As the interest in contextual advertising grew, many smaller firms tried to make a mark and offered visitors at very low prices, thus making the long term financial substantiality weaker and weaker. While this forced many sites out of business, others adapted and improved their services or made other adjustments necessary to keep selling their traffic.
In every business, there are always people who see an opening to trick people, making an easy buck. This is no exception, there are many shady sites, claiming to deliver vast amounts of traffic for pennies, but what exactly are you paying for? For the average webmaster, it can prove hard to know the quality of the traffic received, not to mention the origin. This, of course, is very important in order to assess if the traffic received are worth the price.
While most sites offering to sell visitors are legitimate, paying for low quality traffic is costly, and there are a few, easy ways of spotting the most obvious ways of delivering faulty traffic.
The most common fraud is auto generated hits, often in the form of autosurf programs, designed to deliver massive amounts of hits to sites participating in their scheme. While this might prove useful to some, it sure isn't something you should be paying for. To spot , you should look at the referring pages and look for the following extensions:
Surf.php
Auto.php
Hit.php
View.php
Autohit.php
Zaeler.php
Hitsurfer.php
Autobar.php
Bar.php
On top of these, you should of course keep an eye out for any URL with words similar to autosurf or autohit. If in doubt; just check the referring site to see what it's about.
If you do see these types of referring pages, it's time to switch to another traffic provider, you are paying for automatically generated hits, not very likely to click your ads or purchase something you are selling.
If you are using contextual ads as a method of buying visitors, you should pay close attention the statistics they offer. Some will give you a complete list of referring pages, other only the amount of hits. Depending ob how they deliver the traffic ? e.g. java script or strange redirects ? it might not always be possible to track the referring pages at all.
If you can't see where the traffic derives from, you better be sure it is converting. If it's not, you are paying for something you are not getting. While the lack of statistics and/or information doesn't necessarily mean they are tricking you, it's far better to actually have the statistics to analyze yourself.
This is extremely important if you are buying a small amount of visitors compared to your total traffic. The behavior of the visitors coming from the PPC campaign will be hard to sort out if they are few, so the information you can get from the provider will server as a large portion of all the potential information available. Be sure to choose a contextual advertiser, offering good and detailed statistics.
