The company are going to call me back tomorrow and are offering to give me a banner in Lycos that appears at the top of all search results matching my keyword. The example he gave me is if you type 'computer' into www.lycos.co.uk then you'll see that in the top right a small banner appears embedded using Flash. If you then click on one of their competitors and ignore the banner then you'll see that their banner remains at the top of the page so you can't really get away from the company are advertising.
For the year I would be looking at £500 + VAT to select one keyword - if you were to select car for example then results for car hire, car buying, car selling etc etc would all display your banner unless someone had specifically bought a two word phrase. So, if a company then bought 'car buying' then your banner would still be displayed for those searching for 'car selling', 'car hire' etc but not car buying.
Does this make sense? It sounds like a good deal but I'm just a bit cautious that I was called as it has been my experience that any advertising ideas that result from cold calling are not worth doing!
Once again, many thanks for your help.
Chris Holgate
The thing to remember is that Lycos doesn't account for much traffic in today's search engine world.
You need to weigh up if you would receive enough targeted clicks to make your investment worthwhile.
They also could not quote me much in the way of search statistics.
Then they tried to sell me something else where I can get click throughs via Google & MSN where traffic is redirected to your site, and is not channeled via sponsored listings. This sounds a bit fishy to me.
Don't do it!
Here's a thread talking about Lycos advertising [webmasterworld.com ]. It's generally agreed that Lycos simply doesn't send the traffic any more.
I suspect that the company that phoned you might have been Touch PLC or one of it's relatives. Again there are a few threads around talking about this company (all bad).
Lycos really doesn't get a great deal of traffic now. You will also find that you probably won't be able to purchase any of the good single keywords that might actually draw some traffic. As well as that, you will be competing against the new premium links and the Kiti (sp?) boxes that they are pushing heavily on the search results.
Your £500 could go a lot further, advertising on Overture and Espotting. Supposing you paid 20p per click, you would get 2500 qualified visitors. Can you say the same for your banner?
I tend to assume that if a company is selling advertising on a temporal basis, like Lycos, then it is because the traffic simply isn't there to justify CPC or CPM advertising.
Yes, The Purple Circle is pretty well-known around here - and not for anything particularly good! Read the linked threads further up.
Save your money to spend on something that will actually give you a return.
The "impressions" they quoted came from where? I bet they marry up with the Overture figures for last month! They almost certainly aren't from Lycos!
Apparently Lycos won't give them access to any actual traffic information.
Kind Regards
Chris
think how much traffic overture, espotting, adwords you could get for your money...
Smiley
If you do decide to take it out [please don't] make sure you keep checking your keyword. Mine stopped showing on at least 3 occassions (that I know of) and I had to phone them up to get it reinstated.
They also promised me that it would show up for any search that contained my keyword - it did for about a month and then stopped.
Total waste of money, nobody uses Lycos any more.
The next thing they'll phone you with is a pointless link on MSN.
But that's another thread ....
DaveN
£500 for a listing for 2 words
£2000 for a single word.
Doug
