Low Quality Traffic Sources to Avoid for Your Business

The Internet is filled with websites selling different types of web traffic. There’s the good, the OK, the bad, and the downright worthless.

So, how do you define the value or worth of traffic? Well, it’s quite simple. If the traffic is turning into real sales for you, then it’s good. But, if all you’re getting is a bunch of traffic, but no sales, then obviously it’s not that good. Remember, the bottom line isn’t about the traffic, it’s about profits.

To generate profits, you need two things: Good traffic and a good website design. To stay on topic, I’m only going to talk about the traffic part of it here.

Here are three sources of traffic you might consider avoiding.

Paid to Click/Visit Traffic

There are “make money” networks out there that pay its members to click on links or visit certain advertisers. The only people that benefit from these types of networks are the network owners and its members. The advertiser doesn’t benefit because the people visiting their site is only visiting for the purpose of making money from the visit, and not really interested in the content of the destination website.

Well, you might ask: What’s the difference between this Paid to Click traffic and Pay Per Click (PPC) traffic? There is a huge difference. Paid to Click traffic comes from networks that are set up solely for the purpose of making money for themselves and their members. While PPC traffic is coming from various search engines and publisher sites in which the ads are highly targeted to the advertiser’s content, and there is no incentive for the user to visit the advertiser’s site. In other words, PPC traffic is usually highly targeted, intent driven traffic, which translates to quality traffic.

Incentivized Traffic

People sign up to incentivized networks to make money. Members of incentivized networks get paid whenever they sign up for an offer, or when they purchase something through an advertiser’s site in the network.

The problem with this is, the members are really not buying because they really want to use a certain product or service. They are simply signing up or buying something to get paid by the incentivized network. Usually these advertisers offer a free trial of some sort, so there is little to no risk for the member. Once they’ve gotten paid by the network, they’ll just end up canceling the service or returning the product for a full refund. So once again, the advertiser loses out. They’ve paid out commission for the referral, but they didn’t make any money from that referral because the intent was never there to begin with.

Popup/Popunder

There are mixed opinions about this in the industry. Some say it works. While others say this type of traffic doesn’t convert. When you think about it… popup/popunder traffic is legitimate traffic. It’s real people visiting your site, but you’ll probably get mostly casual browsers or people who are just curious and not ready to buy.

When it comes to converting traffic into a sale, it’s all about the intent of the user. Targeted, intent-driven traffic will lead to sales. Traffic that is not targeted or intent-driven, is nothing more than traffic for stats.