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07 February 2010
So, we are now 1 week into our www.revisitors.com Targeted Traffic Campaign. For those of you who have been following this particular review segment, we posted our observations on Day 1 and Day 3 of our campaign. If you haven’t been following but would like to see our prior reports, you can view Day 1 and Day 3.
To recap, this particular review entails www.revisitors.com who provide targeted traffic services for a small fee. A target traffic campaign is a service some webmasters and bloggers may consider using at one point or another to increase traffic to their site. One reason may be to simply increase their unique site visit count to boost site stats – be it for site rankings, advertising or to improve their curb appeal should they be looking for investors or to sell their site or blog. There are countless reasons one would want to boost traffic to their site.
On the other side of the coin, if you are looking to increase traffic to your site in order to boost membership, ad revenue or product/service sales, targeted traffic services may or may not be useful, depending on your particular site’s revenue model. If your site is running exit link ad campaigns, where you earn small commissions when people exit your site or link out of your site – then the type of traffic directed through www.revisitors.com may work. It may even work on a site with popups or popunders. Of course, I couldn’t tell you for sure because these types of ads are annoying and are not the type we use here.
Small sites like ours do try and create some ad revenue because we aren’t funded, sponsored or have product or service based revenue streams to keep us online.
Revisitors.com promises targeted traffic delivery to your site. The package we signed up for was the smallest available. For $20 USD, revisitors has committed to sending us 2500 unique visitors in 7 to 30 days. We are into day 8 and they have delivered 830 to date. Here is the campaign snapshot from our Revisitors campaign tracking page to prove it.
Now there has been some disparity between our various site traffic analysis services. In particular, we have been tracking site traffic through Google Analytics, JoomlaWatch, our Vinora site Counter and our AWStats Server logs and comparing our numbers with those reported by Revisitors.
We can discount Google Analytics stats as well as those from JoomlaWatch and our site counter, as neither is very accurate. Analytics, for example, reports only 153 unique visits from www.revisitors.com – which we know to be wrong (~500 wrong). What is interesting however are the stats analytics provide for those 153 visits it HAS logged. Since this campaign started, I have been surmising that this “targeted” traffic isn’t quite as targeted as one might expect. If we were getting genuine “targeted” traffic (unless our site was so unattractive, hard to navigate and completely useless as to prevent any visitor from wanting to explore our site further – and if this is the case, I would appreciate some feedback), we could expect some visitors to leave as soon as they landed on our home page, although we could also reasonably expect some to stick around and explore. Google Analytics for the past week shows that for traffic direct from revisitors.com, their time on site average is 5 seconds as opposed to just under 12 minutes for all other traffic sources. The same goes for page views. Where the average for revisitors traffic is 2.2 page views (generally, the home page loaded twice), this contrasts with an average 20 page views for visitors from all other sources.
Our JoomlaWatch stats reveal a similar story. While it reports a more accurate 697 unique visitors from www.revisitors.com, not one of these referrals has stayed on the site longer than 5 seconds or has went beyond the home page. 
Our AWStats Server logs show a total of 637 unique hits from www.revisitors.com. This is in line with our JoomlaWatch stats – or close enough. I haven’t poked into the Raw Server logs yet. I’m waiting for the campaign to be done. At which point, I will compare our Raw logs with revisitors “claimed” delivery and see if they correlate. So far, there seems to be some disparity between my numbers and theirs.
To be honest, other than for the accuracy of this review, I’m not overly concerned about whether or not I get all of my revisitors traffic. After 8 days, it is clear that for a site like this one (and probably like yours), this type of traffic generation is a waste of time and money. It hasn’t generated one single registration and it hasn’t affected our Ad revenue or click-through rate. In addition, with a small 2500 count traffic package, it is unlikely to affect our site stats in any positive way. In fact, quite the opposite. Revisitors traffic has been throwing off our “useable” stats by adversely affecting our bounce rate, time on site and page views.
One third of the way through our campaign, I can already advise you to stay away from traffic generation services such as those provided by revisitors.com. Unless cancelled, my campaign is a 2500/month recurring for $20/month. You’d be better off putting that money towards an Adword or Affiliate campaign. At least these would generate referrals that are actually looking at your content, products or services and are more likely to translate into members or sales.
I will be back with a final report at the end of this campaign.
In the meantime,
Thanks for reading!
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