Be aware Before Buying Traffic

Whenever you're looking to start a new campaign it's always easy to rush in and fall for the sales-pitch and promises of a traffic seller - however doing your research and taking some simple steps to protect yourself will pay dividends in the long run and could be the difference between a profitable campaign and a loss-making one; the difference between small rewards and great rewards.

Step 1: Knowing What to Promote

It's likely that as an online marketer you already specialise in a particular vertical - whether it's online poker, forex, mobile phone packages or whatever.

You may already have in your mind an idea of which brands within your vertical convert best. However one thing to bear in mind is the amount of other affiliates buying traffic for the brand you're considering promoting, as well as the brand owner themselves. Don't forget the last cookie set on the visitor's computer wins - so just be mindful that if others are promoting the brand in a big way you may find your cookie being constantly overwritten. That means no conversions and no revenues to you.

Step 2: Check the T&Cs

You're a marketing guru not a lawyer right? But checking the T&Cs can be vital to ensuring that you're not ripped off by either the brand owner you're promoting or the traffic seller you're buying from.

Check the brand owner's affiliate terms and conditions to ensure you're allowed to promote their product using media buys. Many affiliate schemes specifically prohibit buying traffic, and in particular pops, to target their brands. What does this matter? Well you just need to be aware that if you get caught they may freeze or terminate your account and forfeit any revenues you've generated.

Traffic sellers will also often have terms and conditions that work against you. Some may only refund you money where traffic above a certain percentage is found to be fake - e.g. 20%. This could be a considerable amount of money you've lost. Also be aware of traffic sellers who in their T&Cs argue that you buy the traffic "as-is" - i.e. you buy it and they give you no guarantees as to its quality.

Finally check the T&Cs to see where the affiliate scheme or traffic seller is based. This isn't a deal breaker, but you need to be aware that if you're based in the UK and they're in the US, and vice-versa, if there's a problem you're going to have little or no chance of getting your money back if they refuse to refund you.

Step 3: Don't Rely on the Traffic Seller's Stats - Check Your Own Traffic!

Many traffic sellers have a dashboard telling you how many impressions they've delivered and more. Don't rely on this - their stats will often serve only one person. Themselves.

If you know what you're looking for make sure you make full use of your raw log data and look at every visitor they send you. It may sound time consuming - and it is - but how else are you going to know if all the traffic they're sending you is genuine - i.e. it's not fake (a bot) or that if it's pop-ads you're buying, that's what they're sending you.

Some traffic sellers will send interstitials and claim these are pops! Avoid these guys like the plague! Interstitials should cost a fraction of a pop-ad so don't let them water down your traffic buy with them - and just as importantly, interstitials don't set a cookie! That's bad, very bad news!

If you don't know what to look for in the raw logs (or don't even know what these are!) or don't have the time then you could sign-up to TrafficCake.com. This does all the hard work for you.

Traffic Cake is quick and easy to set-up. You simply open an account and input a few details about the traffic you're hoping to buy. The guys at TrafficCake then give you a unique URL which you give to the traffic seller. When they send traffic it goes via Traffic Cake to your ad or website and analyses all the traffic as it passes through - including whether or not the traffic is fake!

Step 4: Refine Your Traffic

If you've used Traffic Cake From the moment that traffic starts being generated you'll have access to the Traffic Cake dashboard which gives you access to data on whether the traffic is human or generated by a bot, whether your full-page pop under ad is as described or actually an interstitial, what operating system the visitors are using and the country they're from - and much more!

Where you're buying traffic that is coming from more than one source - e.g. blind network traffic - look at the source IDs. Using Traffic Cake you can determine whether some source IDs are sending a higher percentage of traffic that is fake, from a country you don't wish to target or using an operating system that doesn't convert for your product - e.g. Source ID #ABC may consist entirely of Mac users. By switching off these sources you can ensure that the only traffic you're getting is traffic that you've asked for and paid for!

By refining traffic you can cut out those sources that don't convert - you'll soon be getting only traffic that you're happy with.

And most of all use TrafficCake to see how much of the traffic you were sent was fraudulent!

Step 5: Demand Your money Back!

Traffic buying is all about ROI , ROI, ROI! If you've spent $1,000 on traffic and 80% of it was fraudulent how are you going to ever get a good return? TrafficCake gives you a fighting chance!

Within TrafficCake there is an email system that allows you to fire off an email to a traffic seller - this email explains how their traffic has been analysed; how much is fraudulent and why. TrafficCake provides the irrefutable evidence (taking the data from those raw logs and much more) to demand your money back on the fraud traffic. If you got $800 from your $1,000 spend suddenly your losses are looking quite as bad. And heck you can then go and spend that $800 with a traffic seller whose traffic hopefully isn't as bad! But before you do, don't forget to make sure you're using TrafficCake again!