MIVA is ride with dodgy partners

Just looked through our logs and horrified

[1Lit]

I was wondering what other people think about the quality of MIVA USA traffic. I have just investigated some sources where we are getting traffic from and was shocked to see low grade porn sites. I find it hard to believe that those sites, with a Google PR of 0 and hardly any links to them, are sending us legitimate traffic.

Staff haven't responded to our emails in days.

I'm not going to add more keywords to our MIVA account. Complete waste of time.

What do others think?

[wildbest]

MIVA PPC engine is based on FindWhat distribution network they have acquired recently. You are just burning your ad budget. Incentivized traffic is a complete waste of money and bandwidth for the advertiser.

[watchthis]

Miva did not buy findwhat, they are findwhat rebranded.
I do well with them at times and very badly at other times. Its not consistent, but its much better quality than 7search or kanoodle.

[Houndstooth]

I also have had decent, as well as poor experiences with MIVA. Recently I had a massive fraud experience (tons of clicks in a 1-2 day period) that they took care of for me.

[wsm2006]

MIVA got slammed on the MotleyFool today. "Lost Love" - ain't it the truth.

[edited by: seth_wilde at 7:20 pm (utc) on Feb. 17, 2006]

[watchthis]

Also please post a link to that article.

[seth_wilde]

Lets keep this about Miva

[wsm2006]

The article is here: [fool.com...]

[watchthis]

I have nothing positive to say, so perhaps ill edit and not say anything.

[watchthis]

Btw I understand 7search feeds Miva through Searchfeed doesnt it. Can you confirm if your company does this?

[wsm2006]

You're essentially asking about backfill. You seem to know how this works, but for the benefit of the forum, it's very common practice for PPC providers to share results. For example, company A would say to Company B "place our advertisers within or at the end of your results and we'll take a percentage of the bid upon a qualified click.

I can confirm that 7Search does have a limited relationship with both Miva and SearchFeed but the contracts we have with these companies prevent me from disclosing (who is feeding who, how much and at what rate) how this is done.

[Matsuibiza]

Miva & SearchFeed are very very dodgy... imagine all sorts of business going on that we cannot see! I only trust the big ones, Overture and Google, the traffic is clean and the conversion excellent.

[Location3]

The quality of traffic on Miva does go up and down depending on when you run your ads on their Network. Since Miva relies on their ever changing syndication partners, it’s hard to say when the quality ones are in place or not. They used to rock on performance a couple of years ago, but Yahoo and Google stole their best syndication partners with better revenue per click.

Nowadays it really depends on what verticals you are running on Miva, and I would suggest testing them every once in awhile if you traffic is not working for you. Remember a couple of things:

1)The syndication partners changes, so the quality changes.
2)All keyword are on exact phrase match, so you will need to build out your list to get best performance.

Also, if you advertise on Miva, you will get automatic syndication on Search Feed, since they own them.

[wildbest]

Also, if you advertise on Miva, you will get automatic syndication on Search Feed, since they own them.

Also, if you advertise on Miva, you will get traffic from sites like Findology.com that supplies xml feed to more than 30 paid to search programs! Advertisers are just wasting their money feeding click fraud networks. This is our experience, and we have tried them all - FindWhat, SearchFeed, 7Search, LookSmart etc. These guys are too financially dependant on the click fraud committed on their distribution channels now. If they filter out fraudulent clicks, they are out of business in a month. If you report and prove 100 clicks are fraudulent, they will credit back to your advertiser account only 50. This is their business now.

[MikaelTC]

Thank you for the link wsm.

If I understand what I've read here, Miva is a contextual ad network now, right? Is there much, if any, of a search component?

[Location3]

Wildbest, you need to have proper tracking technology in place to see the refering URL's delivering the traffic, and also able to know what the CPA is for those refers. We have developed this in house, and we speak to the Secondary Engines everyday on removing these affiliates that bring crap traffic. We also have fraud detectors inplace to weed out the fraud clicks.

We spend alot of money with these engines, as the results are there! You just need the proper tools and API's into their backend to make them work.

[webdudek]

I also was amazed to find out that I get traffic from porn video sites.
I used to spend $20 a day on Miva.
I paused my campaign on Miva, and my sales did not go down.
For me, Miva does not deliver.

Can anyone recommend a good PPC Search Engine that works well, I'm intereted especially in North America and the UK.

[missgirl]

Since 1-2 months I dont get any sales more for the same keywords and same click quantity. Before it was okay.

missgirl

[ScottG13]

We gave Findwhat(Miva) and Kanoodle another try last spring after having paused them quite a while due to clickfraud.

We found them to convert not once. I spent time trying to get FW and KN to eject their fraud partners but I realized it was not worth my time. AdWords, Overture, and MSN are the only thing that is worth optamizing for me right now.

As far as I am concerned, you're efforts require too much work to be rewarded outside of the Google/Yahoo/MSN/Ask circle of trust.

[designhaus]

I personally think that Miva US may be bad but I can state otherwise that I use Miva UK and get a good return from them. Their customer service is good as we have rep and we spend a fair amount of money with them and they have provided a good return in the past 3 months.

So I personally would give them a go and monitor them closely.

[bostonseo]

I would not use Miva-FindWhat is the United States.

[tnonon]

The issue is the publisher networks. Google's is so huge that you won't feel the effects if your ads are put on adult sites, whereas MIVA's publisher networks are in aggregegate much smaller so you will generate more clicks with them.

MIVA does not deal with adult in Europe (at least that's what I get from their UK reps). They do in the US.

My company distinguishes ads and publishers. We have two separate systems - one conservative, the other for the "undesired" traffic.

[mike_ppc]

Ok, so for US things are very different than for Uk. But has anyone any experience with Miva DE?
And by the way, do the search engines (G, O, Miva) publish somewhere their distribution network?