Thomson Webfinder

Increased traffic or not?

[running scared]

Has anybody else seen significant (1000%+) traffic increases over the last three months?

We only have one account with them and it is for a site that we don't track as it is designed to genreate phone leads. As such I can't compare it to other accounts. The increase has not been mirrored on other PPC providers for the same site.

Feels very fishy.

[sem4u]

I would look through your logs and see where this traffic is coming from.

[purpleC]

Funnily enough I had a call from them recently saying that they were refunding some clicks to my account. They said something like "we have reviewed one of our partners and they do not meet our high standards for quality of traffic..blah blah"

The short of it is, they have canned this partner and are making refunds. If you have not heard from them... give them a call, and get your money back!

[Ross]

Ha, I had the same bad feelings. Checked on what keywords were being clicked on and found that there were loads of clicks for "auto insurance". Hey, we're in the UK, we speak English, it's an English search engine used by UK surfers. We call it "car insurance" - Closed the account!

[larryhatch]

Maybe its called 'auto insurance' in India or Indonesia.

[purpleC]

I asked them if the traffic was from "overseas", but they said that all the traffic is filtered by IP address. My logs have not thrown up anything from overseas that I can see.

Has anyone seen non-uk traffic in their logs?

Has anyone experienced this type of problem ie high traffic- few conversions, with other PPC providers?

[Ross]

Has anyone experienced this type of problem ie high traffic- few conversions, with other PPC providers?

Yes, from another insignificant UK search engine - Closed that account also ;)

[purpleC]

Hey Ross

I presume if you were getting traffic on "auto insurance", you were bidding on this term? If you only want uk traffic, why were you bidding on this phrase?

[Ross]

If you only want uk traffic, why were you bidding on this phrase?

We were targeting Americans living over here in the UK :)

Actually the truth is almost as lame as that excuse. Somebody from Thomson Local (Webfinder) phoned and offered to research and enter hundreds of keywords for us. I did have a quick glance through them when they'd finished but they all looked pretty innocuous.

I used the example of "auto insurance" because it was a glaring fraud, who's to say that there were not hundreds of equally "dodgy" clicks on any number of keywords that I wouldn't have noticed.

[GerBot]

I feel sorry for Webfinder - through their own sites and their yahoo deal (soon to finish when yahoo.co.uk gets it's own local search) they have some good quality traffic.
But now they want to play the partner feed game and are going to be destroyed by the seasoned PPC search feed scammers that exist.

[exmoorbeast]

WF has a great team and they work hard at maintaining quality. I know this because they called us about 20 clicks that came from our network that they had traced as being bad. Now, if that isn't someone that cares I don't know what is.

WF are owned by Thomson, who are in turn owned by an Italian Media Giant - so don't write them off.....certainly not irrelevant.

[rconway]

Their XML partner feed seems to be down as much time as it is up.

[mancunian]

Spot on guys. I just spoke to Webfinder as I had noticed my funds being quickly depleted.

Refund on its way. This is a great forum else I would never have called them!

[exmoorbeast]

XML feed is down alot - well yes this is true - no defence for them there whatsoever.