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Our site is targetted only at UK visitors. Anybody from anywhere else in the world is useless traffic to us.
We set up 28 listings many of which contained copy specifying UK-only members.
We ran the campaign for two days and attracted 219 new members, costing us £150.
We recorded the referrer (Overture) and IP address of every new member and did an IP address -> location lookup on each one.
Of the 219 new members, just 8 were from the UK.
In descending order of quantity, we instead received new members from these countries: Pakistan, France, Philippines, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Morocco, Egypt, Argentina etc etc.
Nearly all of the said new members have proved themselves to be advanced fee fraudsters or con artists of one kind or another. We have closed 90% of the new accounts.
We wrote to Overture, who told us that although our search results have appeared only on .co.uk domains, they are visible anywhere in the world and they have no control over who looks at the web sites they appear on (true).
Our experience with other PPC networks such as Google has been totally different, with the geo-targetting appearing to work well and reasonable quality UK-based traffic coming in. We have ended up paying £18.75 for each UK member with Overture.
Needless to say the campaign has been swiftly terminated. An expensive way to learn that your supplier is not delivering the goods. You've gotta laugh really. What is your experience?
Most UK partners should be able to offer 80%+ UK traffic, if not higher.
Now they may be right, the traffic might have come from .co.uk's but possibly partners with too much foreign traffic. Ask them again maybe. You can never totally eliminate foreign clicks even with geoip redirection. Its a % game and about ensuring that the percentages are in your favour. This isn't fraud just mismatched traffic and I'd be inclined to follow it up assuming you have traffic data.
