The OTHER Pay-Per-Click Programs

Google Adwords and Yahoo Marketing Solutions are effective Pay-Per-Click programs to promote your business, but what about the others?

As I have said in the past, pay-per-click programs like Google Adwords, and now, Yahoo Marketing Solutions (also known as Overture) are extremely effective ways of advertising on the world wide web.  Still, these two programs face two problems:

1. They are not trivial to manage effectively.
2. They are limited in the number of visitors you can ultimately get.

For both of these reasons, we would like to explore other forms of pay-per-click programs online.  First, beyond Google and Yahoo, most pay-per-click programs are very straight-forward:  You bid on keywords and your placement position is based entirely on bid price.  You can see the current bids and you will know exactly your ad placement at any given time.  Very simple.  Further, many of these smaller PPC programs have less users which can give you higher positions for a fraction of the cost of programs like Google and Yahoo. 

So far, simplicity and affordability sounds like a great way to go!  But if you step back from the situation, these both provide inherent flaws.  The idea that position goes to the highest bigger sounds good initially, but remember simple methods like this results in lower quality (and less relevant) ads, which ultimately results in a lower quality search engine.  People using these search engines may be clicking on ads for curiosity rather than purpose.  Further, setting fixed prices for clicks can result in a lot of click fraud.

Click fraud is when someone (or something like a bot) is clicking your paid links only to cost you money.  Why would people do this?  For content searches (these are ads that PPC’s may offer that allows people to place ads on their own site and they split the click revenue with the advertiser), people click the ads to make money for themselves.  This type of click fraud usually does not occur with the smaller PPC companies because they usually do not offer content searches.  For engine searches, click fraud is a way to attack the competion.  For example, if you set a fixed bid of $0.20 to get position #1 and your competitor still wants that position, but only wants to pay $0.19 for it, what they may do it just start clicking your ad, costing you bundles of money, providing you with no quality and ultimately pushing you out of the position or the PPC altogether.  For Adwords and Overture, doing this would make no sense:  If competitor clicked your ad all of the time, your CTR would go through the roof resulting in higher positions at a lower cost.  Understand that click fraud is very illegal.  Google and Overture combat it both in the inherant structure of the system, but also through state-of-the-art anti-fraud mechanisms.  Smaller companies do not have the system structure and their anti-fraud protection is mediocre at best.

My personal experience with smaller PPCs have revolved around programs like Miva and Search123.  When I first started out, I found these to be very easy and I was getting a lot of clicks for only $0.05 each.  For the few dozen clicks I was getting on Google, I was getting hundreds of clicks on Miva and Search123.  But as I got wiser with online marketing and started performing analytics on my visitors, I was noticing the quality of these visitors were virtually zero.  I was spending $10/day for 200 clicks and was getting no sales.  For $5/day and 25 clicks on Google Adwords, my quality and sales were significantly higher. 

Does this make Miva and Search123 and other smaller PPC’s useless (or even a rip-off?)  No, but you have to test and use a bit of logic when using these programs.  My big problem was the industry and keywords I was bidding on.  Things to keep in mind:

• Avoid very competitive keywords
• Avoid very “broad” keywords
• Perform some type of analytics on these clicks to measure quality
• Set daily budgets rather low (no higher than $5/day) at first

I honestly think that you can use smaller PPC’s effectively for niche markets and low volume searches.  If your industry is more competitive, I recommend that you avoid the smaller PPCs.  The only other PPC program that I use and recommend would be MSN Adcenter.  MSN Adcenter is a step in between Google/Yahoo and the smaller PPCs.  They do not provide large numbers of clicks, but the visitor quality is respectively high.  

Your best plan of attack is to use the big three Pay-Per-Click programs:  Google Adwords, Yahoo Marketing Solutions and MSN Adcenter.  Beyond that, you can consider some of the smaller and mid-size PPC programs like Miva and Search123, but keep in mind the risks.  Ultimately, Pay-Per-Click programs will only take you so far.  From there, Search Engine Optimization should be your next focus on building free traffic.

- Matthew Bredel