What a US Traffic Guarantee Can and Cannot Promise

Here is the whole answer in one table. The left column is what a vendor controls, so it can put it in writing. The right column is decided by somebody else: a search engine, an ad network, your analytics tag or your own visitors.

If a guarantee you're reading moves anything from the right column into the left, stop reading the sales page and open the refund policy instead. That's where a vendor writes down what it is actually willing to pay for.

Each of these is a statement about a mechanism, which means you can check it. For each one we quote how our own delivery policy words it for our Website Traffic and Realistic Traffic campaigns, because a guarantee is only as good as the sentence behind it.

These are the promises that turn up on pricing pages and can't be kept by anyone who sells traffic, including us.

Pricing pages squeeze a lot into the word "guaranteed". This table translates the common versions into what they can honestly mean, and where you'd go to check.

The last two rows are the fastest filter in this post. A vendor that writes either one has told you how the rest of its claims were written.

Here's the part most buyers only discover after a campaign looks empty in their reports: a traffic guarantee depends on the buyer's setup as much as on the vendor's delivery. These conditions come from our own delivery and support policies. Other vendors have versions of the same list, whether or not they publish it.

Take the Cloudflare row seriously. We'd rather lose the sale than have you switch off a protection your site depends on without thinking it through. If bot protection matters more to you than the traffic, an automated traffic guarantee isn't compatible with it, and that's a perfectly good reason not to buy.

There's a trade-off inside every US traffic guarantee that rarely gets said out loud: the more human the traffic, the less a vendor can promise about its timing. Software runs on a schedule. People turn up when they turn up.

Our own delivery policy shows the split. Automated Website Traffic campaigns start within 30 minutes to 6 hours and run to a daily band. Campaigns that rely on real clickers, listed in the policy as Premium Traffic, are "delivered based on the availability of our users/clickers across countries" and "usually take up to 30 days to deliver." Neither model is better in the abstract. They guarantee different things.

For a deeper look at the two delivery models, see real human clicks vs automated clicks. If the automated route fits, Website Traffic vs Realistic Traffic explains what the 3x price of Realistic Traffic buys: the same delivery and refund terms, with visits that scroll, move the pointer and click a link instead of loading a page and waiting.

This is the one part of a guarantee where the United States hands you a written yardstick. The Federal Trade Commission's Guides for the Advertising of Warranties and Guarantees (16 CFR Part 239) say a seller "should use the terms 'Satisfaction Guarantee,' 'Money Back Guarantee,' 'Free Trial Offer,' or similar representations in advertising only if the seller or manufacturer, as the case may be, refunds the full purchase price of the advertised product at the purchaser's request." The next paragraph adds that any "material limitations or conditions" should be disclosed "with such clarity and prominence as will be noticed and understood by prospective purchasers" (16 CFR 239.3).

Two caveats, stated plainly. The guides describe what the FTC treats as deceptive advertising rather than spelling out every case, and part of them is written specifically for consumer products, so read them as a benchmark for judging a traffic vendor's wording, not a ruling on it. This isn't legal advice. The standard is still a good one to hold any seller to: either the refund is full and on request, or the conditions are shown clearly before you pay.

Measured against that, our terms are a conditional refund, not an unconditional one, and you should hear that from us rather than discover it: 72 hours, first paid campaign, payment through Stripe or Razorpay, under 10% delivered. When a pricing page says "money back", find the page that lists the conditions. If there's no such page, the guarantee is whatever the vendor decides on the day you ask.

A guarantee you never test is a guarantee you never use. Timing matters because two limits in a typical refund policy run side by side: a clock (72 hours from purchase, in ours) and a delivery cap (no refund once more than 10% of the traffic has arrived). Whichever you hit first closes the window. Every number below is an example for illustration, not SparkCliks campaign data.

The setup. A site buys the SMALL Website Traffic plan: 300,000 page views and 100,000 unique visitors a month, with a daily band of 2,800 to 3,300, targeted at the United States. Before buying, its Google Analytics showed about 40 US sessions a day.

Where the 10% line falls. 10% of 100,000 visitors is 10,000. At the top of the daily band, that takes just over three days (10,000 divided by 3,300 is about 3.03). Counting page views gives the same answer, because every plan carries three page views per visitor. The campaign starts within 30 minutes to 6 hours of creation, so by hour 72 it has delivered for roughly 66 to 72 hours: about 7,700 to 9,900 visitors at this pace. At the default pace, the 72-hour clock closes the window before the 10% cap does.

The trap. Ask for the daily speed to be doubled on day one and the arithmetic flips. At 6,600 a day, 10,000 visitors arrive in about 36 hours, and your refund right ends there, well inside the 72. Run the audit at the default pace, and speed up once you're satisfied.

For the server log sample, one line on a standard access log lists the addresses hitting a campaign URL, most frequent first:

grep "GET /landing-page" access.log | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -20

If your site sits behind a CDN, the first field is the CDN's address rather than the visitor's, so use the forwarded client IP field your host logs instead.

How to read a mismatch. There are three shapes, and each points somewhere different:

1. The server log shows the hits and analytics doesn't. Something between the visit and your tag is dropping it: bot protection, a consent banner that holds the tag back, or an analytics filter. That's a setup condition, and support can help you find it.
2. Neither shows the hits. That's a delivery failure, and exactly what a guarantee is for. Report it with timestamps.
3. Both show the hits but some countries are wrong. Look at the size of the remainder. A small share outside the US is lookup disagreement, which the policy warns about. A large share means targeting isn't doing its job, and that's worth a ticket.

For a fuller forensic pass through every report, how to spot bought traffic in analytics walks through each one in detail.

Run these against any US traffic guarantee, ours included. If you can't answer yes to the first six, you aren't buying a guarantee yet. You're buying a hope.

1. Does the guarantee name what it covers (visits, page views or clicks) and how many?
2. Does it say where the visits are sent from, and what kind of IP addresses deliver them?
3. Is there a written start window and a daily pace?
4. Is there a make-up clause for missed days?
5. Does it say how and when you verify delivery, and where you report a mismatch?
6. Is the refund policy published, conditions included, before checkout?
7. Is your own side ready: analytics tag firing, bot protection decision made, server capacity checked?
8. Does anything on the page promise rankings, sales, undetectability or ad safety? This is the one you want to answer no.

Our terms answer the first six on the delivery policy and refund policy pages, and where they are conditional, the conditions are printed there too. One cheap test before any of this: our free NANO tier (6,000 page views, no card) will show you whether visits reach your analytics at all. It can't test the US part, though, because country targeting is listed as a paid-plan feature, and free visits stop at 30 seconds. If our terms pass your checklist, the plans and their daily bands are on the Website Traffic page.