I did make the title provocative simply because I want people to think before they buy traffic. I am strongly of the opinion that buying traffic is bad. If you view your customers as traffic, it won’t be long before you view them as cattle (and I’ve heard that term used by low end PPC engines too). You must view your web site visitors as people, with desires and needs. Viewing them as traffic means to me that you don’t care. You need to care because that’s how you get inside their head, learn what they want, and deliver better quality products and services than your competition.

It might have better been titled, “Why I Never TRUST Paid-for-Traffic” because it makes no sense to say “I never said ppc was bad” after the title says to “never pay for traffic, ever”

Steve wisely recommends paying for traffic when the real visitors have the intention of taking the action you are interested in having them take. In other words you are looking for traffic that CONVERTS.

This is excellent advice and becoming ever more essential to online success as the ppc engines and especially Google are now manipulating the quality of the traffic advertisers using AdWords are buying. Buyer beware.

I’ve been posting graphs showing what is going on and linking to other bloggers who have raised the same concerns. If you pay for traffic you better keep your eyes open and guard your wallet.

Perhaps you’re buying the exact right set of keywords which have strong intent associated with them, in which case you can save away this article and not worry for now. On the other hand, perhaps some of your keywords have weak intent (browsing) or no intent (traffic). Examine them carefully.

Finally, my last paragraph sums up what to do: pay handsomely for intent, considering paying for browsing, avoid paying for traffic. Exactly where an ad falls within this spectrum depends on the keywords you’re buying, the copy within the ad, and where the ad shows up. Search has much stronger intent than content.