How I "twisted" behavioral factors


Greetings harazhiteli! Today I would like to tell you about a very intriguing thing, like behavioral factors. More specifically, about their artificial improvement. And more precisely, about the shortcomings of the cheat services that deal with this.

Just a little bit about behavioral factors
Behavioral factors - a set of actions of visitors to a particular site. Entrance to the site, time spent, browsing the pages, “clicks” on the proposed links, returning to the site - all these points can be attributed to behavioral factors. A source

Why am I writing this? The fact is that I am the owner of two commercial sites and, naturally, I am interested in them being as high as possible in the search results. And at some point, having read various articles, decided to experiment. Immediately make a reservation that the result was a little sad and I hope that this article will serve as a warning.


Start


Given:
  • 2 commercial sites;
  • Topic: construction;
  • Promotion Region: Moscow;
  • Age of sites: one 5 years, the second 3 years;
  • Traffic before the experiment: site A - ~ 350 users / day, site B - ~ 200 users / day;
  • The beginning / end of the experiment: January-April 2014;
  • Links not purchased since November 2013;

For greater “cleanliness” I did not make any changes on the site, except for posting articles once every one to two weeks. I’ll notice that I’m going to compare not the positions before and after, but the traffic, since for me personally this is a more important metric.

Choosing a wrapping service


I did not have to think about this moment for a long time - I decided to use the most actively advertised and new service at that time. I will not give a link to it, but I will only say that it has an interesting name and logo. :)

Promotion strategy


After sitting on the forums and studying articles from several sources, I was pleased with the following solution:

  • Add 1,500 clicks per month to site A
  • We add 900 clicks per month to site B

That is, approximately I added 15% of the current monthly traffic. I think that for the majority it will be clear that it is somewhat doubtful to wind up such a number of clicks on 1-3 requests, then I selected 80-90 LF and MF requests for each site.

The disadvantages of wrapping: depth and viewing time


During the setup of the project in the service, I was immediately struck by the lack of setting the viewing depth and time on the site.

I believe that each site of a certain subject has its own depth and time of viewing the site. If for my sites the average depth is 4 pages, and the time is 4-5 minutes, then the shaft of visits with a depth of 2-3 pages and a time of 2-3 minutes somehow breaks out from the general statistics. As a result, it happened.

The disadvantages of wrapping: characteristics of visitors


Yandex.Metrica has very wonderful and informative sections “Sex and Age” and “By World Countries”.

So, if in the subsection “By World Countries” Russia, the Center (and a little North-West) always prevailed, then after a month of advancement I saw the Urals, South, Siberia, Volga region. Also, the CIS has actively “turned on”: Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and much more.

In the sub-section “Gender and age”, a typical picture for my sites: the main audience is men from 25 years old. After a month of promotion, a female audience began to grow, as well as an audience younger than 18 years old.

Isn’t this a failure of business ? Naturally, the support service actively persuaded me in this, after I sent them a ticket with comments. The essence of the persuasion was one - " We are firmly convinced that the PSYandex does not take into account the data you wrote about . "Point.

SERP behavior


Separately, it is worth highlighting how the tasks are performed:

  1. "Worker" opens a search engine and sets the region (in my case, if it is not from Moscow).
  2. Enters a search query.
  3. Goes to a couple of random sites.
  4. Goes to my site.

It is very strange when a user from Poltava changes the region to Moscow and is looking for concrete blocks, when yesterday he was looking for GDZ for the 8th grade. Next, the user clicks on two random sites. Yeah. Most often these are sites from TOP-5 or TOP-10. After viewing the sites, the user abruptly switches to the site from 29th place and then finishes the search. Yeah, very natural behavior.

My light, mirror, say or watch the Webvisor

Activity bar from Webvisor

"What is it?" - you ask. And this is a scale of user activity from the Webvisor . It displays typical user behavior from a wrapping service on my site. According to my calculations, 7 out of 10 users behaved this way. For those who don’t know what these colors mean on the activity scale:

image

That is, the user went to my site, “twitched” for 20 seconds, then switched to another window and did there something for 2 minutes. Then he returned, clicked somewhere and closed the page. It is clear that most likely the “employee” performs several tasks at the same time, which forces him to switch to another window.

And on top of everything: in Webvisor, you can filter out visits to a specific visitor, which helped me find another drawback - one user can complete the task several times a week.

Total


After a difficult 4 months, I decided to finish the epic with this experiment. I will not bore the story of other problems, such as incorrect position taking, an incomprehensible algorithm for completing tasks and debiting funds, numerous minor bugs in the interface (which promise to be fixed, but this does not happen) and much more.

It turned out that in 4 months I spent about 40 thousand rubles, a lot of time and nerve cells . In early May, a week after the promotion stopped, I recorded the following traffic:

  1. Site A - 220 users / day .
  2. Site B - 180 users / day .

At the beginning of the post, I promised not to compare the positions, but, as a digestif, this is worth doing:



If you decide to use the behavioral wrapping, then remember the disadvantages of the “cheaters” :

  1. There is no way to set the depth and time of viewing the site
  2. When you install the desired promotion region, you will receive users from all over Russia and the CIS.
  3. The unnatural behavior of the "employees" of the service on your site and on search results.
  4. One and the same “employee” can visit your site several times a week.

For myself, I decided that I would not use dubious gray methods in the future. And I do not advise you.
Thanks for attention!

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