Traffic Exchanges: Advantages, Disadvantages, and When to Use Them

Before we continue, let’s see some of the advantages of using traffic exchanges:

Advantages of Using Traffic Exchanges

1. The main and utmost advantage of traffic exchanges is that they can give you more traffic without doing much work. Traffic exchange widgets can increase your traffic by about 150% to 300%.
2. This traffic gained from traffic exchanges can do many things for you. Most importantly, it can make your Google Analytics and other analytics graphs look much better. Thus, if you are selling advertising on your blog or website, you may get more advertisers and higher prices.
3. You do not need to buy PPC click traffic or banner advertising on other sites to increase traffic. So traffic exchanges can help you save costs.
4. Traffic generated from traffic exchanges can help a newbie blogger who does not have many readers to get some initial exposure and new readers.

Additionally: Traffic exchanges can sometimes be useful for testing landing pages, layouts, or ad placements before investing in paid traffic sources.

Disadvantages of Traffic Exchanges

Now let’s see what the disadvantages are if you use a traffic exchange to drive traffic to your website:

1. If you are using a traffic exchange site that uses a credit system (sites where you gain credits for surfing other sites in the traffic exchange network and then use those credits to display your site’s advert), you can become hooked on surfing and forget to devote time to the rest of your business.
2. The conversion rate of traffic exchange networks is very low, and you need to do a lot of testing to get the best results.
3. Your bounce rate may increase to very high levels since people are interested only in the page that has been advertised. They usually do not care to visit other parts of the site. Sometimes visitors remain for less than 10 seconds on the page, which drastically affects bounce rates. Many traffic exchanges offer auto-surf options with a timing of 10 to 60 seconds, which can make your bounce rate climb Mount Everest.
4. Google has strict policies against using traffic exchanges on web pages that display AdSense. Users who wish to use traffic exchanges should create separate pages for advertising through traffic exchanges.

Additional Disadvantages of Traffic Exchange Widgets

The following are some specific disadvantages of using traffic exchange widgets that I shared a few posts back:

1. If you are on shared hosting, then sites like 2Leep can send 150+ visitors at a moment. This can cause the server to crash, and your hosting provider may suspend your account.
2. Adding more widgets may increase your site’s load speed, which may, in turn, lower your SERP rankings.
3. Using MKTGID and 2Leep has its own advantages and disadvantages. 2Leep won’t give any clicks but will return 500% extra traffic. MKTGID will give you 1–2 clicks for every 100 visitors, but the widget links are dofollow, so your PageRank may be leaked to MKTGID. Also, they sell ad spots within your widget, which you may not realize are actually advertisements.

Instructions: If you decide to use traffic exchanges, always route the traffic to dedicated landing or squeeze pages instead of your main content pages to protect SEO and analytics quality.

Short Case Study: Traffic Exchanges in Practice

Short Case Study: A new blogger used traffic exchanges to boost early traffic numbers and test a squeeze page design. While conversions remained low, the data helped refine the page layout before switching to organic and paid traffic sources that delivered better engagement.

Conclusion

You should only use traffic exchanges if you are in dire need of traffic. If you already have sufficient organic traffic, there is little need to rely on traffic exchanges.

Even if you use traffic exchanges, you should redirect the traffic to your squeeze pages, affiliate links, or autoresponders so that you can get the most out of that traffic.

And about the link exchange widgets—you’ve already read what a user of those widgets wrote. Now, we leave the decision of using those widgets up to you.

Chow for now! Got to work.