Findwhat.com traffic

Why is there a difference in the traffic quality?

[jsglobal]

I've just recently gotten into pay per click search engines and started out with Overture and Google AdWords. My results were okay, but not enough to give me a positive ROI considering the high cost of the keywords I was bidding on. Just a few days ago I opened an account with Findwhat. What I'm finding is that I'm getting a very comparable amount of traffic from what I was getting with the other two. However, not only was the conversion rate less, but the number of pages clicked on per visit was MUCH less (I have a Yahoo store so I can tell). Could anyone explain why this would be the case? It seems to me like if people are searching for a term that I'm bidding on, and are enticed enough by my ad to click on it, the quality of the visitor should be the same no matter what search engine I used to get them to my site. Could Findwhat be pulling some strings to make it seem like I'm getting more real traffic than I'm actually getting? If anyone has any ideas, please let me know. Thanks.

[travelhuni]

Hi there. I too use PPC SE's. I can't say for sure, but it is widely known that some PPC's have problems with fraudulent clicks. Don't know how they ever track it, but i decided that the only way to know for sure is to watch my COST per Search engine, and see how many SALES i get from each search engine and determine total ROI for each. In my case I promote affilate programs, so i have to set up a separate way to track where the SALES are coming from.

By the way, i use www.7search.com a lot, they are easy to use and put your keywords live right away. Also www.goclick.com is a good CHEAP one with decent traffic, although not as many clicks as the other 2. They also put your keywords live right away (as opposed to waiting 3 days for Findwhat.)

I've not had much luck with either Overture or Google, they are cumbersome to use and too darn expensive.

Good luck

[jeffb]

I've noticed much poorer conversions with FindWhat than with other PPC providers, too. I checked the pages where our FindWhat clicks come from. FindWhat seems to feed a lot of businesses that have set up cookie-cutter sites whose only difference is the domain names, each of which is some well-searched keyword. A lot of these sites seem to have nothing to them but their FindWhat search feeds.

I've always questioned how such spammy looking sites manage to draw the kind of traffic that Alexa rankings seem to indicate they get and often wonder if they are run by opportunists who create their own "traffic" to increase their click-throughs.

What makes me wonder this is that most of the domain names that send us traffic through FindWhat have keywords that, by no stretch of the imagination, have anything to do with our product. It just seems strange that people searching on pure search sites that have such unrelated domain names would click on us. It seems more random.

Suspicious, yes, but no substantial evidence that I can approach FindWhat with.

We've let our FindWhat account go inactive lately, with the plan of giving it one last chance to produce conversions over Christmas. If all we get then is more empty clicks, we'll give up completely on FindWhat.

[eWhisper]

It seems to me like if people are searching for a term that I'm bidding on, and are enticed enough by my ad to click on it, the quality of the visitor should be the same no matter what search engine I used to get them to my site.

This isn't true at all. Each search engine has a different average demographic and a different quality of partner sites. So depending on your average consumer profile, this will change which engine you'd prefer to have the traffic come from. The others should still be relevant, but maybe not quite as relevant.

Search partners also make a big difference. If their partner sites are just people trying to generate click thrus so they get some cash, you'll get low quality traffic. If their partners are truly involved in the product or in search, then the quality will be higher.

The search engines are not created equal, they don't market to the same crowd, draw the same type of people to them, and in turn, the results you get will vastly diffeer.

[mfishy]

Findwhat.com generates nearly all of it's traffic through their partners as does overture.

The difference is, that Overture has partners like msn and Yahoo!, while Findwhat partners with webmasters who are out to make a buck any which way they can.

In short, it is MUCH more difficult to become an Overture traffic partner and their filtering is more stringent.

[jeffb]

I just did a traffic analysis of a random sampling of the sites that send visitors to us through FindWhat and Ah-ha feeds. Nearly 100% bounce rate. Click on the link and immediately leave. Hmm.

Then I followed some of the links back to the pages that sent them. Most of the sites have no findable link to us and some of the sites aren't even findable themselves.

I'm sure FindWhat and Ah-ha are doing all they can to prevent fraud, but it's advisable to keep a close eye on the quality of your clicks to detect similar patterns. We snoozed on this and paid for a lot of clicks that it looks like we should have questioned a long time ago.

[jsglobal]

Thank you to everybody who has responded to my post. I guess it's too bad that Overture and AdWords are so damn expensive. At least with those services, there's credible evidence that I'm actually getting the traffic they're claiming I'm getting. It's also too bad that free traffic seems to be getting harder and harder to receive. These pay per clicks are getting frustrating already.

[akande]

I have come to realize that people complain mainly about how bad the traffic is that comes through Findwhats partners named hotbar.com and advertising.com.

Does anyone have any idea of how the partnerships with these sites work?

Do they use automatic pop-unders that open the findwhat.com urls leading to their advertisers or do they use regular searches.

If they use pop-unders, as an advertiser, I don't think I would mind as long as the pop-under is "very" relevant to the keywords I have chosen.

[WonderWoman]

Hi--I work for ah-ha.com and since I work in distribution I know a great deal of how these partnerships operate. . .

PPC partnerships vary, but in general this is how it works . . . Say FindWhat has a partnership with Hotbar.com (since you used them in a previous example). FindWhat makes their advertisers available to Hotbar by giving them some sort of code or a datadump--this means that when someone is on Hotbar and they do a search for "cars", Hotbar will similtainously grab the results for that keyword from their own advertisers (if the have their own) and all their partners at the same time. Each PPC gives Hotbar a percentage of the revenue per click to display their advertisers (so if your paying $.10 on the keyword "cars" and they agree to split the revenue 50/50, FindWhat gets $.50 and Hotbar get's $.05 for each click). Then, once Hotbar has all the results (from their partners and their own advertisers) they display these in order of bid price and rev. share.

However, that is just one way an advertisers results are used. At ah-ha for example we use text links, banners, pop-ups, etc, but they are all keyword targeted. We are very strict about keyword targeting (unless someone specifically buys a run-of-site banner campaign).

Anyway, that's a basic overview. . .