This is a long post, but eventually you will like it, so take a cup of coffee and some popcorn. For some people this will change the way to see the well known traffic brokering business model. You will learn how traffic brokers wash traffic on you and also will learn how to wash their already washed traffic against them and make money out of nowhere.
I would like some traffic brokers to comment on this too. But be very careful with your comments. I have not named the brokers that were used for the tests (almost all of them), but if you post you are exposing yourself to a reply like "This was your traffic". Even that, most probably I have tested your traffic already and could also post the results.
Most people complain that their ratios have gone down the drain during the last 9 months.
One of the reasons for these bad ratios are traffic brokers doing traffic washing and hence diluting the real traffic value. With more traffic being washed out of the usual traffic circuits, the traffic you get is getting less value each day.
I decided to make a scientific research on how much does traffic brokered traffic get diluted, washed and at the end, the buyer (webmaster) scammed buying traffic that has much lower value.
### 1 --> Enter the traffic broker
During the last years I think I am the only traffic trading script supporter who has never sold his script payload traffic to traffic brokers. The main reason is that traffic brokers always tend to wash a good percentage of their traffic. The other reason is that I know how to convert that traffic into money.
During the last months several brokers have approached me asking me to sell them that traffic. Even a couple of non brokering companies, so I was aware something fishy was going on.
Then people suddenly started reporting their sales ratios going 10 times worse on TGP traffic while my sales ratios remained exactly the same, so that raised all the alarms on my side.
### 2 --> The setup
This test took 4 months to develop and almost 15 days more more to analyze all the data. The total amount of money spent for the test is near $7000 + 2 dedicated servers during 4 months.
Since I wanted to compare apples to apples I had to give basically the same conditions for the traffic. I setup two sites that were exactly the same, running the same scripts, having the same layout and the same server and scripts configurations. The server were exactly the same hardware and system configured exactly the same way. One of the servers would be used with traffic brokered traffic exclusively and the other would be used with my traffic as control traffic.
This way I could make sure that both systems ran on the same traffic numbers during the same hours, so chances for clicks and sales should be exactly the same.
The control traffic was the CjOverkill payout traffic coming completely untargeted from multiple sites that run CjOverkill.
The other traffic would be traffic broker traffic also coming untargeted for multiple niches (nichemix).
### 3 --> Tuning the setup
Ok, now that I had two servers ready, one of these servers was set as control server receiving the control traffic and the other was set as study server where the traffic broker traffic was arriving.
The first thing to do was to test traffic brokering traffics till I found the right traffic to match the same productivity as my own traffic.
On most traffic brokers it was the "niche mix" traffic, and lucky for me it resulted to be one of the cheapest traffics. Some traffic brokers allow you to buy other trade scripts payout traffic, but in practically all the cases the results were worse than my control traffic.
Once I matched traffic productivities the whole system was ready for real life tests.
### 4 --> Running a TGP/MGP test
Neither of both TGPs was trading traffic with other sites. Both sites had the same galleries listed and exactly the same layout.
The traffic used to test was 170k spread at 1k per hour during one full week period
Control site running my traffic completely untargeted did about 120% average prod and made 4 sales.
The study site running the traffic broker traffic did about 125% average prod and made no sales at all.
### 5 --> Running a paysite test
The paysite test of choice was an AFF landing page that looks very much like a TGP, so it ensured that the surfers would not close it right away.
This test was ran with 90k traffic brokering traffic vs 75k of my control traffic.
The results were more than bizarre:
Tracking ID Clicks Uniques Total Signups Uni/Signup Women Signups # Orders $ Orders Ajustes de pedidos de usuarios /Devoluciones / Créditos
control 100718 76848 63 1219.8 5 0 $0.00 0
broker 88570 87783 35 2508.1 1 0 $0.00 0
As you can see, my traffic made 63 free signups while the traffic broker traffic made only 35, while my traffic was 10k uniques less.
Since it's a dating site I decided to give these free signups a month and see how much would they convert into paid signups.
The traffic broker traffic has made no sales (zero, nothing, null, nada). My control traffic has converted into a total amount of $648.89 after a month since the test finish.
At this point the red lights were all blinking right in my face and I decided to make further investigation on these traffic broker traffics.
### 6 --> Traffic GeoIP Analysis
The GeoIP country stats showed most traffic brokers had a huge percentage of traffic from non USA/EU countries. One traffic broker had remarcably more Russin Federation traffic, while other had lots of south american traffic.
My own traffic used as countrol traffic showed a very balanced country mix, so that raised my alarms and made me investigate a bit more the traffic brokers country mix.
Some of the traffic brokers were shaving the USA/EU countries during some hours when their traffic was practically 40% Russian or South American while during the rest of the hours it was still high percentage, but not that high.
In any case, the USA/EU counries traffic was much less than it was on my control traffic. Between 15% and 30% less, sometimes even more.
So it was clear that the traffic brokers were redirecting most USA/EU traffic and selling the crap countries traffic they didn't even know what to do with.
### 7 --> Traffic hitbot analysis
So knowing that the so reputable traffic brokers were shaving the USA/EU traffic I just wanted to test if they also spread hitbots.
So far, practically all the traffic brokers were spreading bots, some more, some less. Between 15% and 65% was all bot traffic. Note that 65% is alot of bot traffic.
Some bots were so rudimentary that they were more than easy to detect on runtime. Others required some more difficult to do tests, but still doable and possible.
Kind of bots I detected:
1 ) Bots that were clicking several times per second. Even the fastest clicking human cannot make 5 clicks in one second.
2 ) Bots that were loading and clicking on hidden images. Some of these even hidden under a HTML layout, so even knowing where is the 1x1 pixel image you cannot click on it because it's under another layout.
3 ) Bots that had a known screen saver autosurfing application signature. You know all these screensavers that surf around while you are away?
4 ) Bots running IE api pretending to be FireFox browser.
5 ) Bots that accepted the conary cookies and then passed them to the site again. A conary cookie is a cookie that a real browser would not accept, while a bot would not have a way to distinguish if it's real or not.
6 ) Bots that once marked with UniqueID that changes with each load or click would load or click on the site again with the old ID instead of accepting the new one.
It's more than clean that traffic brokers either don't have the needed tools to filter their traffic, or they just sell the garbage while keeping the good traffic for themselves. No wonder your traffic is converting worse if you buy traffic from brokers or trade with sites buying from brokers. About 50% to 80% of that traffic is either hitbot or has no credit card at all (making a sum between bots and crap countries).
What can you do to benefit from this situation?
Wash the traffic back again. This worked pretty good for me so far and it was really funny to do it.
1 ) Set traffic seller/buyer accounts with these same brokers.
2 ) Buy traffic from Broker A and sell it to Broker B.
3 ) Filter the USA/EU traffic in the process and send it to where that traffic matters.
It's a bit more complex, but I won't give you the exact details.
The end result is that you recover the money yo spent on non USA/EU traffic you bought from broker A by selling that same traffic back to traffic broker B, so you end paying $2 for 1k of USA/EU traffic with about 20% hitbots factor.
Depending on the broker A and broker B prices/payouts that traffic may even end being free for you.
The results in this post are from the worst traffic broker from the test, yet no one of the others was even close to my control traffic.
Now let the flames begin
I would like some traffic brokers to comment on this too. But be very careful with your comments. I have not named the brokers that were used for the tests (almost all of them), but if you post you are exposing yourself to a reply like "This was your traffic". Even that, most probably I have tested your traffic already and could also post the results.
Most people complain that their ratios have gone down the drain during the last 9 months.
One of the reasons for these bad ratios are traffic brokers doing traffic washing and hence diluting the real traffic value. With more traffic being washed out of the usual traffic circuits, the traffic you get is getting less value each day.
I decided to make a scientific research on how much does traffic brokered traffic get diluted, washed and at the end, the buyer (webmaster) scammed buying traffic that has much lower value.
### 1 --> Enter the traffic broker
During the last years I think I am the only traffic trading script supporter who has never sold his script payload traffic to traffic brokers. The main reason is that traffic brokers always tend to wash a good percentage of their traffic. The other reason is that I know how to convert that traffic into money.
During the last months several brokers have approached me asking me to sell them that traffic. Even a couple of non brokering companies, so I was aware something fishy was going on.
Then people suddenly started reporting their sales ratios going 10 times worse on TGP traffic while my sales ratios remained exactly the same, so that raised all the alarms on my side.
### 2 --> The setup
This test took 4 months to develop and almost 15 days more more to analyze all the data. The total amount of money spent for the test is near $7000 + 2 dedicated servers during 4 months.
Since I wanted to compare apples to apples I had to give basically the same conditions for the traffic. I setup two sites that were exactly the same, running the same scripts, having the same layout and the same server and scripts configurations. The server were exactly the same hardware and system configured exactly the same way. One of the servers would be used with traffic brokered traffic exclusively and the other would be used with my traffic as control traffic.
This way I could make sure that both systems ran on the same traffic numbers during the same hours, so chances for clicks and sales should be exactly the same.
The control traffic was the CjOverkill payout traffic coming completely untargeted from multiple sites that run CjOverkill.
The other traffic would be traffic broker traffic also coming untargeted for multiple niches (nichemix).
### 3 --> Tuning the setup
Ok, now that I had two servers ready, one of these servers was set as control server receiving the control traffic and the other was set as study server where the traffic broker traffic was arriving.
The first thing to do was to test traffic brokering traffics till I found the right traffic to match the same productivity as my own traffic.
On most traffic brokers it was the "niche mix" traffic, and lucky for me it resulted to be one of the cheapest traffics. Some traffic brokers allow you to buy other trade scripts payout traffic, but in practically all the cases the results were worse than my control traffic.
Once I matched traffic productivities the whole system was ready for real life tests.
### 4 --> Running a TGP/MGP test
Neither of both TGPs was trading traffic with other sites. Both sites had the same galleries listed and exactly the same layout.
The traffic used to test was 170k spread at 1k per hour during one full week period
Control site running my traffic completely untargeted did about 120% average prod and made 4 sales.
The study site running the traffic broker traffic did about 125% average prod and made no sales at all.
### 5 --> Running a paysite test
The paysite test of choice was an AFF landing page that looks very much like a TGP, so it ensured that the surfers would not close it right away.
This test was ran with 90k traffic brokering traffic vs 75k of my control traffic.
The results were more than bizarre:
Tracking ID Clicks Uniques Total Signups Uni/Signup Women Signups # Orders $ Orders Ajustes de pedidos de usuarios /Devoluciones / Créditos
control 100718 76848 63 1219.8 5 0 $0.00 0
broker 88570 87783 35 2508.1 1 0 $0.00 0
As you can see, my traffic made 63 free signups while the traffic broker traffic made only 35, while my traffic was 10k uniques less.
Since it's a dating site I decided to give these free signups a month and see how much would they convert into paid signups.
The traffic broker traffic has made no sales (zero, nothing, null, nada). My control traffic has converted into a total amount of $648.89 after a month since the test finish.
At this point the red lights were all blinking right in my face and I decided to make further investigation on these traffic broker traffics.
### 6 --> Traffic GeoIP Analysis
The GeoIP country stats showed most traffic brokers had a huge percentage of traffic from non USA/EU countries. One traffic broker had remarcably more Russin Federation traffic, while other had lots of south american traffic.
My own traffic used as countrol traffic showed a very balanced country mix, so that raised my alarms and made me investigate a bit more the traffic brokers country mix.
Some of the traffic brokers were shaving the USA/EU countries during some hours when their traffic was practically 40% Russian or South American while during the rest of the hours it was still high percentage, but not that high.
In any case, the USA/EU counries traffic was much less than it was on my control traffic. Between 15% and 30% less, sometimes even more.
So it was clear that the traffic brokers were redirecting most USA/EU traffic and selling the crap countries traffic they didn't even know what to do with.
### 7 --> Traffic hitbot analysis
So knowing that the so reputable traffic brokers were shaving the USA/EU traffic I just wanted to test if they also spread hitbots.
So far, practically all the traffic brokers were spreading bots, some more, some less. Between 15% and 65% was all bot traffic. Note that 65% is alot of bot traffic.
Some bots were so rudimentary that they were more than easy to detect on runtime. Others required some more difficult to do tests, but still doable and possible.
Kind of bots I detected:
1 ) Bots that were clicking several times per second. Even the fastest clicking human cannot make 5 clicks in one second.
2 ) Bots that were loading and clicking on hidden images. Some of these even hidden under a HTML layout, so even knowing where is the 1x1 pixel image you cannot click on it because it's under another layout.
3 ) Bots that had a known screen saver autosurfing application signature. You know all these screensavers that surf around while you are away?
4 ) Bots running IE api pretending to be FireFox browser.
5 ) Bots that accepted the conary cookies and then passed them to the site again. A conary cookie is a cookie that a real browser would not accept, while a bot would not have a way to distinguish if it's real or not.
6 ) Bots that once marked with UniqueID that changes with each load or click would load or click on the site again with the old ID instead of accepting the new one.
It's more than clean that traffic brokers either don't have the needed tools to filter their traffic, or they just sell the garbage while keeping the good traffic for themselves. No wonder your traffic is converting worse if you buy traffic from brokers or trade with sites buying from brokers. About 50% to 80% of that traffic is either hitbot or has no credit card at all (making a sum between bots and crap countries).
What can you do to benefit from this situation?
Wash the traffic back again. This worked pretty good for me so far and it was really funny to do it.
1 ) Set traffic seller/buyer accounts with these same brokers.
2 ) Buy traffic from Broker A and sell it to Broker B.
3 ) Filter the USA/EU traffic in the process and send it to where that traffic matters.
It's a bit more complex, but I won't give you the exact details.
The end result is that you recover the money yo spent on non USA/EU traffic you bought from broker A by selling that same traffic back to traffic broker B, so you end paying $2 for 1k of USA/EU traffic with about 20% hitbots factor.
Depending on the broker A and broker B prices/payouts that traffic may even end being free for you.
The results in this post are from the worst traffic broker from the test, yet no one of the others was even close to my control traffic.
Now let the flames begin
Comment