Monday, October 23, 2006

"Pop-Under" Ads: Nothing More than SPAM!

Getting traffic onto your website can always be a tough feat. The thought of paying for it seems good, but really, is it quality (or ethical?)

Traffic! Traffic! Traffic! I love traffic! Traffic is what makes an online internet campaign really work. If no one comes to your website, then I will guarentee you that you will not be selling a thing. (It does not take a rocket scientist to understand that theory!). Multiplying one million by zero still equals zero! Don't get me wrong: There is a lot more than just traffic that is required to be successful as an internet marketer. But at the end of the day, when all is optimized and you have a great website, traffic is what proportionally drives sales and income.

So to what lengths do you go to get traffic? A little over a month ago, I found that the traffic to my site had "plateaued". I had tried "Free-For-All" websites in the past, but that turned out to be a big waste of time (and I ended up giving out my email address to someone who ending up selling it to SPAMMERS). So I thought I would look into "targeted paid traffic" websites.

At first glance, these "targeted paid traffic" programs look very promising. For about $100, they guarentee that your website is shown to more than 50,000 targeted recipients! That equates to about 0.2 cents per click in PPC terms. What a deal! I continued to read up on it and it explains that the service works as follows:

While people are surfing the internet, the program will detect which topics the person is currently looking for. If the topic is relevant, the program will place a "Pop-Under" ad on their computer. Most of you are aware of "Pop-Up" ads: They are those annoying ads that keep opening up on your screen for no apparent reason. If you are like me, you have a pop-up blocker installed on your browser. Pop-Under ads appear discretely under the current browser that is open. When the person closes the browser, the Pop-under add is present. The "claim" of this being effective is two-fold:

1) It targets the user by creating Pop-Under ads only at relevant times.

2) Most pop-up blockers do not detect these yet.

So, before reading the fine details of this program, I joined anyway. What a mess! Here is a list of all the bad things that happened:

1) The program was telling me that it was creating about 1000 page views per day, but my statistics where showing about 2 visitors per day from targeted traffic service. I spoke with the representative and she explains that the window does appear 1000 times, but that does not mean the person will actually look at it. (HUH?)

2) Of the total of 12 people and 5000 pageviews that appeared, 10 of the visitors had no quality (meaning, they spent less than 5 seconds on my website). That equates to about $1.20 per (poor) quality click. Yikes!

3) This is nothing more than annoying Spyware and SPAMMING at its finest. The software that determines relevancy is user-unknown spyware. These pop-under windows are nothing more than SPAM. I just spent (a very worthwhile!) $40 on BidDefender to remove this garbage from my own computer.

I suppose that the Pop-Under ad did create some attention to someone who viewed it. This person wrote to tell me how upset they were that I created this window on his computer and they he will never buy my products again. So, at the end of the day (before I actually wrote the company and asked for my pro-rated money back), I spent $10 on 12 nothing clicks and one customer who will never visit my website again. I would say this was money very poorly spent!

- Matthew Bredel

To learn more about making money online of ways to develop internet traffic, Visit TheWebReviewer.com today!