out more about these mysterious Russian visitors and what they've done on my website. However, the bottom line for now is that this seems like a bad deal for any websites that require American or English Speaking visitors.
I'll update this post with any findings.
Reader Comments (7)
I bought a category-targeted 10K visitor package from this company which is basically an Oystein Kkjorsvik enterprise. At the end of the run 96% of my visitors had come from Russia, China and India. The countries that followed most closely were Indonesia, Malaysia and Egypt.
I inquired about these kinds of stats and Oystein insisted that at leat 40-50% of the traffic should have come from the US and that he couldn't be responsible for where the traffic came from (hmmmm). He offered nothing and it was a total waste of time. The average visitor stayed on my site for less than 3 seconds.
Well, he got his money out of me so he's happy...why make good on your word when it's cheaper to just let your customers be mad and hope they go away. Obviously, this is his way of thinking.
Stay away ...it's a SCAM
Very strange...i also bought a larger traffic package for realtrafficsource and i was very happy with it. The first visitors came after a few hours after i purchased the traffic and they stayed a lot longer than mentioned above. I also got a few extra sales in the traffic period so i'm very surprised to see these reviews.
that's a bogus posting...very happy with it...then you are the only person to ever post a positive thing about Oystein and Real Traffic Source: email me : keegan7156@gmail.com and I'll send you screen shots of my google analytics and awstats...there's proof this guy's a scammer...and that, in all likelihood, he's writing this blog and review
I am not sure if this is having any sort of impact, but my opinion is that most all of his explanations are ridiculous. I’d like to see where exactly this traffic is being redirected from. If this is real traffic, then it will be somehow reflected within Google Analytics.
Let me put it another way, if the biggest Internet company on earth is not able to verify or track the traffic arriving at your site, then you might seriously want to question where and how that traffic is arriving.
Reading through server log files is totally inappropriate for gathering user data. They are meant to provide server administrators with data about the behavior of the server, not the behavior of the user.
For my money, the traffic coming to my site must not only need to be easily tracked and studied, but it also must be analyzed for its effectiveness by studying the bounce rate, pages per visit and time on website metrics, all of which Google Analytics provides.
majority are selling fake traffic,They use a special PHP software that routes HTTP get requests through a massive list of anonymous proxy servers or IP addresses.
If you are tracking your hits, your tracking log will show that you received a hit from a particular IP address when in fact, the hit came from one of the anonymous or fake IP addresses the script stores in a database.
96% of all hits were from Russia, China and India followed closely by Malaysia, Indonesia and Egypt. If you get a lot of biz from these countries then go for it. But no one stayed on my site for longer than 3-7 seconds...I had a 96% bounce rate.
Well, hopefully they are legit. But my premonition is says it is bogus. The main reason I say that is acquiring thousands and thousands of targeted gambling hits is absolutely invaluable. The fact they are saying they are acquiring this traffic and able to sell it so cheap raises more than a few red flags.
My guess is that they have some sort of automated software that bombards the server logs with requests and are able to somehow generate different IP addresses. This would show up in the raw server logs as a hit, but would not be recorded by Google’s stats because it is not a human visitor. Google has taken great care to filter out bogus traffic and my guess is they have it down pat.
Excellent post Major Scam...I wish I'd read a post like yours before I spent the money on all the wasted traffic RealTrafficSource sends. Please post in other areas and keep an eye out for this guy...Oystein Kjorsvik...he truly does not care about anything beyond getting his money.
Yep major scam ppl!
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Realtrafficsource.com is a total SCAM! Do not waste your money! 1000 targeted "English Speaking" visitors, they claim to get you for only $2.50. This was absolutely false! Only 11% hits from US. Most hits were from Russia, and the midde east!
My 2 counters, that are accurate, stated that i had less than 1/2 of the visitors that the site claimed i had. The traffic that i did get from these people only lasted a second, making me think that they have bots doing the clicking! I would think that the only good reviews they get are from the very scammers of this site. DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY!