Traffic Exchanges: The Revenge

In part one of my review, Are Traffic Exchanges Too Good to Be True? I revealed the biggest flaw in using traffic exchange services: their high "noise-to-signal" ratio. But I wasn't satisfied to close out my accounts without first examining exactly where the traffic from these services went on a web site. I wanted to give these traffic services a chance to show some useful feature in exchange for their biggest flaws of being cesspits for spammers.

I really floundered to find much good to say about these services, but there were a few points that I could make. First, the companies deliver exactly what they promise. The services do not generally try to scam you out of traffic you've earned, at least not in my brief experience. Secondly, once you cancel a service, they cut off all of their services all at once. I didn't receive a single bulk mail from any of the companies I used for my research after I'd cancelled my accounts. (I did receive constant SPAM messages from the companies encouraging me to buy traffic during the time that I was a member.)

I will not reveal which companies I used, lest my links count as an endorsement of the companies. I want to point out that there is a pro-traffic exchange article here on AC, and the poster is earning referral bonuses for anyone who clicks links in their article. Since I'm trying to encourage you to avoid the services, I don't see a point to linking to them. If you still decide to try these services out, finding them is not difficult.

For my experiments with these services, I used two pages to direct traffic to, the first being my RSS feed for my Associated Content articles, and the second being my own web site, ZoeWhitten.com. I chose these sites because both have zero ads to draw people away from my content. No matter what a user clicked through to, it would be picked up and counted as a hit for me in some way. In the case of the RSS feed, any click would have counted as a unique page view for that article. If someone clicked on a button on the main page of my web site, my statistics software can track them. It can tell me who referred traffic and where the people went after they arrived.

All of this is moot, because the traffic never moved from the main pages. Yes, I got exactly the number of hits that I was promised by surfing through four days of SPAM. But none of the surfers who showed up to either site clicked away from the main pages. For people who are asking for a form to be filled out, or their whole site is one page, this might, in theory, still be a useful service. But, and I cannot stress this enough, no one was checking out either site. Both sites were offering a variety of stories and articles to read for free, but nobody clicked anything.

You might think this is because the users are lazy. Not so. The surf bars themselves create a problem, where if you click on a link in a blog or a real site, the page forces itself out of the frame, and the surf bar is lost. This forces the user to return to the surf bar page, sign in again, and start another session. Having that happen a few times conditions the users to not click anything, and thus, they don't read anything either. There's no point to doing so, because if an article ends in a link that says, click for more, the user cannot without crashing their surf session. So they don't.

Web-savvy readers might point out that surfers can open the content in a new window to avoid this problem, but no one did. On my web site statistics, there is a massive spike in requests for the main page. I've never had so many unique IP addresses showing up all at once. But the point of my site is to get people to read free fiction. If nobody stays to read anything, than the traffic is worthless.

The traffic report on my RSS feed is the same. No new views came in during the time that the services were directing hits to the feed page. I had far more success posting links to my stories in forums where I was already known. This is an important comparison, and I want to expand on it. Over the course of three days, I directed 800 page views to each of the two test sites. (For a grand total of 1600 hits.) Of those 800 views, not one person left the main page or the RSS feed links. I cross-posted one link for my short horror story, Walking Home With Strangers, on three forums, and I got 52 views. So, that's 52 to 0. Which method sounds more efficient to you?

In part one of this review, I said that there had to be a way for me to convince people to read my stories without first having to become their BFF first. But it appears that the only sure-fire way to get real traffic is to get involved in the online communities and really get to know people. Any other way of generating traffic brings people who aren't really interested in reading, or listening, or interacting in any way. They're just surfing to build up traffic for their own sites.

For those of you who are running pages full of banners and medical scams, maybe having people just look at your site makes you money, somehow. But mostly, I suspect that all this is really doing is making junk bandwidth. For those of you on AC looking into using a traffic exchange to boost your numbers, look elsewhere.

Somewhere out there, there may be a "silver bullet" of marketing, but it is not traffic exchange services. For owners of web sites or blogs with real content, they are nothing more than a waste of your time. You can find better ways to market yourself, and as an added bonus, you'll avoid having to sit through hours and hours of SPAM.