Pay Per Click focused traffic exchanges are all the rage with those trying to make a quick buck online. This article will try and explain why you should not be using them in your marketing plan. The text within the brackets is either taken directly from or similar to what you will find within the members are of this type exchange.



It all starts innocent looking enough...

[Our focus is on ensuring that members visit other members sites, click a relevant ad, and actually consider procuring the resulting service. Unfortunately this can have a negative impact because it appears that you are inflating your earnings and that's not true.]

After telling people that they are NOT artificially inflating their earnings by using this type traffic exchange they proceed to teach them how to manipulate and deceive the PPC engine so as not to get shut down for click fraud.

Statements such as this lay the groundwork...

[When you are receiving per pay click revenue at your site there are a few red flags that can appear and raise concerns to the service providers.]

They then proceed to instruct members on how to send enough traffic to their website to keep their Click Thru Rate (CTR) within an so called acceptable range. This is mostly done by using auto surf exchanges to send junk traffic to a particular website. Because auto surfs are useless methods of actually getting interested visitors to your website you can be pretty much guaranteed that you will not get any clicks to your PPC ads. The balancing act is to keep enough junk traffic visiting your website so that when the actual visitors from the PPC focused exchange visit and click on your ads your CTR remains around the 1% - 2% rate.

The other main aspect of this type of click fraud is making sure people allocate their hits and clicks so they are spread out as evenly as possible throughout the day.

Instructions such as these are common place...

[Spreading out your clicks is extremely important, lets say you allocate 50 hits and in one hour all 50 hits finish and for the rest of the day you have no more clicks, they (the PPC search engine) are going to look at that closely. To help prevent this, use the Hit Allocation Module, so that you can allocate hits to your web sites every day little by little. That way you don't end up with 100+ clicks a day. Logging in every 2 hours and allocating hits little by little will help solve this problem.]

Why would it be a problem if they were not trying to fraud the providers?

They then proceed with a few doom and gloom type threats just to insure you click away. After all, everyone wants to be seen as an asset to the team.

[Please remember the community falls or prospers based on YOUR activity. Be generous and you will benefit, give and you will receive.]

[We monitor member activity and members who don't participate in the spirit that the community is based on, will be removed. Quantity means nothing, if you don't take the time to look and click then the exchange dies!]

I actually put these strategies to the test using Google Adsense as the PPC provider. Within 3 days of beginning my campaign and trying my best to keep my clicks spread out and my CTR around 1% I received the following email from Google.

******

Hello,

It has come to our attention that invalid clicks or impressions have been generated on the Google ads on your site(s) through users of third-party programs paid or provided with other incentives to visit your site. Such programs may include, but are not limited to auto-surf, pay-to-surf, pay-to-read, or pay-to-click sites. As a reminder, any method of generating invalid clicks or impressions is strictly prohibited by our Terms & Conditions and program policies:

https://www.google.com/adsense/terms

https://www.google.com/adsense/policies

If we continue to detect invalid clicks or impressions from these services on your ads, we may disable your account to protect our advertisers.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

******

I was not at all surprised to receive this message from Google but what about the unsuspecting novice? The person that was told to purchase some type of pre-designed content website or to just throw up one article on a page and stick the Adsense code on it and start making steady money by simply participating in an organized group of like minded people helping each other by clicking on exchange PPC links.

These trusting and naive types are getting their PPC accounts shut down as fast as they get them started because they want so badly to find a way to make easy money on the Internet that they don't take the time to do any research or even think it through themselves.

The age old saying "If it sounds too good to be true it probably is" fits this type of traffic exchange strategy perfectly.

Making money with Google Adsense or any other PPC provider is not rocket science but it does take a solid long term plan and a commitment to work that plan. Can a person make a nice income using pay per clicks? The short answer is yes...just make sure that traffic exchanges promoting what is nothing more than organized click fraud are not part of your portfolio.