Which is the best value for money? Paying Overture for pay-per-click or thinking long term and stumping up the £149+ for MSN UK inclusion via Looksmart?
Which gives the best ROI? (and, believe me, I hate the term ROI!)
Thanks :)
Let me expand it a little. What gives the best results? As we all know, not every click turns into a sale (shame!) So forget driving traffic and click amounts - what has converted the best for the money?
Inktomi, via positiontech, is pretty much a necessity, for the less popular terms, and is good for tracking and analysing, key term usage of searchers.
Overture is useful for the competitive terms, that other similar orientated sites fell are worth having their site in the top spot.
I would suggest using certainly Looksmart at least one listing, and as many ink page listings as poss, as this also feeds hotbot.co.uk, and others. Overture is your call, certainly worth signing up and seeing how valuable the key words / terms are to your competitors !
This is with new technology terms, where we get a lot of tyre kickers price comparisons.
E-commerce sites are great for deep exposure as Kevin said. I'd be inclined to go to product specific, which will give you the best conversion rates of clicks/sales. And track the traffic like nobodys business. If a keyword doesn't work then you may have a poorly written creative. If you have a poorly written creative, then you've probably got poorly written titles and descriptions (assuming you did them both!). So neither route will give you as good an ROI as you could get.
A well constructed and managed PPC campaign will give you good results, this will give you the profit to conduct directory submissions, which will give you good long term exposure, and if your e-commerce site works well with search engines then you'll be set for life!
Even now inspite of all the stuff about MSN etc.. I'd still say that BT Looksmart should be a definite Pay For Inclusion. NTL, BT Openworld and Tiscali are not insignificant traffic providers, as is Alta Vista UK. All with the exception of AV are heavly advertising on television here and are benefitting from the upsurge in Broadband subscribers. For £149 plus VAT it's a snip, especially as it is still a one off payment.
Each of the PFI/PPC/SEO models will deliver different things. If you want just sales, then PPC is your best bet, definitely.
Personally, I think if you set up an Overture Uk account (pay-per-click) you can get as high a listing as you want on MSN (UK). (Nuff said)
You left off from the end there...... if you are prepared to pay the price
I've just done some quick checks and for "serviced office" top price is close to £15 for #1, "online casino" £10.50 for #1 "personal loan" £8.00 for #1 "hosting" $25.00 on Overture U$
I am so in the wrong line of work!
