Let's talk about traffic washing and dilution
 

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 :)

Interesting read.
Wish you had some screen shots and such to further push your point though I see no reason for deception unless you just really hate all traffic brokers.

Thank you for the effort to educate us all in this. I found it very helpful in understanding the purchased traffic market.

Very interesting post. :thumbsup

ok u sell ur traffic?

good post. traffic buyers be wary.

Nice writeup and nice research... This is one of those things I always suspected but would never have the time or resources to prove like this.

Interesting... opened my eyes for sure.

thank you for your informative post. Great read.

nice post

Good post, one of those that makes me realise just how little I know lol :D

THX for posting. Conary cookies? Do they have another name - I tried googling it?

Good post, interesting read.
Thanks

Post of the month :)

Interesting...


thank u

I'm guessing he meant canary

great post, very interesting read :thumbsup

How to filter traffic?

good post ... wish I had time to do such testing ... noobs will still buy that traffic just to see their stats counters go up though lmao

It certainly is. Keep this on the front page.

dam...gotta take a shower and come back to read this.........looks good....

interesting...

Excellent thread....Too bad the title doesn't convey the importance of it.

This thread should be a sticky.

Oh, and can you tell us who you bought traffic from? I'll understand if you don't want to answer.

Buy traffic?:1orglaugh

But to waste $7K on this.. just my 2 cents.

Please help me understand this... If someone has traffic that contains real surfers/customers (which is the only valuable traffic) then why sell are they selling it, instead of using it themselves to make sells somewhere??? The fact that someone wants to "sell" traffic at all, makes me think it is traffic that can't be worth a damn.

I have never understood the whole concept of buying traffic (that could only be shit traffic), or the motivation to sell "valuable" traffic.

Someone please explain......

is there any 100% proof way to detect who is sending you hitbots?

This is a really great business related thread. I'm glad you took the time to write it.

Bump for a good question ..... Well?

Only noobs believe that there is such a thing a useless traffic and make fun of people who buy traffic.

The reason most people sell traffic is guaranteed income.
- Generating Traffic (Through SEO or traffic trading or viral marketing or ...) and converting traffic (selling a product) are 2 totaly different skills.
- Selling traffic to a broker = instant income. Sending traffic to a sponsor = having to wait a month for you money.

You could say the same about traded traffic. Why would anyone want to send valuable traffic to a trade partner? So that mean 95% of all TGP traffic can't be worth a dime, right? And what about Google Adwords? Google is selling adspots. If those spots were worth anything, then why would Google be selling them?
The reason people think bought traffic is worthless, is because they have no idea how to filter their traffic. If it were really as simple as buying a couple of 1000 hits and sending them to your sponsor link, don't you think everybody would be doing it? Converting any kind of traffic requires (hard) work and skill. Some kinds of traffic are harder to generate, but easier to convert (for example se traffic), other kinds of traffic are easier to generate, but harder to convert (for example skimmed tgp traffic)... but in the end there's no such thing as worthless traffic, there are only worthless webmasters.

It's ironic that people are listening to a well-known thief trying to back up his theories on shady business with a bullshit study he claims to have done.

Folks, this guy is a thieving turd. Even if his study was real (and it isn't, I promise), it was still done with a script he stole and claimed as his own.

http://www.gofuckyourself.com/showthread.php?t=186866
http://www.gofuckyourself.com/showthread.php?t=151072
http://www.gofuckyourself.com/showthread.php?t=190345

Frankly I am betting this is a troll to try to get Choker to respond so he can claim to have evidence that Choker is one of the shady traffic brokers he says he "tested."

Amirite?

Brokered Traffic Arbitrage... nice! Excellent post. I have to admit, a biz post of this quality is a little out of place on GFY.

It's really not a nice post. It's a few common practices mixed with theories and coated with a bullshit experiment that never actually happened. Goddamn some of you people are gullible.

Sharing traffic is WAY different than what we are talking about here. In a group of potential customers, say 100 come to TOM's site and 100 other go to BILL's site. Half of BILL's traffic wants what he is selling and the other half want what TOM is selling but don't know about TOM. Let's say TOM has a similar situation on his hands with his traffic. The two (BILL and TOM) can either keep all of their traffic and make 50 sales each or they can share traffic and make 100 sales each. It is a no brainner.

But that is not answering anything about buying and selling "TRAFFIC".

Not having to wait a month to get a paycheck can not be the real reason behind someone deciding to sell perfectly good traffic. That seems like a very immature and amateur approach to business. A real business person doesn't mind at all waiting a month to get a check. In fact they usually get a check every month. What's the hurry??? Your answer sounds like something that someone told you, not something you found out from experience.

My real questions are... (and this also goes out to everyone)...

How much money have you ever made "selling" traffic???

How much money have you ever made "buying" traffic and directing it to something that would convert??

If I could make real sales from my traffic it seems like it would result in more revenue from those sales than the revenue that would come from selling off the traffic itself. I wouldn't mind waiting a month if it meant more revenue.

Can anyone on here speak to this issue from a perspective of actual personal experience???

thank you for taking the time to write all of this out and post it for everyone.

good man.

No it's not. There's no difference whatsoever between selling a visitor in exchange for money or selling a visitor in exchange for another visitor. If you automatically assume that sold traffic (in exchange for money) is useless traffic then there's no reason to not assume that traded traffic is useless traffic.

Yes it is. might wanna reread it :)

There's no such thing as 'perfectly good traffic'... and there's no such thing as 'useless traffic'... and there's no such thing as 'worthless traffic'... All traffic is good traffic.

plenty..

plenty..

1. There's more to USING traffic than directly selling products.
2. Like I said before: Generating traffic and converting traffic are 2 totally different skills.



This thread confirms 1 thing: the lack of creativity amongst webmasters.


(note: The word 'traffic' in my posts refers to real, human traffic)

Plenty????
 

Plenty???? What the hell is plenty??? Am I talking to a real businessman or not???

Talk numbers. Be specific. All this vague talk is just bullshit. If you ask a working actor what SAG union scale is, they can give you a number not a response like "plenty".

If you are not speaking from real world experience, then don't waste everybody's time.

There are too many people on this board that talk out of there ass.

DO YOU MAKE AT LEAST ENOUGH MONEY ON THE WEB TO PAY YOUR MONTHLY EXPENSES??? If you do, TALK NUMBERS. If not, then your statements have no validity.

THROW OUT SOME NUMBERS!!! Put up or shut up.

I know the majority of the members of GFY are guys that make less than 5,000 a month off of ALL the hours spent and ALL their efforts on the web. Yet these are the guys that have thousands of posts on here.

I'm looking for an answer from someone who makes a living doing this, not someone who is on here for recreation.

If you can't give real numbers then you only do a disservice to everyone on here.

Come on, it took you 4.5 months and $7k to conclude that traffic that goes through a broker, trade script, etc is of lower quality than the traffic that doesn't?! It seems pretty common sense to me...

I would love to hear more on this one...anyone

^^
Well, thats one way to extrapolate data.

That's a response from a person who makes money using a certain technique but does not want to disclose the exact amount. And why would I? It's totally besides the point.

I'm getting the impression that I'm the one who's not talking to a real business person, since you fail to even grasp basic concepts such as traffic trading or to address the points I've made in my posts but instead resort to a kind of immature personal attack about income.

The real question here is "Would a person be selling a product if that product was worth something?" According to your post that would be impossible; You think that if the traffic is worth something the seller would not sell it but convert it instead...

Well, let's take a look at that Google example again. Google is selling ad spots. If those spots were really worth something then why would Google be selling them instead of joining 'a couple' affiliate programs and converting the traffic themselves?
Or why even use an affiliate program? Isn't sending traffic to a sponsor and getting paid for the converted part of the traffic the same as selling traffic? So why doesn't everybody start their own paysites in every possible niche instead of using affiliate programs? And what about for example factories that produce raw steel, why don't they make (and sell) their own cars, spoons, knives, bridges, tubes, trains,... instead of selling the steel? Now that steel can't be good if they are selling it, right? And why don't farmers use all of their grains to make flower? And why don't they use all of that flower to bake bread themselves? And why don't they sell all of those breads?

Different activities/techniques, require different skills/resources...

Like I said, only noobs think using bought traffic is as simple as buying x k of hits and sending them to a sponsors page. There are tons of factors to take into consideration (direct revenue, branding, alexa, cpm, trades, returning visitors, browsers,.... ...). So, only a noob would expect a simple answer such as "bought x number of hits for y mount of USD, sent it to a page with sponsor Z ads and made B amount of USD".

:Oh crap

Thanks for the post - a good read all around.

I highly doubt you will get any of the current traffic brokers in here.

So i will stick my nose in here

I am starting to sell ad spots ( galleries, banners ect.. ) still finishing my site.

why dont i want to keep sending the traffic to sponsors?
cause i have been doing this along time and been fucked over by far too many ( no names mentioned )

slowly but surely sponsors are being removed. ( not all, i found a few solid no bs sponsors, but..... )

sponsors want it, they can buy it upfront.

Great read - appreciate it if it's not biased (as Babaganoosh states.) I'm also enjoying the debate between U-Bob and DBS.US.

I used to buy traffic, but never really learned how to convert it well - now I focus most of my efforts on SEO.

I have recently started selling traffic and it's working out well. I can advertise on my site and if a visitor doesn't buy anything, I can still sell them off to something of interest and make the maximum payment from brokers.

I sell traffic for a couple of reasons - a steady income source (albeit small at the moment) and because it's a lot easier than managing often-dishonest trades. Also, I know that my traffic is of higher quality than most of my trades because I set my skim to 75-80% and nearly all of my traffic is SE generated, so trading for lower-quality TGP traffic just isn't worth it to me (in most cases.)

Just my 2 cents,
c-lo

I'd have to say I don't really think it's comparing apples to apples.

The "control" traffic is coming from your CjOverkill script installations on various sites. The script makes no choices in who it skims back to you (I would assume). It just takes whatever percentage of traffic it's supposed to take from each site and sends it to you. The webmasters get no choice in the matter and can't determine what traffic you get or don't get. For lack of a better word, you're getting a more "natural" sample of the traffic from a lot of sites.

The "test" traffic was specifically chosen by the webmasters to be sold. Whether the brokers do anything with it in the middle or not, they can only get their hands on what the webmaster wants to sell. And most webmasters are not going to sell off their best traffic. They send the majority of their traffic to their sponsors or other sites of their own. What goes to the brokers is the leftovers they are trying to squeeze a little more money from because they've already run it through the wringer and really don't expect it to convert anyway.

One source of traffic is pre-filtered by the webmasters, one is not.

Very interesting read, it makes a lot of sense, though im still keeping an eye on the ongoing debate :) I wouldn't go so far as to say using traffic brokers is throwing away money, but it does seem as if they do have limited useage.

its a numbers game, monitizing traffic at all cost...

Now instead you get fucked by traffic buyers who send you funds from a fraudulently funded epass account. :Oh crap

Made up or not still an interesting read and if its bullshit its well written thought out bullshit witch is still interesting