My recent Traffic Experimentation
I have been pondering ways of bringing more traffic to my website especially since I've been working really hard on it the last month and a half. I've read posts here about free traffic exchanges and I've also been wanting to get into the world of PPC.
Well I've recently tried both and here's what ended up happening. I tried a free traffic exchange known as 10khits. You generate points there, by using their app/browser to view websites for a certain length of time and in response, your website will get traffic hits as well. Now you can set the duration of how long you want traffic to stay at your site up to a minute. I set it up to the maximum and certainly got quite a few hits, even up to 200 new sessions a day, but here is where I discovered things I didn't like and have stopped using it.
While I did get surges of traffic from this traffic exchange, I've noticed that my bounce rate increased dramatically from 70% to almost 90%. My session duration actually ended up dropping quite a bit going from a minute and 23 seconds to just 20 seconds. The number of returning visitors went down to from a high of 9% down to 4%.
Since I have stopped using it, normal daily traffic has returned to normal which is about 40-50 sessions a day sometimes more, and the amount of returning visitors has actually increased to over 12% now which is I believe the highest its ever been. My session duration is also slowly going back up too.
As far as PPC is concerned, I tried my very first campaign a little over a week ago and I did get a big surge in traffic from that too, but didn't make any money from that campaign. I will try again soon, thanks to a nice coupon from Bing and will change things a bit from my last campaign.
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Sounds like I'll skip trying traffic exchanges after reading this. I'd heard before that there really wasn't much benefit so I've never looked into it. Thanks for sharing.
Erica
Not a problem. I'm glad I got to try it out and see first hand what it does so now I can definitely stay away from them.
It is a trial and error thing for sure...
There is no magic pill to take or method that I know of that really works....
Basically, on the PPC, you hopefully are tracking to see which style of ad is getting more attention and action, and you can fine tune it from there....
If you are using on page tracking, you can see what actions the visitors are taking and change the page to better suit the actions they are taking...
It is a journey for sure, best of luck!
Cheers!
Dave : )
I did get quite a few clicks on the ad in my very first campaign and from there when they got to the landing page, a decent amount of clicks on my affiliate links, just did not have any buyers. I think I've figured out a reason why and I'm going to do some fine tuning as they say.
I want you to think about it this way for traffic exchange sites.
You get points for looking at other people's sites. But do you actually view their content? Or wait until the timer is done and then bounce?
If you are doing the latter, we'll just about everyone else is too.
I've tried traffic exchange programs. They don't work. Yes your traffic could be 5x or 100x more than before, but if your income isn't increasing then the traffic is useless.
I make $1,000 a month on a website that gets 250 people a day to my website and another $100 a month on a website that gets 10 visits a day.
I don't have a lot of traffic, but the traffic I do get is targeted very well with my keywords allowing me to make decent money on low traffic.
Yeah, I just wanted to experiment with it, but I'm done and won't go back to it. Like you said, it is much better to focus on keywords and posts that bring in genuine traffic that want to be at your site and can earn you income which is exactly what you're doing.
I have tried many things with paid traffic and it is all bots even Facebook as all the visits are at certain times in blocks and duration is short
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Mmm, I think I'll quite the traffic exchanges I joined, many thanks for sharing Irv :)