My PPC Engine Reviews - Real Experiences - And Reports

[PPCExpert]

Hi everybody!

---------I TRIED--------
PPC ENGINES REPORTS REASONS

Google Adwords: Good Good coversion
Overture(Yahoo): Good Good conversion
Kanoodle: Bad Bad traffic
Looksmart: Not bad, not good Very expensive
7search: Bad Bad traffic
Findwhat(MIVA: Not bad, not good Bad conversion
Mamma.com: Not bad, not good Low Traffic

--------I'M NOT TRY YET-----
Brainfox
Enhance
Epilot
search123
searchfeed

Regards

[bostonseo]

Well you can save yourself a lot of time and money by ending your trials of all cpc programs out there. Yahoo and Google Adwords are really the only one's worth doing business with.

[ryanfromaustin]

I concur with PPCExpert. I can also speak on a couple of others:

Googe Adwords - Excellent traffic and conversions
Yahoo! Search Marketing (Overture) - Excellent traffic and conversions (lousy customer service)
Kanoodle - Complete scam
7search - Complete scam
Findwhat/Miva - Complete scam
Enhance - Complete scam
Epilot - Complete scam
Business.com - Medium traffic, good conversions
SuperPages.com - Low traffic, Fantastic conversions

[PPCExpert]

thank you for your comments

[skibum]

Has anyone noticed any change in the quality of traffic from LookSmart lately?

Got a call from a nice rep over there claiming they've gotten rid of the junk traffic partners but given past experiences, I don't have much faith in giving it another shot.

[Arik11]

What about shopping.com?

[edited by: seth_wilde at 3:03 pm (utc) on Sep. 21, 2005]

[inbound]

Looksmart:

IF they have got rid of the junk traffic then there's not going to be much traffic to be had.

If they haven't then, in their own words, you'll get junk.

I'd steer clear, or even ask them to buy your respect with a free credit to test their new, better traffic.

[shorebreak]

Looksmart is now distributing its results in a backfill relationship with Ask Jeeves. IMO that should contribute *some* good traffic. Check out the two ppc programs' FAQ's to confirm for yourself that Looksmart's system and listings are powering Ask Jeeves new ppc program.

[redzone]

Comparison Shopping Engines:

The major (4) can all deliver as much or more traffic than Overture/GAW, depending on the number of products on your site.

Shopping.com - Category level bidding only which forces you to bid all products within a category at the same price point. Strategy is to track conversions on each product, and then exclude the bleeders, allowing you to increase bid across the entire category.

Bizrate/Nextag - Product level bidding, which allows increasing bids on profitable products, and leaving low click traffic products at category minimums until enough data is collected.

PriceGrabber - Category level bidding (use same strategy as shopping.com), but PG just got a huge traffic bump, as their deal w/ MSN.com launched August 1st...

MSN Shopping - New program, as MSN previously only allowed the elite 100 in their shopping channel. Category level bidding, and MSN merchants get exposure in front of PriceGrabber backfill.

Yahoo Shopping - Category level bidding (Yahoo Stores get a 20% discount). Use same strategy as other category level CSE's (Shopping.com/PriceGrabber), and you'll do fine.

Feed integration. Some of the CSE's can crawl your store, but usually do terrible jobs in auto-categorizing your products. Submitting your own feed data, gives you control of categorization, and product level bidding for Bizrate/Nextag.

There is a myriad of 2nd tier CSE's, but they aren't worth the effort.

[ScottG13]

Thanks for the evaluations RedZone!

[7Seerch05]

Could you qualify what you mean by bad, bad traffic? Did you happen to share any information with 7Search about the quality of traffic you were receiving? 7Search takes poor quality traffic seriously and would like to investigate the matter.

[webaddict]

7Seerch05 it's good to see another PPC player responding the WebmasterWorld community. Keep involved, I'm certain it will help your companies reputation and help you develop your PPC products. ;)

[WebStart]

Red Zone, best analysis I have seen in a long time, and thanks for it.

[gordele]

google and yahoo are the only good ones.
most of the other PPC engines just crappy traffic. In my experience.

We'll maybe I would save Searchfeed.com, low traffic but good conversions.

Enhance very bad quality, my experience.

[redzone]

Gordele,

I'll "Ditto" you on SearchFeed. They have amazing conversion rates across many verticals, but traffic volumes are low.

BUT, if the other 2nd tiers paid as much as attention to the quality of their downline distribution as SearchFeed does, the combined traffic from the 2nd tiers could be as much as Overture or GAW.

Also, CPA (Cost Per Action/Sale/Lead) is much less on SearchFeed compared to Overture/GAW.

[SysShock]

Can't agree with ryanfromaustin with regards to Miva, find their conversion is really good! Thats UK though.

[7Seerch05]

Thanks webaddict! We were hoping PPCexpert would come back and share some empirical data about his post - maybe it was just a drive by post. Either way, 7Search will be checking in with greater frequency from now on to address any questions webmasterworld forum members have.

[watchthis]

To be honest I have always heard of 7search producing good ROI for its advertisers. Im surpirsed to see two people here say "bad bad" and "complete scam".

[bnhall]

I used 7search and a number of others until I developed a useful ROI analysis tool and found that my "conversion rate" for Adwords and Overture was about 30% ( no kidding ) and my "conversion rate" for for 7search, search123, searchfeed, findwhat, kanoodle, eSpotting, was less than 1% if anything at all.

I also analyzed number of pages viewed by visitors from each source and found that 99.9% of the 2nd tier traffic visited one page only. Adwords and Overture visitors tended to visit multiple pages, which I took to mean that they were much more targetted traffic than the others.

[watchthis]

How are you guys getting these conversion rates of 30%? That is insanely high. If that is true, you must have some amazing site.

[medowl]

Two sites I regularly surf have just added Kontera adlinks. Anyone have experience with this program?

[scjack]

I used ePilot and it seems most of their traffic is delivered through some dubious partners.
Lots of high volume traffic but conversion rates were as low as 0.25% compared to between 10% and 20% from other sources.
Yahoo! was at 17% over the same period.

[bostonseo]

7search is horrible. If there is a worse adjective for horrible than 7search is that too!

I tried 7search and is was a complete waste of time.

[TimmyMagic]

Also, WebFinder were a complete waste of time (and money) too. Stick with Overture and Google.

Tim

[arikgub]

May I add

GoClick - complete scam

arikgub

[BroadLea]

I've had a long-dormant account with GoClick which I reactivated yesterday. Thus far, there are about 2-3x more clicks than I see in my logs, but worse yet is that the majority of the referrers are "pay to click" sites.

I've also just created a SearchFeed account based on some comments here, and at least the clicks seem to come from relevant sites. So far, so good.

[redzone]

Broadlea,

I think you'll be happy with the SearchFeed conversions, and ROAS over time, just don't expect much traffic.

At least SF doesn't put quantity above quality...

[jimpoo]

How much profit rates do your guys acquire?

My case:
PriceGrabber - 110% of my profit goes into his pocket.
Shopping.com - 40%
BizRate.com - 60%
Nextag.com - 90%

[redzone]

Jimpoo,

Interesting that shopping.com is your best profit provider in the CSE's?

Are you doing product level bidding at Bizrate and Nextag? If you aren't, you need to be. It will make Bizrate, much more profitable than Shopping.com

[eurokc98]

Great post,

would agree, didnt get much if anything from 7search. Wasted thousands on looksmart until my client would finally listen and pull the plug.

I only use google and overture. Looking forward for msn to rollout.

[edited by: seth_wilde at 6:01 pm (utc) on Nov. 9, 2005]