So, you are planning on promoting your website by buying traffic from those gigs on Fiverr that promise good traffic in exchange for little money? Well, you're surely someone that has researched in order to save some dollars instead of buying trustworthy traffic from Adwords (which depending on the keywords it can be really expensive). Well, I've tried a couple of the best rated gigs on Fiverr that promise plenty of traffic for a few bucks, so cheap as USD 15 for 60K monthly visits (2K visitors daily visits so it looks quite promising apparently at least for a good quality-price relationship).
In order to let you know if it's really worth investing on those gigs (plot twist: it's not worthy and is kinda dangerous depending on what you need), I've tried the services on some of my websites and analized how they performed.
Does it really work?
The traffic that you can obtain from buying one of those gigs that you can find on Fiverr (almost any of them) is apparently genuine and you definitely get some confidence when you read the description of every gig, the reviews and there's even a Fiverr's choice badge in some of them:
Someone new in this stuff would definitely say, hey, this looks trustworthy, I'm definitely buying this and see what happens. After buying most of the gigs, you will feel disappointed, so in short words, the answer to your question of "should I buy traffic from Fiverr gigs?" is a definite no (really, don't hire them unless you have read all the points that I'm going to mention in this article), and I will explain you why in this article.
Let's check the Google Analytics results
I decided to test multiple services on different websites and this was the result in most of them. In this example, the website acquires organically about 200 users daily which is quite normal. After I bought a package that promised 2K visitors daily to the website, once the campaign started, the traffic went up drastically indeed according to analytics (check the traffic spike since December 2):
The number of sessions, as well as the Pageviews, increased brutally and Analytics received all of them, so, the traffic technically is real (recognizable by Analytics), but it's not coming from real persons, the traffic is just generated by Bots. You can easily determine this if you try to check multiple things from your visitors, like the city (where you can see that is not set), the traffic is way too consistent, the bounce rate is completely abnormal among other factors. You can check this awesome article by the Dr. Augustine Fou about how to detect bot traffic in Google Analytics.
There are of course some curious facts about the traffic, for example, some gigs on Fiverr allow you to set the Keywords to your "campaign", so if you check the traffic source it will show that the traffic is "organic":
And the keywords are really set:
Remember that before the Google Analytics update in 2011, a website owner was able to easily see the exact organic keywords that were driving the most search traffic to a particular page of your website, however, for real users most of the keywords where your website will rank will appear as "not provided".
So, to be honest, buying traffic from Fiverr can only be used for one thing (which is quite bad), massaging the figures, presenting data in a manner that gives a really misleading impression of your website's real traffic.
What about the conversions (e.g Ads Networks)
In case that you are thinking on something evil like doing fraud: "Well, I have an interesting CPM, if I buy a lot of traffic and I print a lot of advertising, I may earn way more than the money I invested for the traffic". Well, let me tell you that the ad networks got you covered! Check the following traffic reported by Adsense in the website with the boosted traffic:
As you can see, the earnings from the served advertisement remained basically the same for the first days and the revenue plummeted after some days because the extra traffic instead of benefiting the website, is harming it as the RPM will decrease brutally because of the bot traffic. Once again, this chart from the ad network confirms as well that the traffic that you receive in the website is totally fake, they're just bot visits, you're throwing money away investing on those gigs, because the impressions remain the same and will be displayed only for real users.
Knowing this as well, you must understand as well that promoting a website where your primary goal is to sell goods to real people, is just a lost cause. I mean ... just ... don't do it.
About purchased bot traffic to your site
As mentioned in the official guidelines of Google AdSense, one of the most popular advertising networks out there, you are free to promote your website in any way that complies with their program policies. As you may expect, invalid traffic sources like bot traffic is totally prohibited and may cause the deactivation of your AdSense account and that's why they recommend you to monitor the traffic with tools like Google Analytics. Suspicious activity like the generated by the traffic that you buy from fiverr can be easily identified and you, as the webmaster of the domain, should be able to stop or pause the relationship with the partner that's sending the traffic that may be invalid in order to prevent serious troubles in a near future.
What about the gigs that offer conversions (AdSense earnings)
Now, if what you're looking for is to earn money, I would recommend you to be very careful. You will find as well other gigs that promise you "organic clicks" e.g 20 clicks per day on the ad units of your website. Most of them apply the same technique as described previously, sending a lot of bot traffic that will eventually click on the ad spots on your website to increase your clickthrough rate. To my surprise, there were some gigs that indeed, generated revenue as you can see in the following chart:
Of course, once I found out that my test website generated some revenue (2 days later), I requested him to stop the service as it scared me that my AdSense account could have been compromised in fraud (fortunately the guy was really polite by letting me know that the service was stopped as I requested). You need to remember, that this practice is disapproved as well by the policies of Google AdSense. What they do in the background is unknown for me by now, they may have people hired in certain locations whose job is to click on the advertisement units of the website, maybe instead of people is just a very special kind of bot.
If you live from the earnings of ads placed on your website just like me, it's really not worth the risk that you get caught and banned from the AdSense platform.
Conclusion
Those plenty of gigs from Fiverr should be banned because honestly, they can only be used to massage figures to mislead ignorant people, which will always be used for negative things. However for some reason, those gigs are available and as mentioned, there are even some Fiverr's choice gigs, so, there must be a reason (money, money, money) behind this curious market.
You have the voice in this case, so buying some of the gigs from fiverr that promise 100% legitim traffic (knowing thanks to this article that the traffic is totally fake) is your decision. If you do it, you must be trying to cheat someway in something, maybe getting the approval of an advertising network or something like that, but don't forget that they're way smarter than you and you will always get caught if you try to earn money doing fraud.
