Nice to meet you Dave,
Yeah, don't traffic either unless you're just going for high Alexa rankings.
I found out this one the hard way. Plus, most of the traffic they send (most of the companies) are robots which aren't even tracked by google or alexa anyway. Here's how buying traffic works.
Some pour unspecting soul looks for picnic baskets or some other foolishness in the search engine. First page results show a few promising sites. She clicks on the one that looks like it's more targeted towards her need only, what she didn't know was, that link was old (yet still indexed by the search engine but never updated).
The previous owner of the site stop paying the bill so a url buying company purchase the link because it has high traffic. But they don't put a real PAGE up there. Instead, they just run PPC ads with a timed redirect or a pop-up (sometimes an instant redirect). She then either sees the PPC page for 5 seconds or she never see it at all but, instead, goes to your page selling a home based business opportunity.
What's the problem here?
She wants picnic baskets. Not a second income. She hits the back key instantly and that counts as 1 visitor for you AND the company who sold you the traffic.
But there are no sales.
Because untargeted (or even targeted a lot of times) redirect traffic doesn't make that many sales.
Now, having SAID that, there are companies out there that produce better sent traffic totals. A company called www.ReVisitors.com. The owner of the site is Steve and he responds to ALL email inquiries personally and quickly. I actually used his service for my previous site and it helped me get 15 signups and that was only by purchasing a small sent traffic quota.
Again, it's not the best way to sell a product. But it IS the best way to build up your rankings literally overnight with google, yahoo and alexa.com.
Believe me when I say this...using their services, I've brought my previous site from no ranking to ranked 5 million in the world within 3 days of using their sent traffic.
A month later, I was ranked 1.2 million in the world and 356,475 in the US and my growth was at a crazy 4127% in that months time. It's kind of my secret weapon for building up the sites rankings and having the google bots index more and more of my pages.
To be honest, I don't know WHAT Steve did to make all that happen, but he has the best services by far for sent traffic. It helped land my new company some really high profile alliances with fortune 500 companies and the success helped me get funding for my current project.
Now, I'm an affiliate of this company but I'm not putting it in this forum.
It's unethical.
So, at any rate, you have my free input on that one.
Stephon