Looksmart

Anyone try them?

[Compworld]

Has anyone tried Looksmart recently? I wanted to see if they've changed in anyway. Is the traffic still like a Miva or Ehanced.com?

[toonce]

Well I just came here and joined to see if I could get the same re: Looksmart. I have a sucessful site w/ about 18% click through on ads so I thought I'd increase the traffic with another PPC service. I found looksmart and ran a test w/ them and saw ZERO return. I received a steady stream of traffic of which 96% stayed on the page for less than 5 seconds. This is way unusual for my normal traffic and I can't figure out what it could be.

So my two cents on them is that they have partners serving up traffic that is of no value to me...now I just want to know what the junmk traffic is and to get a refund as I prefer to pay for value instead of getting my pockets picked.

[WeaselyOne]

I had a similar experience to Toonce but it was a couple of years ago. I keep hoping that something will change with them but I haven't heard anything to suggest it has.

[toonce]

Regarding LookSmart, I just sent a note to billing to see how they will respond.

I told them that when I did some preliminary testing earlier today, I saw that most of the traffic I received appeared to be fruadulent in that almost all of the clicks stayed on the page for only a second or two. None clicked through or exited the page normally.

I asked if they would please work with me to identify the fraudulent clicks and refund me for those that are (which is pretty much every singe one).

I'm hoping that they not only refund what is fair, but that they have some sort of strategy or approach to fraud that can help me feel comfortable investing in their service. If not, why would I piss away my hard earned cash to line the pockets of cheats?

Keeping my fingers crossed...

[Compworld]

Yea, I was afraid of something like that. I am trying to get some information on banner networks. Maybe they will do better. Some of the terms on Google and Yahoo are just too expensive.

[toonce]

Well I did hear back from them. I sent them my logs for the traffic in question and they did credit my account. They have assured me that they take fraud seriously. If they can identify the culprit, they would take action. Trouble is that click fraud crooks are plenty crafty and do what they can to hide their tracks. It is unfortunate that one has to be so diligent in capturing and reviewing log data just to try an keep from being robbed by fraudsters. As if there wern't enough data to track to keep from losing money...kinda takes some of the fun out of it...

[toonce]

BTW - let us know if you find a banner network worth checking out. Thx!

[Bewenched]

we used them for a while, but conversions were terrible to say the least.

[watchthis]

I did better with looksmart than with 7search or kanoodle. But all these newtorks have bad bad bad traffic, so that isnt saying much. it seems most of their traffic came from guestbook spam and comment spam on blogs and .edu forums. Quite sad really.

In short stay away from these scams.

[powerstar]

I don't understand how they still in business? I guess they can keep finding new advertisers. The last time they had any kind of real traffic was 5 years ago or more with MSN