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This seems damn expensive compared to the minimum bid of 1 cent on the .com version - at today's rates it is 7 times the price.
Seems a little unfair on us UK guys if you ask me.
We feel that five pence is still a very valuable deal to have your listing on our site, since marketing costs in the UK are in general higher then they are in the US ... market research showed us that the five pence minimum bid is a competitive price when it comes to advertising
tools
Hope you are right Brett, otherwise this seems a very steep price increase.
...GoTo United Kingdom launches on November 3rd!...
They are taking keyword bids, but only via the phone at the moment.
All seems a bit backward to me.
Also, just read the UK faq on GoTo.com. What's this £10 sign-up fee about? That isn't a feature on .com is it?
Looks like more rip off for the UK consumer...
I had my little talk with the nice goto.com person.
He said all bidders for the KW / KWs will start at 5 pence.
\They will all be raising their bids at the same time.
Clicking on your site to see who you are.
We will wait a week to raise our bids.
".....I have also attached an excel template with your converted terms. If you wish to make changes to your search terms, titles, descriptions or bids, please use the DirecTraffic Center after November 2, 2000. We are unable to process modification requests for the UK market before the listings actually go online....".
The spreadsheet has my existing goto terms and bids, including .01 bids, I assume they are going to round these up! I wonder if they will round my higher bids down?
Going to be fun on the 3rd!
[quicken.excite.com...]
makes you wonder if this has been partly driven by the poor(being polite)(VERY!!) results from there hopeless inktomi database.
Freeserve will certainly bring them traffic.
>where does that leave INK in the UK
I think where we have been for about the last 6 mths high and dry, don't quote me on this but I also beleave ink supports ( HA) lineone,ukmax(yet another great uk SE),msn uk, breathe, bt.com, ntl, aol.
Be intersting to see where www.uk.goto.com (which is what the address will be) will turn up other than Freeserve. The Goto guy was keen to point out that other ISPs will be using it but as negotiations were not complete blah, blah,blah.......! - forgot to ask whether there will be a TV Ads
Wonder how long it's going to be before the price comes down to what it should be (1p), or is it another case of 'Rip Off Britain' ??
Funny thing is that the referal was not a paid listing, but from a page that has recently found its way into the Inktomi database. Slurp found this page all by itself and so it didn't cost me a bean to get a #2 ranking for a reasonably competitive (in my field) page.
Am I lucky or what ? :)
It does appear they are PUSHING you guys/gals from across the pond from both ends.
First, the minimum bid is 5 pence
Then they only show top 10 on first page.
US site is top 40
With a good title and description, you can get hits at postion 9 & 10. I'd sure want to be on that first page.
I have my U.S. goto setup and have 20 terms and am still adding. There are still good obscure terms that pull good traffic for 1 cent. Sure hope this helps.
To setup a UK account I just noticed they are waiving the 10 pound setup fee until April 2001. Does anyone know how much 5p is in terms of U.S. money and am I allowed to submit .com and .net domains to Goto UK????
Thanks.
8 times as expensive as U.S. Do you know whether my .com and .net are ok for Goto UK?
I see a lot of great terms wide open like one that is $3.50 USD and no takers yet in UK. Good opportunity. So 50 pounds will get me 1000 hits? Anyone know the exchange rate for USD to pounds?
Will investigate more and see how well the sales are going. If the sales are not to hot I will hold off and see if they drop down to hopefully 1p.
Well, going to setup and account and put 50 pounds and go for it. This is how I see the Uk Goto scene right now and please someone tell me if I am wrong. For the categories that are very competive for me in the U.S. there almost zero movement since Oct 1st. Is it because it is too expensive or people just dont realize it is available? I am thinking that 5p is reasonable if you compare it with the same keyword that goes for $5USD presently. I have a good feeling of getting in on the ground floor of some great terms. Will let you know how it turns out.
On the other hand very few people seem aware of GoTo UK and you can hit the top on many terms for just 5p. I released a whole bunch of terms last night at 5p and almost every one ranked #1 today so I agree with you - get in now before the competition hots up. Fast setup by the staff at GoTo was appreciated (further evidence of a slow take-up?).
My site is a .com so I know that will work okay and I don't see any reason why a .net shouldn't work either.
Your results will pick up traffic from Freeserve.com which is a very popular ISP here in the UK and also from askjeeves.co.uk so your listings should reach a few people. I registered pre-launch and the traffic is now starting to flow - not as much as the USA version yet though.
So I agree with your analogy - forget the fact that the minimum bid is 7 times more expensive than in the USA and take advantage of the lack of competition.
Just about to signup for UK right now as I just added another 30 keyword phrases to Goto U.S. Have you had much trouble with people just clicking through for fun and draining your account?
However, I've seen a reasonable match on GoTo USA's figures with my own stats so I'm quite pleased with the integrity of their system. Once in a while they send an email saying they've creditted my account with a few cents to offset "unusual" click activity - I quote:
"We recently noticed some unusual clicks on your account that we had not caught
before they reached your account balance. For this reason, we have credited
your GoTo Account ID######### for $0.26. Your credit should be reflected
in your account balance in DirecTraffic Center. In addition, it will be
reflected in your September Client Activity Report, which will be sent to
you early next month."
Nice to know they're checking :)
On GoTo UK I had my terms (over 70 of them) added overnight - on GoTo USA (where I recently made some mods to existing terms) it took about three days. This makes me think that the staff at GoTo UK are relatively quiet at the moment and that's probably why there are some popular terms available at relatively cheap prices.
I received an email from client services recently saying that they were closed for the Thanksgiving holiday so the USA services will probably take a few days to add your new terms.
thanks for your interesting postings, I'm just getting into the idea now of paying and like yourselves have just taken the plunge with some keywords, I was surprised to see that some had no bid against them :)
Do you have any idea on the turn around from submission I submitted my bids yesterday AM ?
A glaring example is for the term 'life insurance' - only 5 people have bids on the term and #1 and #2 are slugging it out at an over 50p bid - 3 and 4 are fighting it out at around 12p and #5 is sitting there quite happy at 5p! Insane bidding at the top!
It takes about 24 hours to get your terms in and new clients love it! You can get them top rankings in Freeserve within 72 hours and it takes the pressure of you while waiting for directories, google, inktomi et al!
I just hope the Freeserve listings don't get too swamped with US .coms out bidding us little guys! However, if surfers get turned off by it, there is the 'UK results only' option which favours .co.uk listings - just hope they use it.
I feel the problem with a lot of uk surfers is they don't fully understand how to use SE's and although Freeserve has a 'UK results only' option it would be interesting to know how many people actually click on it.
Mind you there are some interesting keywords on .com that are uk orientated so I've just picked up for some 1c ;)
