traffic
Traffic – because of how important it is, we all want more of it. A website’s audience and revenue possibilities are directly proportional to its traffic.
But not all traffic is the same. Some companies exist only to trick publications and advertisers into paying for fake traffic, luring cheap site traffic with favorable terms. Don’t get it wrong, there is cheap site traffic that is both profitable and real. Let’s figure out how to spot fake traffic and not buy it.
What is fake traffic?
Humans aren’t the ones driving fake traffic. Click farms, bots, and software do it, positioning it as a quality cheap web site traffic. By creating the illusion of a larger audience than exists, fake traffic is used to fraudulently increase ad income. False visitors get an incredible number of ad impressions.
Publishers risk having their advertising accounts suspended or even banned by ad networks if their websites are found to have suspiciously high amounts of bot traffic.
How to spot fake traffic?
Google Analytics is an excellent starting point, however it isn’t always easy. If you think you are flooding your websites by traffic that is fake, you can check following details in the Audience Overview section:
- A website’s bounce rate is the percentage of page views without user engagement. False traffic might be to blame if this figure is absurdly high (or, paradoxically, ridiculously low).
- Some visitors may spend a few minutes perusing the site. Instagram and Facebook visits often don’t last more than 30 seconds at most. Bots impersonating human users may be present if it’s much lower than that.
- Pages/Session Variation is also considered normal. While some visitors may read four or five pages in a single session, others may read only one. Any value close to one on the average is out of the ordinary.
- It’s great to have new users, but it’s too much if everyone does it at once. Unusual is the best way to describe a very high number of new sessions. Similarly, a small or nonexistent number often represents the same bots again.
- Does the language, nation, and city of the target audience match the content of the website? An indication of suspicious traffic can be an abnormally high number of visitors from countries where English is not the native language.
Additionally, you may check your own statistics often to see if anything is wrong. Although it’s impossible to gain a whole picture from any one statistic, by keeping an eye out for outliers, you may start to put together the bigger picture and learn to be skeptical when necessary.
Although many things may affect statistics, variance.tv, the phony traffic source in question, was raising almost every red flag.
Avoid purchasing phony visitors
Even though it’s not called “fake traffic” by anybody who sells the cheapest website traffic, there are plenty of low-cost traffic generators available. Their bargains are, in fact, as fantastic as they sound. A lot of people send out meaningless hits using software. There are click farms in nations where English is not the native language. Some people use remarkably complex strategies to source traffic.
Sponsored networks, PR companies, and even trustworthy social media influencers provide publications a particular number of hits for a predetermined charge or per click. These organizations may seem trustworthy, but they hide their tactics since they offer fake traffic.
If you don’t know their strategies and can’t track your visitors, avoid these offers and grow traffic naturally. It’s not worth risking getting blacklisted from every ad exchange and won’t monetize if you don’t know who visits your site or where they buy advertisements.
Be prepared to spend a lot on traffic. Facebook and Instagram ads and social media influencers may help you target actual content fans. Comparing their metrics to yours will verify these visits.
