MIVA

real garbage

[sharbel]

Man MIVA is becoming really hit or miss with their traffic lately. I am getting some real garbage. Some of it is just hilarious how blatent it is. I mean, there is a pattern to clicks and everything. Every 12 or so minutes, I get 3 visitors at exactly 8 seconds a part, and always from France, Germany and Belgium (always in that order).

I uploaded my server logs to MIVA. They better give me a refund for all that garbage or else they are loosing me as a customer (along with all my accounts that I manage for clients).

Anyone know if they are honorable about refunding fraudulent clicks?

[edited by: seth_wilde at 4:01 pm (utc) on Oct. 31, 2005]
[edit reason] specifics taken out [/edit]

[AdminG23]

I Added $75 to my account with them. Once i started to get traffic .. it was obvious it was bogus traffic.

so i stopped the account and asked them to investigate and return whatever balance i have in the account.

this happened last week . they froze the account and are so called investigating but .. still no refund on the account.

well for me i am not worried. if they don't refund the balance on the account , i will contact my credit card company and refund the total deposit. :)

I really thought they improved. they don't have a lot of advertisers and i thought they learned their lesson, :(

well i was wrong they are still crap

[sharbel]

The lady I was talking to was very nice and they did seem to want to get to the bottom of it.. atleast that was the impression I got.

I will be honest, some of their traffic *does* convert quite nicely for us. The legit traffic is pretty good as far as conversions.. the scam sites just ruin everything.

If they were smart, they would allow the advertisers to do site exclusions. That is if they were *really* interested in running a clean system.

[Tropical Island]

I dropped out of FindWhat last January.

Just because they have changed their name doesn't mean that they have gotten any better.

These second tier PPC companies can't supply sufficient legit traffic so they are dependent on the garbage for survival.

Best suggestion is to just forget them. The labour involved in policing them is just not worth it.

[GameMasterM]

I only use their pay per call service and it's priceless. Sorry to hear they still serve up crappy traffic. I thought they made a huge announcement last December about letting go of the ugly traffic. There must have been more than they figured.

[sharbel]

Honestly, if they would implement a site exclusion panel for us to exclude the fraud sources I would be fine with them. Literally, it's 2 websites that are the problem..

[eljefe3]

Yeah I have also noticed that some traffic is OK, while other traffic is garbage. They have also asked me to send them my logs of the garbage traffic. We'll see.

[eljefe3]

I've heard back from MIVA and they noticed a spike increase in a few other days and they are requesting more info from my logs, so at least this is a good start for them.

It would be a very nice strategic move on their part to side with the webmaster who can produce logs showing the click irrregularities and give any webmaster who can back up their claims the benefit of the doubt.

[mwilliams]

poo poo poo.

I just deleted my nasty note about them, didn’t want to get sued for anything.

Suffices to say, I will never do business with them again under any condition.

[bostonseo]

I wouldn't give MIVA which is FindWhat a dime.

[edited by: seth_wilde at 10:41 pm (utc) on Nov. 4, 2005]

[bostonseo]

When companies have to change their name I'd be weary of them.

[inbound]

I know of a big MIVA publishing partner that is moving away from them because they are embarrased by the association with them now.

Surely that is a sign of how bad it's got when you can't keep the good partners because of the negative press created by other partners (or MIVA being unable to police partners well enough).

[eljefe3]

I did hear back from MIVA and they said they have dropped some sites with suspicious partners and they did give me some click credit. From what I have seen some of their traffic for known popular keywords is worthless, while for others it is a decent ROI.

[bweebco]

I tried out $100 on Miva and it was terrible traffic, tons of clicks, no turn over and very fraudy, I will not be doing biz with them anymore or ever.

[Event_King]

Miva are Espotting! They basically run an affiliate scheme, and these 'partners' are just affiliates - nothing more. This reminds me of when I bought traffic from Kanoodle, big promises and not return.

Yet people still give them the benefit of the doubt, saying "oh, maybe they'll drop these partners or "they asked for my logs" etc. You guys are the clients, as you pay them for results right! They clearly aren't delivering, and they expect YOU to prove you are in the right - I've never heard so much 'We are MIVA and are blameless' from 1 company in my life and it should be MIVA that investigate and sort it for clients - not the client.

Sad thing is that people still pay them cash, I can't work that out lol. hmmmmmm they have a nice new branding, nice new flash looking site and people are still paying them and talking about them more than ever. Er why?

It's clear they aren't going to go bust while they still get payments from whoever flogs their adverts for them.

[watchthis]

I personally have done well with Miva several times and will continue to go with them, so im surprised about how many compalints I hear.

Perhaps your sites are not optimised for conversions. Are your descriptions and keywords relevant. Is the landing page?

You have to know what your doing to convert visits to sales. Pretending you know and simply advertising on a PPC will not guarantee sales.

[sharbel]

Uh, yeah I know what I am doing thank you very much :) I get fantastic conversions from Adwords/Overture.. MIVA has a lot of fraud traffic, sure we do get some conversions, but it still doesnt excuse the blatent fraud.

To say that you have to 'optimize' keywords or landing pages is rubbish. I don't care how optimized you are, if I point a script at your ad you are going to cry like all of us :)

FWIW, I still havent heard anything back from MIVA. I stopped my ads, and will likely chargeback the trasactions if they don't refund the fraudulent clicks.

I simply switched over to Enhance who has a lot of the same partners as MIVA, but are approachable when asking to block certain 'partners'. They even Geotargetted my ads to only show in the US/UK for me. With filtering out the garbage partners (findology, find-info, and the like) I am getting decent returns on my spend.

MIVA should take a lesson on that... We all know you will get garbage partners, just let us filter them or request it.. be approachable. MIVA is not at all approachable with that kind of stuff.

[bostonseo]

watchthis I'm pretty sure I've seen you defend FindWhat, now Miva, before. Come clean do you an association with the company? Like you are an employee :)

I've used every PPC program twice to give them a fair shot; and FindWhat/Miva hasn't consistently worked for any of my clients since some time in 2003.

I recommend staying clear of Miva; I don't care how professional their new website looks :)

[watchthis]

Yes bostonseo I do have an asociation with Miva. I advertise with them.
As for defending findwhat I never did, I have defended Espotting in the past.
It just seems strange that about quarter of the forum do ok with Miva and the others do not.

[chrisuk]

Generally speaking in terms of bad traffic are we talking mainly about Findwhat which is now Miva or the Espotting side which is also Miva but in UK or are we talking globally here.

I always thought Espotting (as it was) policed things quite well in the UK.

[watchthis]

Thats the thing, I agree with that. I have had good results with them. Which is why im suprised and asked if people here actually knew how to optimise their landing pages.
If their traffic is garbage why would companies pay up to 20 dollars (12 pounds sterling) per click and continue to do so for years?
It obiously works for these companies. But then again they can hire people to supervise it who know what they are doing rather than amateurs who think they know.
A poor worksman blames his tools. Doesn't the phrase go like that?

[ember]

They used to do fairly well for us. Then they teamed up with eSpotting (I think?) and it all went to hell. Tried them again when they changed their name to Miva, and it was even worse. Too bad. They used to be a decent alternative to the big guys.

[sharbel]

Watchthis: Are you talking about MIVA on the E-Spotting side? It would appear that the people who are saying that there isnt much fraud are talking about the European side of things (e-spotting).

Sorry bud, but I dont care how optimized your landing pages are, if a bad partner is targetting your keywords you are going to be whining like everyone else. The point here is that MIVA does nothing about it except profit from it. How you can defend it or say it's somehow the 'workmans' fault is laughable. My CTR and conversion rate on reputable networks are great... even on the less quality traffic from Enhance, I've managed to block and GeoTarget where it's pretty good.

The whole point is that MIVA will not work with their advertisers to weed-out the garbage.

[bostonseo]

watchthis calling everyone an amateur for bailing on FindWhat/Miva because we couldn't make it work is pretty funny.

[GameMasterM]

I won't argue the merits of Miva traffic because I have no experience advertising on that side. Their pay per call is an invaluable asset to my business.

Given what I have read about Miva PPC on WebmasterWorld I would not try it.
Miva should have a rep. address this issue here on this thread.