Pay-Per_Click Spike of 4000%

Last month I had a spike in clicks over 4000% Is that possible?

[mitchy231]

Last month on Looksmart, I had approximately 50 clicks for a specific catergory over a weeks period. This moth, over the same weeks period, I had 2150 clicks. That is over a 4000% spike in clicks! Is that possible? Am I getting scammed? I would love to get some input.

[Robino]

Sounds fishy. It's hard to say without knowing the details though. I would contact LookSmart if you're concerned about this.

[hobbnet]

very possible its fishy but check your conversion rates...

Did your conversions increase by a similar number? If so, I would be happy as hell. They could have just signed on a new partner that specializes in your area.

[nate_king1]

Are you getting scamed? I don't think so. LookSmart after losing MSN was getting new partnerships by the day from many smaller Search Engines and PPC engines.

"BrainFox, Findology, Superlogy.com and GenieKnows will join existing sites such as Lycos, InfoSpace (Dogpile, MetaCrawler, Excite), CNET's Search.com, Mamma.com, Cox-Internet.com and Apple's Sherlock."

Now I know that many of these search engines are getting popular and that is were you might see the large spike. "GenieKnows now handles 180 million searches a month, with only 2500 advertisers, they get give a lot of traffic to LookSmart."

Now the real question is are your leads converting?

[shareholder.com...]

[mitchy231]

Thanks for the replys. I contacted Looksmart and they said it was just a normal fluxuation. The only problem with this massive increse was I only had THREE conversions! So, needless to say I am not to happy. After speaking to a few (very unintelligent) Looksmart reps, the said I was targeting words like "palm pilot" and that is where a good amount of my clicks were going from. This is a complete 180 from what my business entails.

[bostonseo]

Typically huge surges in traffic do not convert at the same rate. CPC programs that do not alert you about significant new sources of distribution are shady is you ask me.

Personally I'd tell them to consider giving you some form of credit for 'excessively' poor traffic. Typically works for me. If they do not value your business and feedback move on and stop spending money with them.

[av613]

also you should consider using some kind of conversion tracking software that will show you which keywords converted and which did not.