Due to the programs that are now available for "faking" unique hits (i-faker, RankingBooster, etc...), would you buy advertising from a website based on their stats? Or their Google ranking? Or...? What is the biggest deciding factor for you?

I see people selling advertising for sites that are just a couple of months old, but somehow have thousands of unique hits per month :eek: but a PR of 1/10 - 2/10, and sometimes 0/10.

I realize they can do advertising campaigns but again... :eek: Those are temporary. And I personally question the "target audience" as well if they are "true" hits to the site (and how long they stay).:rolleyes:

Anyway, what is your input here?

Not to mention they spam to get those 1000's of hits. :rolleyes:

By the way, Good Question ... All I can say is look for a 'known' reliable site. By known, I mean ones you have seen on WHT or others have talked about. Again ... reliable sites -- look for reviews.

Their is a very fine line on advertising. Most won't give their trade secrets away.

But like you said earlier, stay away from those 1000+ hits and 1 PR sites / few months old. Look for established websites.

I say always track your ads. If you see that one of them is not performing well don't continue investing in it. Other than that experimenting with different ads is not necessarily a bad thing. It'll help you find a few sources that will work or you out of hundreds that won't.
As for un-targeted visitors, I'd stay away from them.

Eugene

My site is pretty new, I have comparatively less unique visitors only a 3 digit number, but yet these visitors have given me over 29,000 page views.

There are numerous programs available that drive targetted traffic to your site and these too contribute in upping the unique visitors but not the actual activity of the site.... on a sidenote, do these programs have a good convertion rate?

IMO, PR is not a deciding factor...nowadays if you want a good PR , you just have to go around emailing email for a link exchange and you form a chain that way and get a good PR.

I think a factor that would play a role in a newly opened site is how many times its bookmarked.....

I think it should be a combination of factors that determine ad price.

link value (this can be a ton if they have the right kind of site with a high link popularity)

and traffic it will directly send you

and exposure to a new audience


usually you should check many things to see the credibility levels of running an ad with various sites. (glance at PageRank, look through their backlinks, search what other people are saying about them, contact prior ad testimonials, verify their links are parsing link value)

there are lots of things to consider.

I have very few visitors also but then again I have not been pushing ads and such. I have noticed that when i work on my site that i jack up the number of hit by at least a few 1000. so i always keep that in mind.