We tried a web traffic service - guess what we found.

About a month ago, we tried one of the many web traffic services from fiverr and analyzed the traffic. This is what we found:

1. The traffic being driven to the site looked like a denial of service attack (DDoS). It was all bots, all Windows desktop PCs, and all highly suspect. While it was not a denial of service attack in the sense that it crashed the website, the traffic looked very much like a DDoS attack if it were done once every few seconds or so.


2. The visitors were from different IPs. So it looked like unique visitors and sessions, but it was all bots.


3. The product did not significantly impact bounce rate. It remained pretty much the same. Some bots would hang around and browse a couple of links at random to keep the bounce rate low. It was pretty easy to see what were bots and what were actual people as the browsing habits were different. Time per page was different.


4. The product was advertised as “qualified” traffic. Not in the least. Bots from compromised Windows PCs do not count.


5. The product was advertised as “unlimited” for 30 days. We got 700 to 800 sessions per day.


6. The product was advertised as “1000+” visitors per day. We got 700 to 800 “visitors” per day.

The product as advertised is more or less a scam. It didn’t deliver what was promised and what it did deliver was on the backs of people with compromised machines (spyware/malware/virus) and that just isn’t right. If you have a low bounce rate, it will most likely drive the bounce rate up despite some of the countermeasures.

The most annoying thing it did was make it very difficult to properly analyze the qualified visitors. When we write an article and post it, the stats spike when people look at our post. It was very difficult to tell how big of a spike we had when we posted.

So, we are only out $6 in total but well worth the lesson. We won’t ask for our money back because we feel we got what we really were after out of it.

We are unable to review it on fiverr for some unknown reason.

We tried a web traffic service - guess what we found.