Bulk Adult Traffic
Buying traffic and making it work for you is a skill, not a silver bullet. The first thing you will need is a good landing page to send it to, rather than a paysite tour, such as the following:
I have some paysites, well, 18 of them. Some of them do really well, and some of them don't. Let's talk about one of the good ones:
I have one that converts about 1:270 on front page hits. So, if I send 10/k of traffic to it, I make about 40 sales, give or take, right? Wrong!
When you buy bulk traffic, you're normally buying "forced blind traffic." This means that they don't know where they're going, and maybe didn't want to go there in the first place.
Conversions of 1:10,000 on this type of traffic may not be all that bad. Actually, I personally feel that 1:10,000 is on the optimistic side, so let's use 1:15,000 as our basis instead, and take a look at the numbers...
Let's say that Mr. & Mrs. Site Owners buys 100,000 hits for $250.
We now know the cost of the traffic is $2.50 per thousand.
Let's assume the cost of the membership to their paysite is $30.00.
At 1:15,000 Mr. and Mrs. have spent $37.50 to gain a member.
Since that member is worth $30.00 and the cost of the member was $37.50, we're now at a loss.
Well, how good is your site? I can't answer that for you. Do you update a lot, have good content and take good care of your members? Probably so (or I would hope) if you plan to continually operate a good program. I retain for about 2.5+ months on average. I'm happy with that. This takes into account the trial cancels as well as the monthly recurring members.
Considering I just spent $37.50 to get that member, at 2.5 months, I've billed him for $75.00 total, minus whatever my per-member overhead is, so I just made a nice profit on him.
Pay Per Click Traffic
Pay Per Click (PPC) text listings are bid listings in which, you the advertiser, have complete control over how much you want to spend and where you want to be listed and what keywords trigger your listing. You only pay when a surfer actually clicks on your listing and visits your site. The following are two case studies of PPC listings at Sex.com.
Case Study #1: Advertiser is an affiliate of a targeted fetish site:
| Average price paid for 6 search phrases purchased at Sex.Com | $0.045 |
| Normal conversion ratio of web site from fetish (1 in x) | 350 |
| Average price for a new customer using Sex.Com traffic | $15.75 |
| Price charged to surfer (Monthly Cost) | $29.95 |
| Share of site price to affiliate advertiser | 60% |
| Length of customer retention (in months) | 3.1 |
| Value of customer before costs | $55.71 |
| Less: cost paid to Sex.Com for targeted traffic | $15.75 |
| Profit from purchasing traffic from Sex.Com | $39.96 |
| % Profit on investment | 253% |
Case Study #2: Advertiser owns a general purpose site:
| Average price for generic traffic at Sex.Com (Run of Site banners, Hot Zone, pop ups) | $0.060 |
| Normal conversion ratio of web site from general traffic (1 in x) | 800 |
| Average price for a new customer using Sex.Com traffic | $48.00 |
| Value of exit traffic for those who do not purchase content | $0.015 |
| Price charged to surfer | $29.95 |
| Length of customer retention (in months) | 1.8 |
| Average value of customer before costs | $53.91 |
| Add: value of exit traffic for those who did not purchase memberships | $11.99 |
| Less: cost paid to Sex.Com for traffic | $48.00 |
| Profit from purchasing traffic from Sex.Com | $17.90 |
| % on investment return | 37% |
You can find a similar comparison of PPC campaigns and Adwords from Google here.
So, what have we learned from all these figures? Provided you have the ability to provide visitors with what they're looking for, purchased traffic can give a much needed boost to your sales revenue without any additional marketing efforts. Balance and calculate carefully what you get at the end of the day. Also, it goes without saying that without a good product, no amount of traffic is going to help you.