Is adfly worth it? This month I trialled advertising on adf.ly CPM advertising for a website I own. Here is my review of adfly:
Advertising spend: $5.
I ordered the worldwide option. After signup, payment and entering my website details I was taken to the account screen which showed the website was pending an admin check. i guess adfly do this for all sites now after spam and virus complaints from users and affiliates.
72 hours. Thats how long It said I needed to wait for the website verification check to complete according to the adfly notification. Luckily I guess they were feeling fresh and it was done in about 6 hours.
Now here’s the interesting part.
For my $5 I was to get 5,000 visitors on the worldwide package. According to the adfly traffic statistics, The website received approximately 5,300. Sweet, right? Well…not quite.
Google analytics says 950.
So $5 for 950 verifiable uniques. Oops.
So how about location? Were they prime juicy US visitors? In a word, no. Thailand, brazil, malaysia, etc. were prominent and the vast majority of visitors sent were from developing countries (viewable in google analytics).
So to sum up; approximately 1000 visitors from third world countries viewing your website for at least 5 seconds for $5.
Conclusion: I will not be using adf.ly again.
Adf.ly warning: if you do decide to use adfly; after signup and during the pending check of your website, remember to PAUSE your campaign! This way you control when it starts, else it will start as soon as the site verification is done. Which could be anytime.
Also, adfly links do need javascript and flash set to on for the linked site to unlock once the 5 seconds is up. However, some adblock software, for example noscript on firefox, can still block specific tracking scripts, like google analytics.
Edit update: here’s the raw data from google analytics for adfly worldwide from approx 950 visitors:
Brazil, 185
Vietnam, 101
Egypt, 98
Hungary, 69
Malaysia, 47
Romania, 36
Germany, 29
Chile, 26
Thailand, 26
Pakistan, 17
Bad traffic is bad!
Edit 2: it took approximately 20 minutes for adfly to send the alleged 5000 visitors. So make sure your server is ready.
Is adfly a scam? I do not believe adfly itself is a scam. However, adf.ly is a payment service and link middleman that is used by pirates on forums to earn money from linking to bad files. There are also programmers who make software to manipulate adf.ly to generate false positives so they get paid. I do not believe adfly is complicit in this action. I believe Adf.ly is not a scam, but I would not use it again.
I used Adfly, and it was waste of time.
Thank you for your review.
.
Can you give some details Kei. Pageviews, visitors sent, just some numbers would be good. Thanks.
Adf.Ly is a piece of shoe for both advertisers and publishers! I tried the advertiser package and had the same experience as you. And then tried the publisher sign up and same thing happened. Yesterday for instance on my publisher account, my google blog stats and analytics page says i had 10000 visitors (7500 UNIQUE) on my 2 blogs, but adf.Ly only shows 2000 considering i had the WEBSITE ENTRY SCRIPT installed !! & my earning were $1 and some change!! THEY SHOULD BE BANNED FROM THE INTERNET AND PUT TO JAIL!!
I’m closing the account now!! THE WORST EXPERIENCE EVER! A JOKE!.
I like this.
Thank you for your review of our service. We always welcome feedback.
I would like to invite you to try another $5 test (at our expense of course) but this time with a Max. Daily Budget set, to spread the traffic out over at least 24 hours.
If your campaign was over in 20 minutes, it is quite likely over loaded your server. If this happened, your website would not be responsive and your Google Analytics code would not have been loaded.
Good review, but it would’ve bee more helpful to readers if you told us what kind of website you were trying to promote. You obviously know what kind of people use adfly, but if your website isn’t something the targeted audience like, then its not going to grab anyone’s attention. Next time try promoting something for free and see how that goes, and pay for US traffic only. If you pay for worldwide traffic, then that’s exactly what you’re going to get. So why expect many US visitors. Of course you’re going to see poor results if you’re promoting an english website to non-english people. Just a thought.
US traffic was close to $4 for a thousand. Too risky if it is the same junk traffic.
Hi Kia,
Try to advertise in the States, I think you’ll wait until Christmas or Eastern to have your campaign started. The booster price actually rised to 1o$/1000, and even then you have to wait. Regarding the product, mine was quite for a really large niche and I offered a free gift (ok an ebook). But look at my stats in my reply.
Thanks for the review. But I believe that you can’t conclude yet because of the worldwide option you choose. Maybe try targeting specific countries and see what happens. Also, conversion will depend on the kind of site you’re promoting.
Or better still, promote the same site with adfly and compare it with another CPM network.
Can anyone name some other CPM advertising networks?.
I have a question! Can adf.Ly help to be on the first page of google?.
That’s not what ad fly is for, so I would say using adf.Ly has no effect on Google ranking. If Google has a way of looking deep into adf.Ly links or through google analytics on your site then it might even have a negative impact on your ranking. But that’s jut a guess.
I really think it’s a scam for small online marketers.
I paid for 25.000 worldwide and 10.000 in selected 5 countries 47$
For the ww campaing they did it in 14 hrs (instead of 1). But god sake if they’ve done in in 1 hour my hostgator server would have crashed (it really didn’t show my pages during at least 2 hours).
For the selected countries, the start was very, very long (even today it isn’t finished. I did have to pay their booster ptice (min+ 20% – 100%) to leave the waiting list.
Final result: Officially until today 19.024 visits (30.000 paid) – 58 subscribers, 8 confirmes, 6 unsubscribed = 7.25$ per confirmed subscriber. If this isn’t scam??.
Thank you for your honest appraisal and review of adfly. I won’t waste money on it because it sounds like all the other services I’ve tried to drive traffic to my online store.
Who needs bad traffic anyway since a good business person spends a large amount of time trying to weed out that type of traffic.