The Kona Impact Blog

The internet is full online marketing scams and it appears as if RedZee can be added to the list. RedZee, for those who don't know, is a second (or third) tier search engine. This, in itself, is unremarkable, as there are tens if not hundreds of search engines trying to get slice of Google's pie. The goal is not users, per se; the goal is to sell pay-per-click advertising on the site. That is where the real money is.

Well, Kona Impact, was asked recently to evaluate a RedZee pay-per-click campaign. The site owner had been sold several hundred dollars of clicks on the site at what she thought was a good deal: .05-.08 cents a click. This is far lower than the average of $.50 per click she pays on Google AdWords.

I took a look at her stats, and here's what I found. The RedZee "vistitors" (put in quotes intentionally) are very low quality and of dubious value. I suspect they are using a network of computers to inflate the visits, and, therefore, their revenue. For example, the average time on site for a RedZee visitor was just 3 seconds compared to an average of over 3 minutes for visitors from other sites and searches. The number of pages viewed per visit was a little over 1.0 for RedZee "visitors" compared to over 7 for others. These stats alone indicate that RedZee is either running a scam or unable to deliver qualified visitors--both a bad sign. The third nail in the RedZee coffin is the bounce rate of over 90%. This means that most so-called visitors leave the site quickly.

The lesson to website owners and webmasters is that independent, 3rd party verified results should be trusted over marketing hype.

Kona Impact recommends that business owners never buy web promotion or online marketing services on the phone. Get the information, do some online searches about the company and than ask your webmaster if the product or service makes sense. Never buy under pressure and keep your skeptics hat on all the time.