Max Visits Review: Our Experience and Conversions
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Max Visits may sound like some kind of web traffic version of a MST3K hero name, but it’s actually just the name of a site where you can purchase website traffic. They work directly with advertisers and publishers, they allow resellers, and they have an affiliate program. First, let’s take a look at the service itself and what it offers. Then we’ll cover reviews, our own experiences, and a final verdict.
What Max Visits Offers
When you first visit their site, you’re greeted with a large counter proclaiming that they have provided their customers with over 1.6 billion visitors. This is roughly equivalent to a full month’s worth of Facebook’s usership, so it’s not insignificant. Of course, that’s their totality, not their monthly traffic.
The traffic that Max Visits uses, they claim, is 100% legitimate, targeted traffic. They have a broad network of sites they operate in various ways to send hits towards their advertisers. This traffic comes from:
- IFrames in existing websites. Whether these are hidden and invisible, or broadly visible as advertising, I don’t know.
- Pop-unders on otherwise legitimate websites.
- Specifically adult-targeted traffic, typically coming from a network of adult websites.
- Traffic coming from expired domains; think domain parking, or expired domains picked up and registered then filled with ads to soak up residual traffic from the site before it’s deindexed.
- Alexa-specific traffic, that is, a specific network of people who have the Alexa toolbar installed and whose presence boosts your Alexa ranking.
- Traffic coming from email marketing.
How much of this is spam versus placement in legitimate mailing lists, I have no way to tell you.
According to their marketing, Max Visits has an algorithm that sorts incoming visitors based on the category of the site they visit, and sends traffic towards their clients based on those categories. It’s like basic interest targeting, in broad industry terms.
Ordering From Max Visits
First of all, Max Visits has a free trial. In order to claim this trial, however, you need to take some specific steps. First, and most damning in my mind, is you need to write an article or blog post about their service. It has to be unique content and it has to be positive. This is a problem, because it’s essentially the site bribing people for positive reviews. I’ll add the disclaimer here; this post is NOT written for that purpose.
They do have an alternative, which is to provide them with a backlink… if your site has a PageRank of 1 or higher. This is also problematic and I’m surprised they haven’t been bashed to oblivion by Penguin by now.
The free trial consists of 5,000 visitors, USA targeted, to be delivered over the course of 30 days. It’s not much, but it’s enough that if you want to go through the trouble of promoting their site, you can do so.
For web traffic, they have different categories: US, country-targeted, worldwide, and a special package where a pop-up is allowed. These start at around $12 ($10 for untargeted global traffic) for 10,000 visitors. Their packages go up to $384 for 400,000 visitors for US traffic, with slightly lower prices for untargeted traffic.
For their other services, pop-under traffic is a little cheaper, Alexa traffic is a little more expensive, mobile traffic is the middle of the road, and traffic from expired domains is on par with international traffic.
Can Buying Traffic Turn into More Website Sales? Many webmasters will tell you that buying…
Their affiliate program isn’t bad. They have a 90-day tracking cookie, so one user can count for a number of views. They offer a 10% commission – no, the links in this post aren’t affiliate links, I don’t participate in their program – and they have a low minimum threshold for payment, only $25. Their reseller program is similar, allowing a 10% discount on traffic to make room for profiting.
The Max Visits Reputation Engine
So, I’ve already mentioned how the requirements for their free trial are problematic. This makes trusting any online content about them very difficult. For example, take a look at this set of reviews. You see a few people with 1-star reviews and complaints as to the validity of their traffic. Then you see a host of 5-star reviews, which are all pretty generic.
Here’s the thing; they very easily could be legitimate reviews, just coming from black hat sources. That’s the crux of the whole issue. Max Visits is pretty firmly a traffic purchasing scheme for gray and black hat marketers. The traffic you get is going to be a mixture of bot traffic, untargeted low-interest traffic, and the occasional moderate interest user. It’s going to be far worse – but far cheaper – than traffic you might get from targeted AdWords or Facebook traffic.
Generally, you’re not going to get any conversions out of Max Visits. I’m making a blanket statement here, though, and I realize that some people very well will get conversions. You’re just not going to get a very high conversion rate, if you get any conversions at all. In my experiments, I didn’t get any conversions.
There’s also an issue with Google Analytics. Google has very aggressive filters to get rid of purchased traffic, particularly purchased traffic coming from methods like those used by Max Visits. This means that when you buy 10,000 views from Max Visits, Google Analytics might only record 500 of them.
This is a problem if you’re trying to monetize through AdSense; the views will be largely discounted and Google will very likely suspend your account for suspicious ad activity. On the other hand, if you’re using non-Google monetization – and non-Google analytics – you’ll see a lot more of the traffic making it through filters.
My overall opinion is this; as far as black hat traffic sellers go, Max Visits is among the best there are. They have a wide network of sites and a variety of traffic sources. The only problem is, it’s still black hat traffic. If you’re looking for higher quality traffic or traffic you can use with Google, you’re best off looking elsewhere.
Written by Kenny Novak
Kenny is an SEM and SEO professional. He uses blogging and content marketing as a launchpad for small businesses looking to grow their online presence.
Susanna Davis
says:GrowTraffic.com is well-presented. The impression is one of honesty, and helpfulness. What else matters, at the bottom of it all. Bought the starter package of 10,000 visitors. Writing a bit about it. Either way, Kenny’s really done a great job here. Preciously rare to find a site that makes money…. yet still shares the good, bad, and ugly of competitors in a manner that indicates good likelihood he wisely chose his parents. lol. Good job, and thank you for the mini-education.
Manish Barik
says:Thank you for alerting about MaxVisits. I was actually thinking to go for that. However your website looks more branded and reliable. I would love to check out your service. Just one complaint. Why there is no testimonial?
Dharsan M
says:Does your traffic affects my adsense account ?
Chekroun Abdelhaq
says:“This means that when you buy 10,000 views from Max Visits, Google Analytics might only record 500 of them.” mmm it’s traffic real thats mean i will banned from adsense or propeller ads get 0.000 for cpm ??
Fatiha Bilal
says:Very helpful article! I was discussing lately Maxvisits and this summarizes my thoughts.