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Looksmart doesn't give you the ability to see the times your keywords were accessed or anything, they just tell you how many searches they delivered. In December 2003, Looksmart billed me several thousand dollars for 4,500 something clicks. According to my web stats they delivered closer to 1,000. I use a tracking URL on all of my advertising, so every click they delivered would have had a url of example.com/?t=looksmart. In other words, even if it came from a partner/third party site, the hit would still have been to the URL with the tracking data.
I use iwebtrack AND my local log files. When I contacted them they e-mailed me a dispute form (interesting that they had such a formal procedure for disputes in the first place). I gave them everything I had, showing them exactly when the clicks I had were delivered, copies of the web stats, etc. They insisted the clicks had been delivered and that their system can't be wrong. I verified that links from partner sites did indeed include the tracking URL and that it wasn't getting dropped off.
After about 3 weeks of jerking me around, asking for more information, etc. they were still unable to prove where the extra 3,500 clicks came from. I ended up closing my account and charging back the purchase and haven't heard from them since.
Has anyone else had this kind of problem with them?
[edited by: seth_wilde at 9:34 pm (utc) on April 13, 2004]
I recently started a campaign with LookSmart after some of my direct competitors began a bidding war on Overture. The biggest complaint I have thus far is with the 3 day reporting delay. This makes it nearly impossible for me to make adjustments without spending money on useless clickthroughs.
However, I have not seen them cheating me on clickthroughs. Honestly, I am beginning to think LookSmart is more trouble than it is worth.
