The Brunlea-Web - serving internet-based small businesses

Let me tell you a story of a traffic exchange mistake ... one that I made myself last night.

There was a new product that I wanted to promote. I opened up my PageSwirl rotator and added the site to one of the rotating product groups, all neatly packed up with a ProTrackerPlus tracking link. Next thing was to look at the relative priority to be given to each of the seven sites now being shown on that rotator. (That's a great thing about PageSwirl; you can not only set each item as enabled or disabled and therefore switch sites temporarily off and on without deleting them; you can also set them as normal, high or highest priority).

So, I temporarily disabled four of the products, set two of the remaining three to lower priority and put the new one on "Highest". Ready to go? No, not quite!

Next thing is to check the traffic exchanges on which that rotator is being shown, so back I go to ProTrackerPlus to check the display statistics. You see, I don't enter the PageSwirl URL itself into the traffic exchanges. I enter it with a tracking link and now I can see at a glance where it is being shown. I call up the statistics for this rotator and for the current day. This particular rotator I try to keep running at around 7,500 displays per month, spread across six or eight exchanges, and having good access to an overall stats panel is important. The new ProTrackerPlus now gives my that. Yes, it's running happily on four exchanges where I know I have a good stock of credits, but two of the others (let's call them A and B) show no hits today, so I open up their control panels. They're out of credits.

There's no time to do any surfing tonight so I quickly buy 1,000 credits on A and 500 on B using my PayPal account. That should be enough for a few days. I assign 250 credits from the 1,000 to be used on the rotator display on A, leaving 750 for future use. The other exchange doesn't allow me to assign its 500 to a specific site or timeframe, but I only have that one rotator site listed there so that's OK.

Or is it OK? As things turn out, No! I reckon that after a year of fairly intensive use of traffic exchanges I know what I'm doing. But I got it wrong this time. This morning I checked the overnight stats. The rotator's sites have been shown almost 650 times overnight. That's more than I expected. What's been happening. I look at the line for Exchange A; yes, that's been shown just over fifty times to thirty-five different people, and that's about what I would expect for that particular exchange. But what about B? Wow! Almost the whole of my newly bought 500 credits have gone overnight, seen by only a hundred and seventy people. - less than a 35% "unique rate"; and worse, not a single click through from any of them. What a waste.

My mistake? I should have remembered that this particular exchange devours credits like lightning, and also has a very low response rate. I'd meant to stop using it after a recent test, but in the rush last night had forgotten.

Test, test and test the exchanges for your particular kind of promotion, and then act on the results. The traffic exchange league tables such as Hoopla are very useful, but they should only be your starting point. Check performance for yourself, and especially remember that a service which delivers well for one type of business may be disastrous for another. When an exchange consistently fails to deliver, DROP IT. Don't waste your clicking time or your money. (You might also want politely to tell the exchange owner why you're leaving; it may help him if he's the kind of person who values constructive customer feedback, and you can return after a while to see whether he's improved his performance).

Find exchanges which allow YOU to control the use of YOUR credits. Ideally, you'll want to be able to reserve credits for future use, not have them all gobbled up at one go; to assign the number YOU wish to be used on which sites and when; and to set the maximum number to be used per day. There are many traffic exchanges which provide these control facilities and one, EasyHits4u, even adds the facility to choose which days of the week each of your sites is displayed.

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