Yes, for example...
Say you had a $100 advertising budget. You could either:
A.) Pay $100 to have your banner shown on a site, people who like your banner and would genuinely be interested in your services click it, go to your site and most likely sign up.
B.) Pay a ton of people who don't even know what your site is or care what it's about to click on your link then just close the window, ending with no sign ups or very few. (These people might not even speak the language that your site is in).
I think A would clearly be the answer as you would only want people that are genuinely interested in your site to visit it. Like I said we can track who actually signs up for an account by the referral IDs, NOT ONE person that 3aKat referred signed up for an account. They clicked the link then closed the page so they could get paid. What actually made us notice what was going on was a bunch of people from Japan were following that referral ID. I would say there is a pretty good chance those people from Japan probably have no idea what the site was about and might not even beable to read English.
You might as well go into your stats program and just increase the visitor number by 10,000 instead of paying for someone to go to your site that genuinely is not interested in it.
If I'm somehow seeing this the wrong way please let me know.
-Corey