This section includes several of the most common questions asked by retail customers and some suggested answers. This is to help you support your customers. Feel free to use the answers provided when supporting your customers. Of course, if you are asked a question to which you do not know the answer, don’t hesitate to contact us.

Question: Where does the traffic come from?

[The full explanation is provided in the traffic info section. Most customers will not want that much detail. This is how we would answer the question for a retail customer. ]

Suggested Answer: Most sites on the internet are associated with a domain name, like Yahoo.com and TheOnion.com for example. Domain names are not actually purchased. Rather, companies pay an annual fee to register a domain name. Usually, this fee is between $9 and $30, depending on various circumstances. When a company no longer wants a domain name, they can simply abandon it by not paying the annual fee. After a name is abandoned, the company is given a grace period during which they can re-attain the name (usually 60-90 days). After the grace period, anybody can register the name. We find and register high-traffic abandoned names using software. Once we own the name, we simply point it to our servers and from there we redirect the traffic to your site. This results in high-quality “clean” traffic that is NOT initially generated using SPAM, adult sites or excessive popup windows. We sometimes use other methods to generate traffic as well, but abandoned domains generate the bulk of our traffic.

Question: “My campaign has stopped!” Or, “It does not look like my campaign will be delivered – it should be more complete by now!”

[Some users expect delivery to be steady throughout their campaign. For example, if they order 10,000 visitors to be delivered within 30 days, they expect 333 visitors to be delivered each day. They get concerned when delivery is slower than that.]

Suggested Answer: Our system automatically throttles traffic to achieve the most efficient delivery possible. Do not be concerned if delivery stops or is slow for several days, particularly at the beginning of your campaign. Rest assured that we will deliver your traffic within the period you specified when ordering… we guarantee it. If you are specifically concerned with quick delivery, we can setup an expedited campaign for you for your future orders (additional fees apply for expedited campaigns).

Question: My counter does not indicate the same number of visitors as your system. Why?

[Note: This can have a variety of causes. Please be sure the answer is appropriate to the situation. Contact us if you are in doubt]

Suggested Answer: Our system counts visitors automatically as they are directed to your site. It is possible for our count to differ from yours in a variety of circumstances. Some possibilities include:

1. Your web site went down. As such, visitors were sent from our server, but did not load your site.

2. Network difficulties, there may have been a network outage preventing some users from loading your site.

3. Use of an image, java or JavaScript counter. Counters that rely on the user loading an image, loading an applet or running a script are inherently unreliable and will always undercount.

4. Use of a 3rd party counter. Counters served by other companies are notoriously unreliable. Not only must the user load your site, but they must also load the counter image from the remote server, introducing an additional layer of complexity. Such counters do provide useful information, but do not provide an accurate count.

5. Your web site was overwhelmed. In some cases, a web server will issue an error when a large number of users attempt to load your site in a short period of time. Some servers will issue the error with a surprisingly low number of users – in some cases as few as 10-20 users over a few minutes will cause an error. This seems to be a particularly common problem on IIS servers when asp pages requiring an ODBC connection are served. In other cases, pages will load fine, but users arriving too quickly will cause an undercount due to poor coding of a counting script.

6. Bandwidth, system or connection throttling by your ISP/Web Host. Most web hosting accounts are on shared servers. That means that one computer and one internet connection are used to serve tens (or even hundreds) of web sites. Some hosts even put 1,000 or more sites on a single server! In order to keep one web site from overusing system resources, the web host will implement an artificial upper limit on the amount of system resources, bandwidth or connections that a single account can use at any given time. In some cases, the bandwidth limit is as low as 64 kbps! If the number of users causes you to exceed any of these limits, visitors will not load your page.

7. Bandwidth Limits – nearly all hosts will limit the amount of bandwidth a site can use during a month. If you reach this limit, your account will be automatically suspended. It is obvious if this has occurred – simply load your home page and check for a “bandwidth limit reached” message.

8. Other Errors– other server errors can cause a miscount. Check your error log for an unusual number of errors. Your raw server logs will provide more detailed and useful information on the problem. Please look at

your server logs – you will probably find that our count is accurate. If not, please forward your raw server logs for the period in question (please forward the “access,” “referrer” and error logs). We will go through the logs and attempt to determine why our count differs from yours

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