Looksmart Bidsmart wind down

Anybody got their refund?

[webdiversity]

As we all know BT Looksmart Bidsmart ceased operating at the end of January.

They said they would be refunding any positive balances held at that time.

I've not heard a peep out of them regarding refunds and wanted to know if anyone else had before I went and threw my dolly out of the pram.

If you think how many advertisers they had and how much each must have had on deposit, we are not talking insignificant amounts of money.

Anybody?

[Receptional]

We got billed for Feb clicks - but it was literally pennies as the results were still on a few portals, but luckily we were on account.

Dixon.

[webdiversity]

We only had three accounts, one was racking up the money but they stopped taking top-ups so we couldn't rectify the negative balance and the other two we couldn't spend money even if we had wanted to.

It would have been nice to have tidied up the loose ends, and give us the last remnants of the data, so we could bill the clients, but it's not proving easy to get the information out, as the company (BT Looksmart) is no more.

[Crazy_Fool]

not had a refund as far as i know (will have to check tomorrow). i opened one account with them just a couple of days before they announced closure, so there's the best part of £90 to come back on that.

[Crazy_Fool]

bank statement shows a refund on £48.15 on 20th Feb
unfortunately we can't log on to bidsmart any more to check if they've refunded the correct amount.

bidsmart had a very good interface - very easy to use and very easy to manage hundreds of listings. it'll be nice if espotting buys it cos the espotting interface is crap. (any espotting people reading this?)

[kara_b]

Crazy Fool

The Espotting interface is being updated, if you get the chance to see the Swedish version of Espotting, you will see the new interface which is being rolled out. It's a lot similar to other PPC interfaces, and much easier to use in my opinion.

[fom2001uk]

One of our clients got an email from them about refunds but it doesn't mention paying it.

Instead, they're trying to flog something else called "Performance Listings". How can a company which is now out of business, try and sell a client something else?

And what is "Performance Listings". I checked out the BT Looksmart site and found the section on performance listings. It looks a bit like old-fashioned Looksmart commercial listings, but there's no link to take you to more details.

Does anyone know what this is, and have you used it?

[kara_b]

Performance listings are similar to LookSmart commercial listings except that you can have a number of listings to different sections of your site (whereas Looksmart listings are supposed to be only one listing per site) and then it's on a pay per click basis.

They always tried to upsell us on these listings, but the price quoted was always quite a bit more than we were paying for other ppc traffic. I think they decide the PPC price depending on the topic of the site.

[webdiversity]

Premium Listings appear in the normal directory section of MSN, but are charged for on a CPC basis.

Usually, you can spot a Performance Listing as it tends to be "the company name - the keyword sector" as the listing and it usually nestles one or two below the top 3 sopnsored listings.

We've had mixed success, but you can attach tracking URL's and can also negotiate hard on the price. Now that BT and Looksmart are not in bed so to speak, I don't know if Looksmart are more or less price sensitive and there were some issues with Zealbot clicks appearing.