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I guess it remains to be seen how quick MSN will update their directory listings..
I notice that there is no way to specify that a site shouldn't appear for a particular search phrase. How exactly is Looksmart/Lookstupid going to deal with this kind of problem?
It is one thing to charge people for click throughs on phrases that are relevant, but it is a whole different thing to charge for useless clicks over which I have no control.
I get the impression that Looksmart has tried to introduce pay per click without any of the advantages, like complete bidding, keyword and position control, but still with all of the disadvantages, such as irrelevant results, costly useless click throughs and so on.
yes similiar here, 80%of clicks are off topic due to the wording of my listing throwing up a popular 2 word keyphrase that is OT for me, i will be burning my monthly allowance in a day and most of the clicks will be irrelevant.
Are we now being held ransom if we have a good ranking and don't want to lose it? I've looked through the L$ info and don't see this issue addressed. Still waiting to hear from them. Anyone have insight into this?
From my perspective, there is no such thing as "bad traffic," just a bad "use" of traffic. Maybe it's just me...
True story: Last year a Japanese portal had a glitch -- they accidentally listed a link to a crafts site I maintain with the link text "Yahoo Directory". In 1 hour the site burned many $$$ of bandwidth for no sales at all.
No traffic is bad traffic when it's FREE. It can get quite expensive paying for off topic traffic, especially if the product or service you are selling is specialized.
If its irrelevant traffic from a faulty search provider (Advertising provider - lets cut to the chase and not even call them a search engine or directory) it becomes "Awful traffic."
Like running ads for feminine products during NFL games.. bad "relevance" = bad idea.
Each ad media needs a careful look.
Bad traffic is any traffic you pay for in time OR cash that does not return well on investment (condensed) like running ads for feminine products during NFL games.. bad "relevance" = bad idea.
Well said, bigjohnt. Speaking of traffic and relevance, did you ever get that tracking system in place that you were looking for a year ago? (http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum39/102.htm?highlight=bigjohnt) To link search terms, visitors,and sales?
<edit>If so, could you sticky me with any details, as I guess this is not the proper thread to discuss?</edit>
Of course, the whole L$ spin on the situation makes things a bit less cut-and-dry I understand; but, ANY traffic means that human eyeballs are looking at YOUR page out of the billions -- what you will do with that reality is the question.
If after some intense creative marketing thinking, you still can't come up with a way to "convert" those mis-directed viewers into "revenue" in SOME way, then certainly those were wasted click-thrus.
In business, you can either develop a market for a product, or a product for a market. With those mis-directed clicks, as long as you know what product they were originally searching for, you can learn how to adjust your site in some way to be THE "one" to answer their request; traffic to sales conversion is never "easy," but that doesn't mean that those click-thrus are "bad."
The only way that this traffic would be bad is in tedsters situation where there was no feisable way for him to answer their request for the "Yahoo Directory;" but, I imagine that particular situation is rare indeed.
Just my $.02
Why do third-party tracking software packages (like Webtrends) show that I'm not getting as many clicks as LookSmart is reporting?
There can be a number of reasons why third-party software can fail to capture the correct amount of clicks, all of which arise from the way LookSmart counts the source of clicks. LookSmart counts the number of times a user clicks on one of our listings in the LookSmart Network. Many third-party tracking systems only count the number of times a user actually visits or "lands" on your site. If a site is broken, down for maintenance, or if the site or user has a poor connection, they may not be able to reach your website. Because LookSmart cannot control whether a given page is operational, or whether users have a good connection, we do not count clicks in this way. We count a click each time a user clicks on the link in your listing, not each time a user "lands" on your website. In addition, clicks may not register through third-party click tracking methods for a variety of reasons including, but not limited to, the following:
If the third-party tracking system relies on referral information to track the source of visits, that system may undercount clicks from LookSmart, because many of LookSmart's listings are distributed to other sites. In other words, clicks from our partner sites may not register LookSmart as the initial source of those listings, and as a result, third-party tracking would not attribute those clicks to LookSmart. For example, your listing will likely generate clicks registered not only from LookSmart, but clicks from our partners, such as MSN, Juno, and AltaVista, as well.
If the third-party system counts users or "sessions" instead of actual clicks (as LookSmart does), the third-party data would likely be quite different from LookSmart data. Typically, tracking systems that count users or sessions use the IP address of the first click to establish where the visitor came from. An IP address is a unique code that identifies a user's computer when it connects to the Internet. Due to the use of proxy servers (which can mask individual IP addresses) by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and businesses, many clicks coming from different users could appear to these tracking systems as one user or session, rather than tens or hundreds of different clicks. This would cause third-party numbers to be significantly lower than numbers provided by LookSmart.
If your site is not operational, if the link is dead, or if the user is prevented from accessing your site for any reason, LookSmart would still register that a user clicked on the link in your listing. For this reason, it is imperative that you ensure that your link and your site is functional 24 hours, seven days a week as you are responsible for all clicks generated by your LookSmart listing even if your site is not operational.
I would suggest lookcreditcard.com
If after some intense creative marketing thinking, you still can't come up with a way to "convert" those mis-directed viewers into "revenue" in SOME way, then certainly those were wasted click-thrus.
(2) Are you suggesting that you can subsidize unwanted Pay-per-click traffic with some other affiliate relationship? We're talking 15 cents a click with L$ and that ain't chump change. You're not going to get anyone to pay you 15 cents a click for traffic you deliver to them, perhaps you could become an Overture partner for the unwanted topic and then set aside a decent portion of your interface design for the un-related, off-topic Overture sponsored revenue-sharing results and hope that you can attract lots of unwanted traffic to your site.
Then the site could become like Oingo aka Applied Semantics dba DomainPark and just invent ways to derive revenue from meaningless traffic. But the reason is works for them is that each unwanted visit doesn't have a 15 cent cost.
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The suggestion of monetizing unwanted, off-topic 15 cent PPC traffic from L$ with affiliate relationships makes no sense to me.
