I’ve been testing out different “traffic exchange” systems to monitor the results thru Google analytics. Now for those who are new to these things, “Crowd Ignite” is not the only player in town, but in my opinion, one of the better. I don’t run them on “this” site, but am running it on another.

How they work is that you include their widget on your site and it displays the type of content that you specify (thru settings etc…such movies, sports, politics, etc).

The thumbnails link to other sites that pass thru “Crowd Ignite” first. As you send traffic (people clicking on the thumbnail links), “Crowd Ignite” sends back a %150 to 700% referral return rate of click backs (it registers your pages and promotes them on other sites the same way).

This can also be monitored thru your account with them.
It can also be verified thru your Google analytics referrals

It’s worth nothing that it takes about 3-4 days before the return rate has ramped up. This is due to them flagging you in the system and including some of your pages .

Now the traffic that they send back can vary but you should expect tier 1 or tier 2 style traffic. Since its actual readers clicking on article links, its not shady like a “auto-surfing” site may be (also “auto surfing” referrals will get your Adsense account banned (no really…it will!)

I’ve done some testing with and without the widget activated to see how it would effect things. I did notice that quite a bit of referrals noted in Google Analytics were coming from “Crowd Ignite”. This is a good thing. (it was actually 2nd to Google itself) Continue reading Does Crowd Ignite Work? Do Traffic Exchanges Work? →