Have you ever seen advertisements for 10,000 targeted visitors for $10. Usually I just brush those adverts aside, reminding myself of the old adage “you get what you pay for”. But it occured to me $10 is worth about 4 adsense clicks on some of my high paying keyword sites. Surely out of thousands of visitors I could manage to get enough clicks to easily cover my small investment. Well it was worth a shot and so I set up an experiment to see if there was something in paid traffic.

The first thing I had to do was pick a traffic company. I searched the term “buy traffic” in google and chose the company that appeared first in the paid advertisemnts. My thinking was that if they could pay the most for promotion they must be one of the most successful companies and successful companies generally deliver the best product/services. The company was revisitors.com. One thing to be careful of though, was the fact that Revisitors sold subscriptions to paid traffic as opposed to one off services. In hindsight this is probably how they could afford to be first in Googles ads.

The Experiment

My test subject for this experiment was a forex blog I have sitting around gathering dust. It does have some traffic and adsense clicks (very minimal), enough history to compare the results of the paid traffic. For the safety of my adsense accounts (as I have publised my adsense statistics further down) I have decided to not make public the URL of my test subject. So for this site I purchased a package from revisitors which consisted of 2,500 U.S visitors in one week. I chose the visitors to come from the investment category as it was the most relevant category to my niche. The package cost me $22 so that is the amount I need to earn in adsense revenue to break even.

Control

Before we see the results we need to compare them to something. So here are the stats for the site up until I paid for traffic. Over a period of 3 months the stats for the site were:

• Page Impressions: 284
• Clicks: 21
• Click Through rate (CTR): 7.39%
• Page eCPM: $42.32
• Total Revenue: $12.02

Obviously I would not expect that type of CTR for paid traffic but it is important to know what stats real traffic generates so to compare with the paid traffic.

Results

Below are the adsense statistics after I paid for the visitors. These stats are for the first 5 days following my first visitor from revistors:

• Page Impressions: 961
• Clicks: 1
• Click Through rate (CTR): 0.10%
• Page eCPM: $0.41
• Total Revenue: $0.39

Conclusion

Where oh where do I start? Well I guess I should point out I stopped the experiment a couple of days early. The result was fairly obvious at that point and I wanted to cancel my subscription before I forgot. As I mentioned previously I did not expect a high CTR with paid traffic but I did expect something higher than roughly 1 click per thousand visitors. For my $22 investment I got a return of 39 cents so its fairly obvious to see this as an abject failure. Perhaps I could of tried several companies or found a company that specifically deals with forex visitors so it may be a bit soon to make a complete judgement on paid visitors, but gut instinct tells me this result is the norm not the exception.