Website owners are always keen to know how much “traffic” their site gets i.e. how many people visit the site, which pages they read etc. Then it’s all about getting more traffic.
We all know that some of the traffic on the Internet is fake, but most website owners hope it is a small percentage of the real traffic. However, some companies in the field of advertising believe that up to 50% of traffic achieved through advertising could be fake.
In this context ‘fake’ means it’s not a person looking at your website – it’s another computer.
This is the reason why so many websites these days insist you answer a Capcha query (click I’m not a robot) to prove you are a human being.
Suppose you have a new website and you believe the content is worth sharing. You want to get a lot of people to view your website. How do you go about this?
The starting point is to tell everyone you know, use social media to advertise your website content, tell anyone in the industry that you know and ask everyone to spread the word about your website.
Then, if you need more traffic i.e. people looking at your website – you might consider advertising on Google, Facebook, Twitter or other online services. This is good quality traffic (i.e. real people viewing your adverts) but it does cost.
If you can’t get (or afford) the traffic you want then you may look at the cheaper traffic providers.
How Do Cheap Suppliers Get Traffic?
There are lots of ways including:-
- clickbait
- spam messages
- posting fake comments on popular blogs or forums
- fake adverts
- advert marketplaces
- fake search engine optimisation
- traffic exchanges
- push advertising to mobile phone users
Clickbait is such a source that is increasingly used on popular news aggregator and entertainment websites. You will see mini ads with labels such as “10 things you didn’t know about Scarlett Johannsen” or “See what happened to these child stars”. Some of these are genuine but often when someone clicks on the ad they don’t get what they expected but are directed to a website where the owner has paid to get more people viewing their site.
Clickbait is annoying and time-wasting but harmless. More of a problem are “bots”. These are pieces of software that mimic people in viewing websites and clicking on links.
Using these techniques, your website may get lots of traffic, but it could be largely other computers and is very unlikely to be people wanting to do business with you. This is largely a waste of your money.
If you don’t go down the route of buying cheap traffic then you shouldn’t normally have to worry about fake traffic.
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