espotting

ever heard of espotting?

[philrkelly]

I took a couple of calls earlier this week from espotting.com, claiming that they were a UK search engine with 2 million hits a day.

I'd never heard of them (have you?) and is 2 million hits a day an achieveable figure for a UK-based service or do we suspect the figures to be inflated?

Phil

[makemetop]

Espotting is a pay-per-click SE which is probably the only viable competitor to UK GoTo here. Currently their results appear on Ask Jeeves UK and several other less well known affilites. Rates are the same as UK GoTo with a 5p minimum bid - but they did give you a £25 bonus on sign up (not sure if they still do). They also had a team of staff who would research all your keywords and phrases for your site as part of their service and suggest them to you who did a pretty good job. Back up results are from Inktomi with UK filter and I get quite a few hits from the free Inktomi listings via their affiliate search boxes and a few via Ask Jeeves. If they are including affiliate searches and Ask Jeeves in their figures they are probably accurate. If you feel the need to go on another PPC engine as well as GoTo - then Espotting is a lot better than any others out there - however if you are making a choice of which PPC engine to go for - GoTo has a greater exposure and would get you more traffic.

[NFFC]

>or do we suspect the figures to be inflated?

Tell them to show you the proof, you are a potential advertiser after all. ;)

>a few via Ask Jeeves

Jeeves only shows espotting if there are paid for listings, same deal as with the GoTo results.

[makemetop]

Watch Espotting for referring completely irrelevent searches through their very bad matching algo at Ask UK like this [ask.co.uk]. Anyone looking for someone else's web site gets a list of web design companies and web site promotion firms (like me). I've dropped down my bids as I was getting 4 to 5 hits an hour for people looking for relations web sites!