My tests of Revisitors.com consist of buying the 2,500 visitor package for the category Income Opportunties and sending it to a Marketing Pond splash page, and their “massive website exposure” package of 20,000 visitors and sending it to this blog.
My metrics for the Marketing Pond campaign are signups, and for the blog are RSS subscribers.
I started receiving traffic within 24 hours, as promised. Initially, the traffic has been on the order of 100 visitors a day. According to the website, this should ramp up over time. All traffic shows in my logs as being referred from IP address 70.85.216.247.
For the Marketing Pond splash page, after about 170 visitors, there have been 0 click throughs on the splash page. I’m using the TEToolbox, a free service which tracks this for me. That splash page normally runs at a 5% click through rate in traffic exchanges. However, the amount of traffic is low enough yet that this may or may not be significant.
For the blog itself, after about 200 visitors, RSS subscribers increased by 4. This is also inconclusive, as the normal fluctuation of Feedburner stats can raise or lower the number that much as subscribers either check or don’t check the feed that particular day. As the number of visitors increases, I’d expect to see this number raise above the level of noise if the traffic is converting.
The bounce rate for the blog was running at about 50% before the campaign started, and jumped to 75% when traffic started to flow. It’s been dropping 10% per day while the traffic continues to arrive, and is back to normal levels now. Similarly the average time on the site dropped considerably, to about a minute and a half when the campaign started, and has now risen to about five and a half minutes. It would seem that the visitors are finding the blog interesting, despite the lack of an appreciable jump in RSS subscribers. This suggests the traffic is real people, and not automated hits.
So, it’s too early to say whether the traffic converts, but in all other respects the service works as advertised.
Signing up as an affiliate of Revisitors.com is free, and I see nothing in their terms of service that keep you from using your own affiliate link for your own orders. In addition, when you have a campaign running, you can add visitors to the campaign for a 20% discount. They’re basically giving you your affiliate commission as a discount rather than as cash back.
Update: you do not receive credit for your own sales through your referral link. The sale shows up, but has a value of $0. So you pay the full price for the initial traffic, and once your campaign is running get the 20% off for adding traffic.
And if anyone reading this arrived here through a link other than one to Online Opportunity, let us know. I’d love to hear from you, and you’re just in time to enter the July comment contest.
Jay –
I am currently in Japan on a 3 hour layover as I try to make it back to Texas from this business trip.
Thanks for the update, it is good to see the jump in traffic for you, and I hope it leads to click throughs soon.
Great idea with the plug for your contest, but I would throw the plug and the welcome to the new vistors at the top of the article. Might have more umph. Also, mention the prize money, that would be an attention grabber.
Again, thanks for the update.
What prize money? I thought the July contest was for a pair of links in an ezine article. Am I mistaken?
Did I hear “prize money” from one of the commentators above? Jay please clarify whether it’s the ezine article link or some prize money or both (hope so) for the prize?
The contest is definitely just for the ezine article, not for money. My last contest was for money, so that may be where the comment about prize money came from.
Sorry for the confusion with the mention of prize money. I had stayed up until 3:00 A.M. and had to leave the hotel at 6:00 A.M to catch my flight to Japan. So I was not thinking clearly.
My apologies.
How has the traffic been going since the 13th?
Hi Tyson, traffic has been ongoing, conversion statistics have gone down. I’ll get an update out soon with exact numbers.
I am sorry that I went to revisitors.com through the link in this post instead of the 2nd update – i notice you have the affiliate link there. I purchased 5k visitors to a homemade for adsense site I put up about 7 months ago. I am curious how google sees the referred traffic coming from 1 spot. I will update everyone with a post on my blog halfway through the campaign.
[quote post=”256″]I am sorry that I went to revisitors.com through the link in this post instead of the 2nd update – i notice you have the affiliate link there.[/quote]
Hi Tyson, the affiliate link was in both. I was playing around with some Javascript link cloaking in this post, but finally decided it wasn’t worth the trouble. I saw your purchase come through, thanks!
I hope the traffic does well for you, and will be looking forward to your analysis of the results.
I am doing a case study so thank you for your info it has been helping me.
[I signed up with Revisitors about 2 weeks ago; however, I am starting to feel a tad skeptical. I am getting alot of traffic to my jewelry website
http://www.buyrightjewelry.com/sassycreations
however, I am thinking these are autosent. I check my sitemeter consistently (anyone can check it, it is at the bottom of that page-just click on it) Alot of the traffic appears duplicate and they are not even on the page for more than seconds. I am hoping that I am wrong because I really trusted this site. I guess only time will tell. If things don’t get better, I will cancel my account with them after this month
Check out the site meter on the home page of http://www.buyrightjewelry.com/sassycreations and let me know what you think
Tks in advance
Hi Michelle, thanks for letting us know your experience so far! I’m still leaning toward the service being legit, but that the right way to use it isn’t sending traffic to the home page of a web site. This has to be considered totally untargeted (and, in one sense, hijacked) traffic, so offering a free gift with an email signup should be a good bet (and the page should acknowledge in some way that the visitor ended up somewhere other than where they expected).
I keep meaning to do a test along those lines, but just haven’t gotten around to it yet. I’ve done enough tests at sending traffic to various home and affiliate pages to know that that approach isn’t working.
Jay
Thanks for the reply. I am new to this so any advice (as long as legit) is always very appreciated by me.
Michelle
Michelle, I had the thought that your “free gift” might be a discount coupon, if your store supports those. Maybe a page that says something like, “Where is this? The site you tried to go to doesn’t exist any more! Sorry about that, but here’s a 20% coupon you can use here to get some truly awesome jewelry.” Keep it light, acknowledging that they ended up somewhere different than they expected.
Then direct some Revisitors.com traffic to it and see if you get any sales using that discount coupon.
I still think it’d work better offering a totally free gift for an email submit, but maybe if they’re already clicking a jewelry related link they’ll bite on a discount.
If you give it a try, let us know how it works out.