To begin with, there is a need to note that the way traffic is generated is always described either in small or in big letters during the purchase. This is not a fraud and you should not consider it such. If you still decide to try it or have purchased an advertising package without noticing, you can check whether you have real or fake traffic. You should know that indeed the websites sell traffic but they do not offer efficiency.

And this is exactly how you can distinguish the fake from the real traffic. As it has been already made clear, a consumer makes at least four or five clicks on your website. I.e., if you have 10,000 unique visitors, it is logical to expect about 50,000 impressions. When you buy traffic “by the kilo”, the unique visitors sharply increase to 10,000 (what you have paid for), but the number of page reloads remains 10,000, too. I.e. if the consumer does not enter deeper into your website, sometimes it is possible even not to see it.

The traffic’s efficiency also can be checked through the number of clicks on the banners. The number of clicks on the banners is increasing proportionally to the number of impressions. For instance, if there are banners on the home page (where the purchased traffic goes to), you will increase them with 10,000 impressions. With the fake traffic, the number of clicks will remain the same as it used to be before the big inflow of consumers.

This will prove that the consumers generating the traffic in question do not even notice the website. This type of packages could be used only by dishonest traders, who sell impressions to their advertisers and are not interested in whether their client will be left satisfied or not. However, this is something that cannot be left unnoticed by advertisers, advertising agencies, and the independent metrics for a long time.

Last but not least, the share of consumers in terms of countries and cities. If you have launched a website for Italy and suddenly it turns out that the last 10,000 consumers that have entered your website mostly come from Kazakhstan, Uruguay, China, and Morocco, while Baikonur is the most active city, then you must be sure that you have poured your money down the drain – you do not have real consumers, and you have not generated clicks on the banners, sold any product, and the traffic is not even Italian.

However, the internet is a global network and something offered by the global advertising networks can be found in anywhere. Such advertising packages have been offered for years and they even come from some popular websites.

More than five years ago we purchased advertising for NasamNatam.com from a popular email service provider. We did not want to purchase traffic but real advertising. It was supposed that when leaving the email page by entering the EXIT button, consumers should be redirected to our website – exit page.

Currently, some email service providers, do this by redirecting the consumers to another websites. But this was not what we got. The effect was incredible – we increased the number of visits with 5,000 people a day. However, it turned out that our website is opened in a new window, outside the visible scope of the monitor. This way, even if the consumers wanted to see it, they could not. The advertising contract expired and then we went back to the old levels without attracting a single consumer.

Of course, this was a long time ago. Currently, none of the big internet groups dares to offer such services. However, for better or for worse, the market expanded seriously and you can easily come across a dishonest trader selling “fake traffic” in the form of well-packaged advertising. Even if you make the mistake of buying such advertising, you already know how to check whether it is efficient or not.