Detailed Review of Trafficzap Exchange
Overview of Service Trafficzap exchange is a popunder-based traffic exchange with a 1:2 ratio. In other words, you show two of their popups on your site, and your popup appears once on someone else's site. Unlike a popup exchange, you don't provide Trafficzap with an advertisement; they simply popup your homepage, or whatever page you define. This means that each popup from Trafficzap counts as a unique visit to your site. In addition to credits earned through the traffic exchange, Trafficzap also has an affiliate program which gives you 10% of the credits earned by anyone you refer to the service. About Our Experiment We tested the Trafficzap service over the course of 3 months (March, April, and May 2006). After registration, the Trafficzap popup code was placed on a testpage. The service was configured to direct visitors to the Great Traffic Experiment homepage. Traffic on the testpage and traffic on the GTE homepage was then measured, and the data compared to statistics from Trafficzap to confirm their claims and ensure accurate traffic reporting. The results of the experiment appear below. Whenever possible, we have made efforts to document our data with screenshots. Some shots have been cropped to remove identifying information about the testpage, but none of the numbers have been altered in any way. We have also tried to be thorough in our reporting; not all sections of this review will be relevant to everyone, so feel free to skip around. Interface Before we get into the nitty gritty data, here's some information about the inner workings of the exchange: Traffizap got us up and running quite fast. We registered at 5:23, and our site was approved and on the exchange by 5:32. The Trafficzap publisher interface is fairly simple:
The Members Area contains the code that you paste into your site, the Statistics area (shown above) provides information about impressions earned vs. impressions served, and the Affiliates area provides data on your affiliates and the impressions they've earned for you. Like many exchanges, Trafficzap offers you the option to buy credits directly from them (the Traffic Blast feature). We were able to login without hassle, and the stats are updated often enough. Although it's not terribly detailed, the interface serves its purpose, so no major problems there. Popup Format The Trafficzap popup appears behind the page that generates it, loading as soon as the page loads. It's a full size window, though Trafficzap includes a small frame at the top:
When visitors click on this frame and register with Trafficzap, they are credited to your account as referrals. This feature is nice, as it guarantees a certain number of referrals without any extra effort. The full size window is also a plus, as it allows you to display any page of your site without worrying about the dimensions. Traffic Reporting Here are the statistics that Trafficzap provided over the course of our three month experiment:
Based on our server logs, our test page recorded 10,048 raw views (the image below is pasted together from 3 reports, one from each month):
However, that's not the number that Trafficzap is interested in; to prevent clickfraud and wasted impressions, they only count 1 impression for each unique visitor:
So, dividing the total raw views by our testpage's average unique visits/visitor:
We get 1048 visits/2.21 = about 4500 unique visitors. Trafficzap credited us with 4,075. Based on this, Trafficzap is reporting 91% of the actual traffic received. This is a reasonable number, and it indicates that Trafficzap isn't cheating us out of impressions--the remaining 9% is probably the result of popupblockers, pages that failed to load, or the difference between the average visits/visitor and the exact number. Traffic Delivery Looking back at the Exchange Statistics above, Trafficzap shows that it has delivered 2035 impressions to our site, as per its 1:2 ratio. Here are our server logs (again, these have been coped and pasted from 3 separate reports):
Based on the logs, we received 1902 impressions from the exchange (unlike Trafficzap, we're just interested in raw visits, not uniques). This indicates that Trafficzap is delivering the promised impressions--their numbers and our numbers differ by only 6%. Customer Service Many site promotion services suffer from a lack of customer service, but when it comes to basic questions, Trafficzap came through for us. When we had an issue with an affiliate registration, they responded to our email in about an hour--on a sunday. Commendable response time for any service, not to mention a free one. Issues Overall, we didn't have any major complaints with Trafficzap. It would be nice to have an interface with more details (like a day to day breakdown of impressions), but for a free exchange, Trafficzap delivers what it has to. The Bottom Line
While the quality of traffic from any traffic exchange is questionable, the Trafficzap service itself is a sound one--it makes reasonable promises and consistently delivers on them. More Info You can sign up for the exchange here: http://www.trafficzap.com/exchange If you would like to join Trafficzap as our affiliate, please click here: If you'd like to be informed via email when we publish new Detailed Reviews, sign up for our newsletter If you have any questions, email feedback@thegreattrafficexperiment.com If you found this review useful, please consider linking to it or telling others about it.
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