Forum Moderators: open
At some point they will; but there are a ton of 'mom and pop' businesses' trying to figure out how to make them work (which is nearly impossible). In due time the one's commonly discussed will disappear, but there will always be new 'awful' programs popping up that people will try.
Is your ROI the same on 2nd/3rd tier PPC programs as it is on Overture and Google? If you can honestly say that yes your profit margin is just as good (or better) than I great for you.
PPC is not about click prices, it's about conversion. Sure prices factor into the overall ROI heavily, but 2,800 clicks at 12 cents a click and 4 sales is still a
major loss of time and money.
The other thing to keep in mind about 2nd/3rd tier PPC programs is to watch for trends of declining performance. YES these programs worked marginally for me at some point as well, but then distribution and increased competition sprung up causing the results to become unprofitable. Just keep an eye on this; this is EXACTLY what happened with FindWhat.
I'm just passing on my experiences'/advice; thing to think about.
Well said - I think this is something that is universal in advertising itself though. You can't just keep one ad up and expect to keep driving traffic for it for months on end. Some of my best PPC performing campaigns used thirty different ads for as many days. That means, people that searched for something multiple times within a month did not see the same creative or landing page - and I think it made a big differenec especially on the smaller PPCs where partners get in and out quickly.
You have to figure click fraud into the equation for any campaigns because it's quite clear that the search engines are doing nothing about it. If the campaign on {insert name of small PPC engine here} doesn't work because of click fraud; just pull the campaign... And don't sign long IO's with networks you aren't comfortable with.
Google, Overture, and Kanoodle's Content program.
Nothing else works as well as these three together. Kanoodle's keywords, enhance, findwhat, goclick dont warrant the effort. It took one of the sales reps along time to get me to come back to kanoodle and try their content product, but i can say I am happy I took the risk. There was so much volume on all my keywords campaigns on findwhat, kanoodle and others with no result regardless how targeted the terms and creative were. enhance sent me more volume than overture on some terms...imagine that. This whole industry is up against fraudulent activity which makes us advertisers against it as well. The object is to catch it and alert the companies and get what you are due. I hear so many people not tracking there results the right way, some who dont even know where there conversions are coming from.
You are going to pay more obviously as we all know on these products, but remember you get what you pay for.
They will do this because it is what will make advertisers successful. The smart PPC networks know that it is all about getting and keeping the advertisers. And if click fraud is important to advertisers (which it is), the smart ones will attack the problem.
