I have spent the last few weeks trying to figure why I was receiving traffic from sites such as lopsearch.com, hugefinder.com (among others) where every 'visit' was a 'Didn't stay'...
As I also had a Google Adwords account I could never be sure where such 'clicks' came from

it tied in with an increase in Overture account spend and I did receive a rather vague e-mail from them where they appeared to misunderstand the question

Howver they did point me in the direction of the tracking URL and I must admit that when I changed the listings a few months back to a new website I omitted the ?SOURCE=OVERTURE at the end.

Can anyone enlighten me as to whether adding this tracking URL will help?

Related and perhaps for another forum is...

I noticed that certain 'search sites' (what is the correct term?) started sending concentrated and large (in my terms) volumes of traffic for short periods of time...there were also instances of a similar search terms, not common, being used once or twice per day over a number of days and over a number of these 'search sites' that I had never heard of.

Is there a list of search sites here somewhere?
Can anybody point me in the direction of some info on this?

I am not a fan of conspiracy theories but when I see the list of 'visitors' from lopsearch.com 100% of whom are 'Didn't stays' when the same list from google, yahoo, msn etc. show 'didn't stay' rates of <15% I get worried? Especially when for october lopsearch.com was my biggest referrer!

Any info appreciated.

Many thanks,
Peter

You might be getting traffic from these "other" sites because they are part of the Overture or Google distribution network (they are paid to carry PPC listings or they are AdSense publishers).

The fact that this rise in poor quality traffic coincided with your increase in Overture spend is probably the best clue you have about what changed.
Why did your spend increase?

Did you add more keywords?
Did you change your phrase matching settings?
Did you bid up to positions 1-3 (which would get you broader distribution?

Are you only working with Google and Overture? Many of the second tier PPC sites work with smaller and sometimes less reputable search sites.

Hi Tomslick,

Thank you for the input. I am only working with Google and Overture. One of my problems was that I moved my site from a subdomain of a related site to its own domain - I believe that my problem may lie in the fact that when I changed the URL of the Overture listings I omitted the ?source=Overture tracking. At the same time I installed Nettracker when I moved the site to its own domain - hence I could see the exact referrers and phrases

This was compounded by my misunderstanding of the Match Types - I used the broadest type possible - this resulted in some clicks on 'irrelevant' searches.

I do consider the fact that lopsearch.com sent me volumes of clicks for terms that included 2 of my words but not the critical word 'golf' (and that other lower tier engines also sent traffic for the same words) to be highly suspicous? - especially when they were concentrated over a few days and there were no corresponding matches sent by the primary sources. The fact that I can list all these visitis in Nettracker and 100% were 'Didn't Stay' is also suspicious?

Anyway, I have changed the match type to standard and included the URL tracking - I will reactivate the account sometime soon and see whether I lose the poor quality traffic.

Thanks again,
Peter