Boostinsider

We got an email about their service and looked interesting. We are a B2B site but our main target audience is <30 yrs old. Ability to get in front of a lot of Millennials at a low cost sounded perfect for us to grow our site or at least get a bit more users. The minimum campaign amount is $200 which isn't too bad. The minimum CPC os $0.10. We picked $0.15 but looking back, the minimum would have worked just as well.

Making the Campaign.
This is easy and straight forward. Actually maybe a bit too straight forward. What ever you put in the fields is basically what people will use to Tweet. So be careful and make sure you put the @XXXX in your message in order to get the tweets be directed at you and count. The only real targeting you can do with the campaign is Age range, Male / Female, social media to use and location. This is for who will do the promotion, not for the audience it will be in front of. One bit of social media missing was LinkedIn.

The Actual Campaign
We had a few people tweet about us and right away got a lot of traffic coming to the site. Looking at the people that tweeted, they were young with 50k+ followers. The age is to be expected for this type of service so no red flags there. Looking at the quality of tweets of the people other than our tweet, all very low quality. I'm not sure how they have the followers they have. Besides them promoting a lot of boostinsider campaigns to make money, the other tweets were lots of random retweets. But we were getting a lot of traffic hitting our site.

Quality of traffic
Here is the big red flag for us. We had over 2000 people come to the site from the boostinsider campaign. That was great for the price. Unfortunately, the actual quality of the traffic was horrid. Basically would have gotten better results by paying a bot farm to hit our site with traffic and would have been cheaper. The traffic had a 100% bounce rate at avg time on page of 1 second. Not a single person clicked any other link on our site, and they left as soon as page loaded. Ok, you might say it is because of our site, but our normal stats is way different that those even our Adwords campaigns. We should have had at least a bit of targeted traffic as the tweet described what we do. If they were not interested at all in our site, why click the link then leave 1 second later. Yes it does feel like a bit of a scam. The users get paid by getting clicks. No other verification is done. Very easy for them to set up bots to do the clicks and get paid for tweeting and running some bots.

I like the idea and hope they can solve the issue with quality of traffic (potential) of abuse.

Strengths: Cheap? but is it? With 100% bounce rate and 1 second on page. Even $1 would have been expensive.

Needs to improve: The quality of traffic is awful. Actually bots would have been higher quality as they might have stayed or been programed to at least click a 2nd link.