I mostly keep Overture around because of the listing with MSN and a few other SE's. My current daily spends at Overture are under $2 a day verses $10+ at Google, and if the Trends keep up, the gap will widen greatly.
Some people do well on some PPCs, and poorly on others, and vice versa, it's a matter of testing out the various places to see what works for you.
The gameroom stuff ad cost per dollar of sales come in about like this:
$.08 - LookSmart
$.15 - Overture
$.21 - AdWords
In real estate, the numbers are different but LookSmart is the best, followed by Overture, and AdWords brings up the rear.
With AdWords you have more options to hone in on the money words and eventually these numbers may be reversed but LookSmart and Overture are not as time intensive when it comes to getting campaigns to work IMHO.
I want people to know they are clicking on an ad to a comercial site to go somewhere that wants them to spend money.
Overture CTR rates have always been higher for us, and a lot of it is due to the fact that they look like normal listings in a lot of places (there are places they look like google ads).
I don't think click throughs matter as much as ROI. I'd rather have a terrible click through rate and a very high ROI than vice versa. Google makes a bit of exception to that rule as the high CTR rates does bring down the CPC a lot.
Overture and LookSmart combined supply about the same volume as AdWords.
That depends on your product. There are some products that target the yahoo audience and gather a lot more clicks from there than from AdWords. And vice versa.
<spelling edit>
[edited by: skibum at 9:16 pm (utc) on Dec. 5, 2003]
I just finished putting together a November report for one of my clients. These include content syndication for both Overture and AdWords.
Visits:
AdWords - 23,961
Overture - 23,236
Looksmart - 4,199
Not sure if this goes against the TOS or not w/ specifics - no market or KW is mentioned...
Edit - I can't spell
[edited by: Shak at 11:05 pm (utc) on Dec. 5, 2003]
[edit reason] lets keep away from specifics please. [/edit]
Our ROI on Adwords is twice what we get using Overture. We like Adwords bcuz we are not competing with a bunch of irrelevant ads. Plus Adwords has AWA!
Looksmart is a bust.
-c
Ultimately, results will vary for every advertiser in every sector for every PPC.
I know some will never use Adwords, others will not use Overture, some will not use Looksmart.
My recommendation would be to invest some R & D into as many of the PPC's as it seems logical to use based on the demographics of your intended search audience (location/age/socio-economic), and try to do as close to a like for like comparison as you can, and then evaluate after you've spent your R & D budget.
Don't try anything unless you can commit to a month's worth of traffic, and always ensure that your daily limit is set to as high as is needed for the ads to be shown all the time, othereise it distorts the results, if you use broad match on Google then do the same on Overture (yes they also do broad match).
Nobdy can advise you definitively on whether OV or LS or FindWhat etc.. will work for your site.
$2 a day.......that's 20 clicks at most, must be some obscure keywords in the pool for that level.
sort of. Most of my Overture keywords are in the 5 to 7 cent range. Before the end of the grandfather clause, they were 1 to 3 cents. My best money words are only 9 cents. One reason that i am not getting as many clicks is that my competion must be crazy. They have bid some of the terms up to 50 to 70 cents. For these products, I am selling higher end ones for $20 to $40 and can't justify paying more than 15 cents to Google much less Overture traffic which doesn't convert as well for me. My competators are mostly selling the cheap lowend mass produced pieces for $6 to $10. Unless they are having outstanding conversions, or they are making a lot of multi sells, I can't see how they are justifying it. I know people say that you can make it up on volume, but since i make all my own pieces, that just means I'm working for less.
Yes I'm a bottom feeder on the PPC's. My highest ever bid was 18 cents on Overture which was when i determined that the ROI just wasn't that good. On Google i actually have a number of groups with a max CPC of 15 cents, but they usually only cost me 8 to 13 cents because of my CTR. That is a good thing about Adwords. If you keep a high CTR, you don't have to be in the bidding wars and can keep your advertising costs down. I curently have a total budget of $13/day which I thought I would never do, but it is returning great sales. I'm not sure if I will keep the same level after the holidays, but for now I can justify it since my $100 to $300 items are flying out right now. Adwards has run about 2% of total sales for me which I'll take any day. Even better I picked up a wholesale account off an 8 cent click that will continue to produce sales in the future.
