What is fake traffic?
Fake traffic for a website is web traffic generated by click farms, bots, or software that isn't from a real person or authentic web session. Fake traffic is mainly used to create artificially inflated numbers and revenue by making a monetizable audience of the site. It will always appear greater than reality.
Identifying Fake Traffic
There are a few different factors to pay attention to when trying to spot fake traffic. You will typically want to use a traffic tracking tool to see the signals. Google Analytics is a great place to start the identification of fake traffic though it is not so simple as even Google is fooled sometimes. Here are some basic things to look for:
1. Check the source of the traffic. If you're seeing a lot of traffic coming from a single source, ip address, or geographical area, it's likely that it's fake.
2. Take a look at the bounce rate. If the bounce rate is extremely high (>90%), it's a good indication that the traffic is not real. An extremely low number could also mean fake traffic as well (<20%).
3. Check the time on the website. If you're seeing a lot of traffic coming from a specific time period and isn't coming in any consistent way, it's likely that it's fake
4. Ensure that the variation of pages or session path is normal. Generally per session, visitors will read four or five pages.
Fake Traffic For Testing
Generating fake traffic can be useful to test your site and verify your analytics tools. If one just want hits a website, a simple curl or wget request from the command line or a code script would be perfect. That said,if you just want to hit Google Analytics or another analytics provider, it will harder. Then, you may have to use a headless browser like phantomJS/Headless Chrome.
Either way, generating fake traffic can be an important step in making sure that your website is working and that you are tracking your website events properly
Buying Fake Traffic
There are a lot of people out there who are looking to buy fake traffic. Why? Because they think it will help them in some way. Maybe they think it will help them get more views on their website or blog. Maybe they think it will help them rank higher in search engines. Whatever the reason, there are people out there who are looking to buy fake traffic.
Webmasters and website owners are always keen on improving their site traffic metrics. Sometimes organic traffic can take a long time to build and may require a short term boost to get there faster. To buy fake traffic or generate fake traffic, the company owners will want to consider some matters before risking hurting their business.
For example, there are websites that will sell you visitors that come from bots. These are not real people that are actually interested in what you have to say or offer. Another way that people buy fake traffic is by using PPC (pay-per-click) advertising to drive traffic to their website or blog. The problem with this is that you are paying for these visitors and they may not even stay on your site for more than a few seconds. So, you are essentially wasting your money.
Some people think that it will help them rank higher in search engines. This is because when you have more traffic to your site, it looks like your site is more popular and search engines will take notice.
However, this is not necessarily true. Search engines are getting better at detecting fake traffic and they will penalize you if the site visit doesn't look like a real user session (high bounce rate, low dwell time, etc.)
Another reason people buy fake traffic is because they think it will help them increase their conversion rate. This may be true to a certain extent but if most of the visitors to your site are not real, they are not going to convert into customers or subscribers. So, is buying fake traffic even a good idea?
Advantages Of Fake Traffic
It really depends on your goals, but there can be a few advantages to buying fake traffic. If you are trying to increase your search engine ranking, you will need a special kind of traffic, not just visitors coming to your site for a few seconds. You will need the visit to involve searching for your keywords, clicking on your site, and staying on your site for a little bit of time. Doing this guarantees higher quality traffic and improves your Click-through-rate (CTR), a major factor in your SEO rankings.
As a result you want to make sure you can control the traffic you are buying, and configure it in this manner . We call this type of fake traffic, "seo traffic" or traffic generated to improve your search engine ranking. There are very few services that offer this level of control, one of which is SearchSEO (which you can try for free).
It is important to not rely on generating fake traffic for a long time even seo traffic. Your should only use these services to improve your visibility and/or ranking long enough to figure out other organic strategies, content, and link-building. When there are such big players on the internet, you need something like this to compete against the big guys.
Conclusion
Overall, buying fake website traffic can have some advantages, but you have to be careful. With the right service, it can help to increase the number of visitors to a site, as well as the amount of time that they spend on it and as a result improve your ranking on a results page. However, a lot of fake traffic is easily detectable given its low quality, so look out for the factors we talked about earlier.