Are all Pay-Per-Clicks created Equal

[rightliner]

OK, so here's the question that "seems" to have an obvious answer. What I want to know is are all PPC created equal - in the sense that certain PPC's for some reason seem to end up with a higher CLICK-THRU rate for advertising on the traffic they send you? Can anybody address this? Statisticly speaking, shouldn't all queiries/visitors on "horseshoes" (for example), no matter what search engine they come from, be just as likely to click on horseshoe ads? What I'm getting at: Does anybody see major differences in your ad-click-thru rates for keywords - based soley on the pay-per-click search engine that your traffic/visitors came from? (when comparing the big pay-per-click engines)

thanks!

[disgust]

no, there's quite a bit of reasoning why they WOULDN'T be the same.

take this for starters:

what do internet-savy users use for a search engine? google, probably. what do new people to the net use? msn, yahoo.

CTRs and conversions tend to be a lot higher on overture than they are with adwords.. :)

[rightliner]

Interesting....that makes a lot of sense, and seems to really favour yahoo, and msn then. Who advertises for msn? Overture still? Actually, I'm using more pay-per-clicks right now that depend on searchengines like excite, dogpile, etc... Lots of hits, but my conversion rates thus far are less than impressive. While another similar pay-per-click gives my unbelievable click-thru rates on the same type of theme website. Any thoughts? Of the major pay-per-clicks besides the big 2, anyones to avoid. Kanoodle, 7searh , search123, Enhance Intactive (ah-ha), Looksmart, etc.... What do you think?

[Michael Anthony]

The only two PPC services worth using, IMO, are G and OV. Many of the others run content-like stuff like Adsense but with much less strict publisher controls, which means that you get poor quality visitors and poor conversions.

[SlimKim]

I agree with the previous post that G and OV are the only ones worth the trouble for most marketers ...

... however it all depends on what you market ...

The reason G and OV are the only ones suitable for most is ... they are the only ones who can drive traffic in significant numbers for many keywords.

The only logical way to look at any PPCs is to consider two factors (A) are you geeting enough positive return on your investment to make the ads worthwhile and (B) is the traffic (conversions) amount enough to bother with?

This is assuming you are like us and have to avoid red ink like the plague. If you are a fortune 500 company that believes in building the brand with non measurable result ads ... then this advice may not apply to you.

:)

[rightliner]

Well forutune 500 , I am not - so thanks for the advice. Does anyone find it odd that my campaign in one PPC does really well, and the same campaign in another PPC does awful? To that point, does anyone have any experience with Enhance Interactive (ah-ha.com)? Thanks!

[GuitarZan]

Hey,

I have heard people get great ROI/profits off of PPC's like FindWhat, but I don't hear many success stories from those PPC SE's.

The bottom line is testing. Gather up your targeted KeyWords, and give them a try. Through tracking you should be able to see if they convert or not.

All the Best,

C.K.