I have some interesting table talk for the next time you’re speaking with your media buyer. Ask them, “hey, where does that sites traffic come from anyways?”
This question is sure to illicit an uncomfortable silence, or perhaps a brief pause for a made up answer. Most media buyers do their job utilizing systems like Comscore Media Metrix. This service costs in excess of $40,000 a year to use, so most people don’t have the luxury of browsing through the system.
To spare you too much drab, there’s tons of useful demographic info in there, that is if you want to believe that a ranking system based on spyware is an honest source. Here’s a a sad truth, Comscore, a publicly traded corporation is sadly misleading us all. Providing a questionable service that is easily manipulated with spyware/ adware traffic. Advertisers beware, you might be spending a ton of cash on nothing.
You might be wondering, “how can I prevent this from happening”. It’s actually fairly simple. You can request publishers provide third party verification or direct verification of traffic sources, with time on site and bounce rates. Alternatively, you can use systems like Quantcast to pre-screen your sites before making a media buy.
Quantcast offers a beta tool for media planners and buyers. While it is still not an accepted norm in regards to site metrics, it is the only honest and free measuring tool available. The
Media Planner Beta tool has a powerful function called “similar audience”. This is, in essence, a tool that shows you where a sites traffic comes from.
So here’s an explanation. Say you start by looking at
CNN. First plug them in, and collect those tastey metrics, then start clicking around. When you come to similar audience, you will note that CNN shares a similar audience to sights like
MSNBC,
Finance.Yahoo.com, etc etc.
Basically, a sites with news and information affinities will populate the similar audience area. Now, plug another random site, perhaps one of the million online video sites, and see what it says. So if you’re
CollegeHumor, for instance, your similar audience would be something like Maxim, Heavy, Kontraband, etc. These are real sites sending visitors to Collegehumor.
Now, if you’re buying click traffic from bogus sites and third tier networks, then that’s when the really interesting info comes out, or disturbing, entirely dependent on how much money you wasted advertising on a site with a bogus audience. You will see things like gambling.com, or poker-play-russis.ru, health-netdoctor.com, whqwer.biz and so on. These are all crap traffic sites, where people purchase low-cost filler traffic.
This audience augments the metrics of a site on Comscore and makes media buyers waste millions. Worse yet, much of it is forced click-traffic, peoples hi-jacked pc’s sending them to sites.
So I guess this is where you should begin checking out your publishers traffic, making sure you’re not being taken for a ride.