Uk v US

goto

[tigger]

I have set up accounts with both goto.com & .co.uk with roughly the same keywords on each. My first thoughts were that the .com site & partners would generate the most traffic out of the two.

How wrong can a person be??!! Although the .co.uk site only passes information to Freeserve (so far!) the traffic from these sites far outweighs that from the .com se's.

Is anyone else finding the same??

I have also noticed that the service from the .co.uk does seem somewhat better, I don't know if this is down to workload but I have sent a request to .com and am still waiting, whilst the .co.uk replied the next day!

Has anybody heard of any ripples relating to other uk se's taking onboard the goto.co.uk database??

Tigger

[rpking]

I've had sets of similar keywords at similar positions (although not exactly) in both for the past couple of weeks or so.

The FreeServe traffic is certainly pushing a lot of traffic through GoTo UK. If they sign up with other major UK portals eg NTL, then there is a lot of potential traffic.

On the downside, I've found that when FreeServe kicked in, the bids rose sharply.

[makemetop]

I'm finding the same thing. Freeserve outweighs the US .com partners in referrals. There are also loads of areas on UK Goto where there are no bids at all, so I have clients at #1 for many of their main key phrases on Freeserve at 5p bids. This is due, I think, to the lack of research from newbies buying key phrases - they go for the main ones and forget about two and three word phrases.

Interestingly I do not seem to have suffered much by the increase in bids pushing down my ranking on the 1st page. Quality of the referral seems to have increased.

I'm also getting referrals from UK Ask Jeeves.

[tigger]

it's just a shame we are paying 7 times the price, the initial payment I made to .co is now in need of topping up, but the .com has only had 25$ so far taken out.

I completely agree with you on some of the bids available a friend of mine who's site I built has just picked a load of 5p bids in quite a competive field

I've never had anything from ask jeeves, but I did have look around but couldn't find any listing from GoTo but to be honest have never liked their site, so I didn't give it much time.

Makemetop: where's your affilate listing gone in splut ?
and how was your trip to london ?

[makemetop]

tigger

Goto only comes up for paid for listings on ask uk, so a search which has no paid results does not show on Ask Jeeves.

I moved my link to Splut to an internal page so not that many people click on it! I think I'm between 40-50 on their affiliates list.

London was busy, meetings with two big insurance companies but I can only take one as a client - so first come, first served! Drinks were too small though, measures are a third larger here and cheaper!

[tigger]

good luck with the insurance company I don't think you could be moving into a more competive market place on the SE's mind you looking at the bids it's not going to cost to much to get a high raking.(unlike the our US friends,silly bidding or what !!) yet another wide open door ;).

I'll have another look around AJ later thanks for the tip. found your splut link I'm somewhat lower than you, mind you I do like the splut site.

[vespa]

Tigger,
Following on from your comments in another thread, did you have any luck seeing your GoTo.com kw's appearing on the other GoTO US partners searches?

[tigger]

vespa

just checked with the following SE's

Netscape yes
AOL yes
Ask Jeeves nope
Dogpile yes
Go2Net yes
Searchalot.com yes
Findaroo.com yes
CNET.com yes
Compuserve yes
Mindpsring/Earthlink yes
Mamma.com yes
NBCi.com nope
Metacrawler yes
411web.com yes
AltaVista nope

This is probably one of the main reason why traffic from the .com site is so low, most of the above SE's are not exactly well known over here other than of course AOL and AV but AV is one of the few that is not showing anything.

hopefully things will change when lycos/hotbot start to show listings

[makemetop]

tigger

Your listings should be showing on HotBot and Lycos straight away, if you have any top 5 listings - that is where I get most of my US hits from - the rest from dogpile, netscape and goto itself - I think only 1 from AOL ever!

Thanks for the best wishes on the insurance - it is totally UK focussed, so should be OK (and I've done a pilot for one of the companies which worked pretty well for them). PPC is going to help a lot though - and they can afford it!

[tigger]

makemetop

thanks also in lycos/hotbot ;) nice to hear they have some pennys in the bank, mind you the bids so far on .co are pretty reasonable, I'ld expected so see high figures but was surprised to see top listing for insurance only at 36p, but I wonder just how high that will go