Diary of a Slightly Eccentric Euro Man

BetterVisitors.com is a company that allows you to buy targeted traffic for your website. They claim to have been in business since 1999 with thousands of happy repeat customers. We have carried out an in depth investigation of the system over the last month.

They claim their system works by buying expired domain names with regular visitors. They then either resell them or use them to send visitors to you. These domain names had a previous website on them that fits into various targeted categories, they then redirect that traffic to your website. In principle it sound like an interesting idea. If for example, Jack was looking for a domain name on domiansareus.com and you had picked ‘domain names’ as a category, then he would be redirected from domainsareus.com to your website.

Of course this will either result in Jack being surprised or disappointed about ending up on a different site or he may well stick around for a while and see what you have to offer. In some ways it almost seems like false advertising although Jack does still end up at a relevant web site, just not the one he thought he was going to. In our experience of purchasing dozens of newly expired names it is very rare we ever found one with any residual traffic. The main reason for this is the 90 day period from when a domain expires to when it is available for sale. This time normally means all Alexa ranking and any traffic has long since gone elsewhere. The only way this whole system could work is if you were able to redirect traffic the instant a domain expires and not when it is available for sale.

Another flaw in the system is that if the visitor goes to the original site address e.g domainsareus.com more than once then there is no guarantee that he will see your website a second time.

To help with this review we bought a package from bettervisitors and set up at least three different ways of tracking on the site so we could be sure of catching every viewing.

To begin with we have to say that their website is a good quality well designed site that we had no difficulty using. Our orders were placed and complete in a matter of moments and all we had to do was wait for the flood of visitors to start. It took about 24 hours and it is our understanding this is while they check your site to make sure everything is in order. In the meantime we were sent the url for yourtrafficserver.com which is where you can view the stats of the traffic they send you including the ip addresses.

According to the statistics on yourtrafficserver.com we received all the traffic we ordered evenly divided over the period of one month which is exactly what the FAQ told us would happen. Unfortunately this is where we differ from what we were told by bettervisitors.com and what all our other ways of tracking told us. We found that on average for the first week we received about 25% of the visitors they claimed were sent. After the first week this dropped to even less until a couple of days we received hardly a hit despite yourtrafficserver.com telling us a different story.

The traffic was always sent in a burst that lasted about an hour so for a few days we sat there and monitored the website in real time via a direct backdoor connection. Once again we were unable to see anywhere near the quantity of visitors that yourtrafficserver.com claimed. We checked all the logs and visitor trackers we had set up and they all agreed with our manual observations.

The other thing that concerned us a lot were the details in the log kept by yourtrafficserver.com itself. The one thing that struck us as very strange was that in a world where Firefox has about 15 – 20 % of the browser market, our visitors were 99% Firefox users. I do not know if this is something to do with the way they redirect the traffic or just a strange quirk.

You can draw your own conclusions from our experience and we are certainly not saying to avoid them. We just want to point out that we were disappointed but not surprised in the results. We have had better results and better conversions from auto surf programs.
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