Trash traffic

The term trash traffic refers to web site visitors that do not convert into sales because they are "bots" or people incentivized to click. For example, if you purchase 1,000,000 clicks on an Ebay auction for only 99 cents you will probably get worthless clicks.

In many cases "junk clicks will not only not generate sales from your business web site but also cost you money by using up valuable bandwidth" and slow down your web site making it hard for "real" users to access your information.

In a worst case scenario, trash traffic could even cost you sales as users get tired of waiting for your pages to load and go to a competitors web site. This is different from click fraud, as you typically pay for trash traffic a certain amount, whereas with click fraud it is a percentage of your clicks that are worthless. In trash traffic, all your clicks, 100%, are worthless and do not reflect real people interested in purchasing your product or service.

Trash Traffic is usually easy to spot, as it is typically generated by a bot that spends less than five seconds on your landing web page and does not click on any secondary pages or fill out any forms. Typically a limited set of IP addresses are used and all traffic comes from countries with limited regulation of the internet.

More sophisticated trash traffic schemes pay people in low wage countries to click on ads, but again no forms are filled out, no sales are made, and the clicker will spend less than 15 seconds on your landing page.