I can definitely file this experience under amateur move. In an act of desperation I decided to try the cost-per-click platform Bidvertiser. Essentially you setup a text or banner ad and your message is shown to a selection of Bidvertiser’s network of publishers and you’re charged on a per click basis. I decided to give it a go to advertise my new website to try and drive some sales. This turned out to be a massive waste of time and money.

I want you to do a quick Google search right now for “Bidvertiser”. What I see on my local Google is 4 results saying the service is a scam. Not wanting to rely on a few individuals’ results I signed up and took a look around. What I like to do, and what others might, is look for new traffic sources. While Bidvertiser has been around for a while I hadn’t heard of many people making bank off of it – probably a good reason why. The only thing that drew me in and the reason why I didn’t go straight to Adwords was the ability to fund your account through PayPal. I had a few dollars in my account and figured what the hell.

The account was funded, I added my site information and keywords and decided on a text link ad (I didn’t want to make a banner ad, it’d take too long, I was in a rush etc.) Afterwards you could specify if you wanted to target a specific country. Not wanting to receive visitors from a country which couldn’t read English I chose the UK, USA and Australia. By now the ad was setup, impressions were increasing and I was seeing visitors.

A few days before running ads on Bidvertiser I installed LiveZilla onto my website. LiveZilla is basically free live support software. Installing it allows you to see visitors on your website, accept live chats along with a lot of other sweet features. A feature I found handy for this test was to see which country your visitor was browsing from and who referred them to the site. If Bidvertiser was doing their job right I should only see visitors from them from the UK, USA or Australia. Instead what I saw pissed me off. I started to see visitors coming from Bidvertiser from Vietnam, China and many other parts all over Asia.

As well as providing low quality traffic, they have the nerve to have cost per clicks in excess of $1 for niches which go well under that in other platforms such as Adwords. I actually had 1 individual who came to the site from Bidvertiser who hailed from Argentina. He ended up wasting my time on live chat, didn’t wish to purchase anything and thought it was funny to tell me to “go eat road tar” in broken English. So yeah, I essentially paid for that experience.

Just as I’m writing this I see that another visitor came online from Taiwan who was referred by Bidvertiser. I have $3.12 left in my Bidvertiser account and not wanting to withdraw such a low number I’m letting it ride – who knows, maybe they’ll end up doing what I’m paying them to do and provide me with some decent visits.

What’s worse is that I think they’re screwing not just advertisers, but publishers as well. A friend of mine named Vishal blogs over at DumbLittleBlogger.com and wrote a post about a year ago scrutinising Bidvertiser. To save you the read, he basically says that Bidvertiser didn’t count proper clicks and thus he lost some moolah in revenue. To be honest, I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the case – the business as a whole seems pretty dodgy.

A few forums I visit regularly have threads dedicated to Bidvertiser and their scammy ways. It looks as if they’ve gotten it right with bloggers with the $10.00 withdrawal threshold and the ability to fund your account with PayPal – if any other platforms replicated this but provided a quality service can you imagine the popularity? One common feature in the forums is that everyone agrees on the low quality traffic and the targeting problems. Amongst all of this, a few (and I mean, 1 or 2, perhaps paid Bidvertiser promoters? You never know) have had successes with it.

So you’ve just read ~700 words bagging a service – first instinct is to try it? I really hope you don’t. It truly is a waste of time and money. If you’re looking for an effective CPC platform, stick with Adwords.