Don’t always believe the stats web publishers quote when trying to persuade you to advertise on their sites – not all web publishers are honest!
Firstly let me point out categorically that I NEVER employ this (or any other underhand) methods. The stats quoted here come from a project we have under development and this was done purely to illustrate this article.
Within 48 hours I took a site from 16 pages to over 9,000 page views – which make for a very nice looking chart to present to a potential client.
If I was trying to sell you advertising, it would look pretty impressive wouldn’t it? Really, it’s not. It’s a very simple deception technique used by some unscrupulous web site owners.
How did I do it?
Simple – I bought the hits from a website – for $9.99. There are a many sites where you can do this, and on some you can even set a daily rate, which if you are using this to be deceptive which you can control to show an upward trend.
The thing to note – is that hits from this type of source are worthless. I wouldn’t show the potential client of course – I’d just have a nice looking bar chart with spectacular numbers – in this particular instance the vast majority came from China, so even if they were real hits, rather than automated or users tricked onto the site by some means – they would not be able to read your content anyway!
There’s four reason people might use this…
1. They are stupid, and believe they are buying genuine, worthwhile, human visitors
2. To improve their rank on the Alexa website (or similar sites) that measure sites by traffic rather than more thorough means
3. An SEO company can use tools like this to deceive less knowledgeable clients and impress them with improved performance
4. Most commonly, a small web site owner hoping to sell ad space can create charts like the one I have described to deceive prospects. Picture a site with 200 visitors a day (or even less), if the owner was to ‘buy’ 1000 hits a day they have a chart which has 1200 hits a day (and they only need to do this for a week or a month occasionally to get a nice print out for their sales folder. Simple, but very effective to a potential client with little or no understanding of the Internet.
So – next time someone comes knocking on your door selling advertising – don’t take their impressive statistics at face value.
Here’s a couple of things that you should be aware of…
1. The term hits means files loaded which includes images and other files – each page can contain many items. For instance a hundred hits a day could simply be a couple of pages viewed with lots of images on!
2. Unique visitors, is exactly what it says – as is page loads. The ratio of visitors to page loads is crucial – lets say a site gets 1000 visitors a day and 1000 page loads, it means that anyone who his getting to the site is jumping off right away, they are not reading the content. If its 1000 visitors to 10,000 page loads – obviously users are finding the content useful as they are reading 10 pages each.
3. Ask where the hits come from geographically, and ask for evidence – does it reflect your target audience?
4. Ask where the inbound links in come from – they should be from quality sites – not “I’ll click yours if you click mine” type sites like Twitter!
It’s a simple thing. Statistics, charts and spurious numbers look great – but they can be formed and twisted to say whatever the person sat in front of you wants to say if they are less than scrupulous!
Ask questions! Even better, have a look at who’s advertising already and talk to them!
And the big question is – have you ever heard of the site before someone walked through your door or that email arrived in your inbox? Chances are if you haven’t, neither have your potential customers.
Alan Gandy is a seasoned Internet Marketing professional having set up his web design business in 1993 – in addition to his web design Alan has had a successful career as a marketing and business consultant with small and medium sized businesses, as well as owning and operating a number of other small businesses himself.
Since 2006 Alan has focussed on web design for clients, and creating a number of successful content driven sites and blogs. Alan has an intense dislike of the digital pollution created by the recent prevalence of the ‘get rich quick’ and ‘make money from blogging’ culture which he covers on one of his blogs. His writing is often pointed and irreverent, and he has set up a forum to help new bloggers where he offers his experience and advice for free.
