Miva

What sites do they target?

[MediaSpree]

Recently signed up for Miva, funded my account with a trial $25.00 and was surprised for it to be out of funds in two days. My adwords account usually eats up $10 a day but I've never seen an "Ad By Miva" on a site whereas the internet it littered with google ads. What kind of sites are my ads being shown on through miva?

[TomWaits]

Coincidentally, I've lost my patience with them this week. Actually, today. There's too much fraud in my account, I'm done with them. My approach over the years was to simply delete the offending keyword(s), the ones that their partners have chosen to hammer, and it fixes the problem for little while. That doesn't seem to work anymore. It's like killing a roach and having five come to its funeral.

[bostonseo]

Miva is terrible. Miva used to be called FindWhat, but FindWhat then changed their name to Miva. When a company changes their name because their reputation had become so bad - well you get my point.

[highway51r]

Hi to all Miva advertisers here;

Got a prob here. (is this news?) lol.
anyways...

ucmore Has anyone Ever Converted traffic from this place?

It's a Direct Partner to miva, but I've found it in my goclick traffic stats.
At first, I thought my problem was coming in from searchfeed, but ucmore is a miva partner, so that's where it's coming in from.

I AM, getting what Looks like some ok small sites sending me traffic through the network system, but for every 5 hits, one hit per site ave, I'm Also getting 5 Hits from this ucmore thing?

Anyone know if any of this ucmore traffic is worth anything? It's Killing my Top 2 keywords, have had to turn them down to 1 cent to Stay Off the partner sites, waiting to hear back from gc 2nd responce now, how are you folks finding your traffic from ucmore via miva?
The 'volume' from the site gives me the fear it's another of those 'too good to be true' ones out there?

thanks.

[jmorgan]

I complained to them regarding a few partners and in some cases they said I would not receive clicks from them anymore. What is strange is that they gave no indication that other advertisers would also not receive clicks from these obviously fraudulent partners.

If they would just simply terminate them for ALL advertisers (not just the ones who complained), it would do wonders for their credibility and long-term viability.

Other dodgy partners of Miva besides ucmore include findology and abcsearch.

[watchthis]

Not to mention targepoint.
They get a lot of traffic from pirate sites and torrent sites. Highly immoral. Miva feeds them.

I did well with Miva for a while, (the Uk branch), but now the ROI and click fraud is almost as bad as 7search and kanoodle.

[WW MemberName]

Hey jMorgan,
Can you give me some more informatiuon on "findology and abcsearch"? They seem to be driving traffic to one of my sites?

Thanks,

[1Lit]

Read through the many other posts about MIVA on this and other forums. Avoid.

[watchthis]

Update:
Miva just emailed me asking if I would consider trying them again.
When I asked what had changed and why they thought I could do well again, their reply was:

"We have brought online more quality partners."

When I asked for an example of one of these quality partners, they would not comment.

[WW MemberName]

Hey WatchThis,
I too recently asked for a list of the top Miva partners. They have not responded with a complete list, but did mention the following:

www.mirror.co.uk

www.dailyexpress.co.uk

www.uk-banking-net.co.uk

www.yourcreditcard.co.uk/

Any one what to comment on these "search" partners?

I will say that I asked UK Yahoo for a complete list and they never got back to me. Great.

[ispy]

Ah memories...Looksmart was like this, tons of traffic with no conversion. Tried to figure out why anyone would advertise for clicks who would not convert on sales from any affiliate site who would sign up, porn, junk you name it. It was mostly comparison shopping engines, ie sites which charge more for their clicks then the cheap engine one. One click coming in to a page with 20 products may get a more expensive click then your advertised click or kind of thing.

[dramstore]

I thought MIva used to be espotting didn't it, not FindWhat?
or did they merge or something?

[GameMasterM]

Was FindWhat, bought Espotting and also bought Miva Business Solutions.
Changed name to MIVA and supposedly dumped their "questionable" traffic.
The CEO left and spends his days fishing on his yacht.
An American dream story for the CEO. Everyone else is left scrambling to make something of the mess.

[JesterMagic]

I have since learned that if you see findology and abcsearch results from a ppc company ... run. These sites offer nothing except fraud clicks.

**************************
Quote

Hey jMorgan,
Can you give me some more informatiuon on "findology and abcsearch"? They seem to be driving traffic to one of my sites?
Thanks,

[WW MemberName]

Hey JesterMagic,
This is from Findology website "Findology’s advertising team ensures results by identifying fraud, optimizing traffic, increasing return-on-investment and developing brands. Pay-Per-Click Search Network combines Findology’s search products and technologies, network of premium publishers and individualized customer service to provide advertisers with one of the most valuable PPC marketing solutions in the industry." I'm not sure how these type of companies generate traffic, but they seem to feed through search engines like Miva. And I end up paying for these clicks.

When I asked my Miva rep about the quality of traffic from less-than desired sources, this was his answer: “A user visits this site, searches for a product or service and is then displayed a MIVA feed of relevant advertisers for the specific query. If you are still unsure about this traffic then please don't hesitate to follow this up with me.”

I seem to generate quite a bit of traffic with Miva through www.Where2Search.co.uk. Seems like just another third party PPC click drain. I guess the real question are there any ROI benefits from search engines like Miva, or Mirgo? Or so I just stay with the tried and true Google, Overture, and MSN? Some belief that Overture/Yahoo is heading down the path of Miva.

Thanks for you input….

[Matsuibiza]

Miva used to be Espotting... and now look at this!

[espotting.com...]

It's magic! The old URL is used to display links from Miva's network. The ID used is not a test one! This means that Miva is getting money directly in his pocket from its network of advertisers! Ethical?

Seriously, they used to be good and honest, now, it's a waste of time and money. The UK office is a mess, and what is left over in Europe is just a joke.

Rest In Peace Miva...

[Tropical Island]

Rest In Peace Miva...

Anyone from Yahoo reading this?

[RichTC]

Just wanted to say that some of you should perhaps review your position regarding miva - Its very effective compared to how it was in the past and currently produces a quality offering:-

We work on a number of UK sites and have seen mivas effectiveness from both sides of the fence:-

For Advertisers you can select to have your ads on prefered sites, ie ones that have a high level of conversion. The miva team want your adverts to perfom well and the feedback and support the team provide to customers is higher than that of both Yahoo and Google imo.Also the tracking is top notch and i genuinely think that click fraud risk is reduced now with them and better than the others in this market. They will act on any issues quickly and want to know how well they are convertng for you - In all they are moving forwards

From a publishers perspective, the reporting is in real time (not a day later like Yahoo) they dont quibble over payment or delay payment due to systems issues or some other nonsence problem (Yahoo currently) and they support publishers who support them. They want to attract the better clients to partner with them and have a refreshing no nonsence attitude.

I can tell you that Miva is far from "dead" and whilst it has had to shake off a difficult past history when i compare its effectiveness to that of yahoo and google i have to say in a number of areas it out performs them both!

Whilst this thread is not about Yahoo i wont wont expand on them to much other than to add:- whilst some of you may be unhappy with Miva can you honestly say that Yahoo is better with its current problems? - i dont think so, do you!

[exmoorbeast]

I wonder if the people slating Miva might have once worked there....

[1Lit]

"I wonder if the people slating Miva might have once worked there...."

We have experience with them as advertisers, having spent over $50,000 with MIVA. They are, without a doubt, a joke of a company. We stuck with them through the years, believing their statements that things would get better, but they never did.

I can't remember the number of times we've had to send them logs and prove that we have been flooded with fraudulent traffic from their dodgy partner sites. We usually get a refund, because the evidence is there, but I'm sick of wasting my time rifling through the logs to get the evidence to them.

The staff are totally incompetent as well.

Avoid MIVA unless you enjoy stress.

[edited by: 1Lit at 7:16 pm (utc) on Oct. 27, 2006]

[Wlauzon]

We tried MIVA a while back, then forgot about them for a long time. A couple of weeks ago we got an email that we still had some money in the account, and that we should reactivate.

We had around $50 left, so I turned the ads back on. For about 5-6 days I was getting the strangest junk referrals from crap sites with no conversions at all. After a couple of days I figured out that they were coming from our old MIVA "burn up the $ that are left" campaign.

The junk stopped when the money ran out, and we would never start it up again.

[rhinestonejoe]

You should all know. My history with Findwhat/Miva goes back a 5 years. In the beginning, We got orders from Findwhat visitors. E-spotting too.

I noticed over the last year or 2 that the both of them have trickled down to 0.002% conversion. So that there is no mistake, that's 500 times smaller that 1%. Keep in mind adwords, YahooSearch and MSN are all 1% and higher for us.

In the last year, from Find what we got:
122,689 visitors and 3 orders.

I was tracking this from the Yahoo Store tracking codes that I thought for sure had to be wrong. We spent over $10,000 with them this year and got less than $500 in orders. Thankfully, we had the budget to do this. I said that I will not cut them until we have concrete evidence from an accurate tracking system. I saw what we get elsewhere and thought for sure that there has to be an error in the Yahoo Store reporting. Some areas of Yahoo Store is admittly inacurate in reporting and the tech support group will even tell you this.

We signed a contract with Omniture a couple of months ago and have used it for some detailed tracking. We got thousands of visitors from Miva and no orders just like the Yahoo Store system showed us. I decided to call Miva. They set me up with an Account Exec that said she will move us to a better filtered network and my traffic quality will improve immensly. She also offered to add $200 to our account. I accepted the offer, however, I was really upset that they play games like this. They created a new account and moved my keyterms over to it. I removed every keyword from the account that is not a high converting term with the other proven ppc engines.

1 month later....no orders. I got sick from this to think that all this time, I was giving them the benefit of the doubt throwing money away. With Omniture I have set it up to log the domains and countries that Miva is sending us traffic from. Referring domains that sent Miva's traffic in order from most to least:

1. No referrer <--By far the most (97%) sent from no referrer. Omniture tech support says that this looks fishy.
2. redirect.clickshield.net
3. dogpile.com
4. myzodiac.info
5. dreamlandresort.com
6. information.com
7. dexsearch.com
8. googletopsearch.com
9. easilyfound.com
10. xxlsearcher.com
11. madonnas.info
12. page-not-found.net
13. swiftseek.co.uk
and more..

Country data:
united states27.11%
france9.80%
germany9.19%
canada6.73%
spain4.40%
italy4.21%
united kingdom3.68%
poland3.43%
netherlands2.96%
belgium2.69%
mexico2.35%
turkey2.33%
australia2.10%
brazil1.97%
sweden1.41%
switzerland1.30%
israel1.22%
hungary1.19%
austria0.97%
argentina0.83%
denmark0.78%
norway0.75%
finland0.53%
portugal0.47%
colombia0.42%
venezuela0.39%
hong kong0.39%
chile0.36%
romania0.33%
bulgaria0.33%
greece0.30%
morocco0.28%
egypt0.28%
czech republic0.28%
peru0.25%
ireland0.25%
slovakia (slovak republic)0.22%
puerto rico0.22%
new zealand0.19%
lithuania0.19%
slovenia0.17%
estonia0.17%
saudi arabia0.14%
latvia0.14%
cote d ivoire0.11%

I stopped at .10%, because there were too many. No other PPC (of the many that we use) ever had a statistics like this.

73% of the traffic was NOT from the USA.

Account is now cancelled.

1. I do not recommend ppc advertising without being able to track at all. Besides adwords, yahoo search and msn I would not recommend ppc advertising without *accurate* tools to evaluate results better than the ppc engine offers. Even then, tweaking is needed.

2. Whenever a PPC engine tells you "you have been on a bad network, we'll move you to a better quality network"....run for the hills. They are crooks. How could they just leave anyone that doesn't complain sit on that terrible network. With both search engines that it has happened to us, we gave it a chance and did not get better traffic afterwards anyway. The other one is Looksmart. Just a tad better than Miva, but we are noticing a similar situation - but at least most Looksmart's traffic is US based, which is where our sales come from.

One last comment...for all its worth. Somebody mentioned 7search earlier in this thread. We get very little traffic from them. However, the 310 visitors that they sent have translated into 2 orders. It is not a good conversion rate, but it is 100 times better than Miva. If you factor our extremely low bids on 7search, it is actually as profitable for us as the big ppc engines. And...78% of their traffic has been from the USA.

[watchthis]

"One last comment...for all its worth. Somebody mentioned 7search earlier in this thread. We get very little traffic from them. However, the 310 visitors that they sent have translated into 2 orders. It is not a good conversion rate, but it is 100 times better than Miva. If you factor our extremely low bids on 7search, it is actually as profitable for us as the big ppc engines. And...78% of their traffic has been from the USA. "

Good for you. ROI is all that should matter at the end of the day. That said though, its good that it worked for you, it seems to have robbed me and quite a few others.