I’ve only been evaluating traffic exchanges as an advertising source for about a year, so maybe the information I’d like to see is out there somewhere and I simply haven’t seen it.

Obviously, there is no shortage of individuals and organizations that rank traffic exchanges. There’s the “Traffic Exchange List,” your own “Hit Exchange News,” the “Affiliate Funnel,” and of course the monster of ‘em all, the “TestHoopla” report. There are also a number of folks who publish subjective lists of their favorite traffic exchanges on their websites.

There is certainly no shortage of statistical information regarding virtually every facet of the traffic exchange industry!

However—

—as an ADVERTISER, I could care less about an Alexa ranking, or the number of members, or hits/unique ratios, etc, etc. Naturally, all these figures can be a good indication of RELATIVE performance. But!—

As an ADVERTISER the only data I care about are:

1) The cost per thousand visitors
2) The length of time it took for an exchange to deliver those thousand visitors
3) The number of “actions” that resulted from those thousand visitors. By “actions” I mean either the actual cash-in-hand sales of a product, or downloads of a free report, or opt-ins to a list.
4) The click-to-”action” ratio, and finally,
5) The cost per “action”

I, for one, would LOVE to see such a “Top Ten” list published by someone on a weekly basis. In my opinion, such a list would give a DEFINITIVE and OBJECTIVE analysis of the top exchanges.

Does such a recurring list exist?

Stan Stuchinski
Author, “Secrets of the Big Dogs”
Webmaster, GuruUniversity.net