Pay-Per-Clickthrough Search Engines

We highly recommend considering your budget carefully before embarking on a pay-per-click marketing campaign.

Pay Per Clickthrough Providers

Search Google AdWords Ads | Sign Up for Google AdWords Ads

MORE ADVICE: How to get the most out of Google Adwords

We advise that you pay for Google AdWords pay-per-clickthrough advertising if you can afford to pay at least ten cents per clickthrough to your site. (see Hard Costs) and Google Adwords.

Getting into the top three at Google for any competitive keyword is likely to cost big bucks. But good results can still be gotten here without being at the top.

Google AdWords has recently started offering demographic targeting (male/female, age groups, etc), as does Microsoft AdCenter (MSN/Windows Live). We don't recommend depending too much on the demographic information being completely accurate, since it depends on information submitted by searchers, who are known for not wanting to give up a ton of accurate personal information.

If you are going to run your own AdWords account, we highly recommend you sign up for the Inside AdWords Google Group and receive the emails from the AdWords team with advice and tips on using your campaign to the best advantage.

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Search Yahoo! Search Marketing | Open a Bidding Account

MORE ADVICE: Things you should know about Yahoo! Search Marketing.

This is Yahoo!'s PPC program. Your ads will display with search results, as "Sponsored Listings". Generally, I recommend using the self-serve sign-up form at Yahoo! SM (bottom right of the sign-up page). See Hard Costs.

Alternately, use this referral link to get a $20.00 credit on your account at sign-up.
This is an affiliate link, so using the $20.00 credit link to sign-up gives us a commission from Yahoo.

Also note that the new "Site Match" is the only way to pay your way into Yahoo! Search results.

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Search Windows Live (previously MSN)
Microsoft AdCenter Signup
Microsoft AdCenter Information

This is Microsoft AdCenter (previously MSN AdCenter), the PPC for the Windows Live search engine/directory (previously MSN - now Windows Live).

Microsoft adCenter has a pretty easy sign up process, they walk you through setting up all that "advanced stuff" while creating your account (like target audience, when to display the ads, conversion tracking, and such). Just don't try to backtrack during set-up and you'll be fine.

Microsoft AdCenter encourages you to choose a target audience age and gender to pump additional bid money into. This sounds great, but don't depend on the information being completely accurate. It is presumably based on individual search engine user's "MyMSN" settings. Shared computers and inaccurate user settings can make this data not accurate enough to depend on completely.

Since coming out of BETA mode, Microsoft AdCenter has gotten better and better, easier to use, and had more features. More frequently updated data, better filtration and time variables and better reporting capability (seeing whether your campaign is working). All in all, it is still a new and shifting PPC, but we have seen good results from it for the few clients willing to spend top dollar here. The conversion rate here has been shown to be remarkably better than leading competitors, probably because Microsoft AdCenter doesn't seem to be generating as many fraudulent clicks for now. We recommend it as of December 2006 because of that. We still recommend utilizing at least one means of combating click fraud if your income depends heavily on search traffic and paid search advertising.

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Search MIVA | Open a bidding account at MIVA

MIVA (previously FindWhat) was recommended to me by several other experienced internet marketers as a worthwhile place to put a pay-per-clickthrough listing. My opinion: If you are going to do Yahoo, you might as well do MIVA, too (see Hard Costs). I have several clients who have used MIVA to get traffic and find it more effective than others at a cheaper price. We don't recommend any program above another, though. Results and success are dependent on how you run your advertising campaign.

MIVA listings show up in the following places: Miva.com, Cnet's Search.com, Excite, WebCrawler, MetaCrawler, Dogpile, Microsoft Internet Explorer AutoSearch, Bizjournals, Mamma, and Cometsearch.

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Ask Sponsored Listings
Sign up for Ask Sponsored Listings

Ask.com (previously Ask Jeeves) rolled out their competitive pay-per-click product to Google AdWords or Yahoo! Search Marketing in August of 2005. At first it was caled AJInteractive, but now they call it Ask Sponsored Listings. They no longer require telephone consultation to sign up. Sponsored Search pay per clickthrough. If you are launching a complete pay-per-click campaign, you should try to include Ask.com Sponsored Search. Your ads will be shown on the AJInteractive partner network, which includes Excite, Ask.com, iWon.com, maMMa.com and Search123.com.

AJInteractive still offers their customized program for the big fish. Anyone with hundreds of keywords and over $5000.00 per month to spend in one place should contact an AJInteractive representative by email through their AJInteractive Sales Contact Form

Find out more about the services AJInteractive offers here. Here is where to go to log in to your AJInteractive account.

Advice: Paying for top placement at Google still gets your ad shown on Ask.com search engine result pages. It is not known to us when and if AJInteractive ads will completely replace these.

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ClickRiver
Sign up for BETA

Click River is the BETA PPC program for the Amazon.com shopping environment. This is different from store results or a shopping search - these are standard PPC ads displayed within the plethora of Amazon.com mini sites and on Amazon.com. It's still in BETA, so to get in you must fill out an application for a key. Then they will decide whether you fit a profile they are looking to beta test further. Once and if you're granted a key (which could take weeks), you may log in and get started.

We don't generally recommend BETA services because by nature, a BETA is still working the kinks out and can be dangerous to plug your money into. That said, there are advantages to getting in while a PPC program is in BETA. One of these is that you are advertising among a smaller group of individuals and cost per click is usually pretty good considering. The disadvantage is the fact that BETAs tend to be a bit buggy by nature.

If you have experience with this service, please let us know what you think of it.

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Search Mamma.com
Mamma Classifieds

maMMa Classifieds is now the only paid way into maMMa. The minimum payment to start a campaign in Mamma Classifieds is $25. This sum is applied in total to your usable balance. There is no monthly spend limit and you can choose between a "pay as you go" and a "monthly payment" system.

A maMMa.com pay-per-click listing can show up at maMMa, WhatUSeek, Copernic and others. You can pay for placement on maMMa.com only, you can pay extra for top three placement in the search results, and/or you can pay extra for placement on their network of other sites.

Mamma Classifieds recently changed from a telephone consultation system to offering an online interface.

Thanks to Kristen at MaMMa.com for sending us the special offer on MaMMa Classifieds for Words in a Row's visitors -- it is for $10.00 worth of clicks credited to your account upon sign-up.

MORE ADVICE: About maMMa Classifieds

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Search Rolist
Sign up at Rolist

You can pay as little as two cents per clickthrough when you register here. Note: No affiliate websites here or a few others -- read their excluded sites carefully. One year costs $39.99, plus the clickthrough charges.

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About Business.com
Sign up at Business.com

The Business.com PPC service gets your ad on CNet, Business.com, Forbes, Hoovers, and more. It's a respectable PPC for B2B businesses. This PPC is not a good place to market for consumers. Here is more data on their sizable network of B2B websites.

You can also contact them at 888-441-4466 to sign up by phone.

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Epilot

Epilot seems to be getting bigger lately - here's a list from April 2004 of the sites they partner with to show their PPC results:

Fitness.com, B2BYellowPages.com, Findia.net, FindIt.com, Yellowpages.com, FindTheWeb.com, Coolwebsearch.com, Findology.com, PageSeeker.com, SearchFeed.com, Searchport.com, Searchbug.com, Searchresult.net, HuntBar.com, NetZero/Juno, Search Hound, Ads.com, Locate.com, 24/7 Media Group, Index, and Mamma.

The largest of these would appear to be YellowPages.com, where they show up at the top of the right-hand side for keywords pets, apartments and others.

Minimum bids are 7 cents here.

Contact:
Everett Watson
Account Manager
24422 Avenida De La Carlota, Suite 120
Laguna Hills, Ca 92653
949.784.0800 ext.201
fax 949.784.0880

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Try the Pulse 360 Content Network

Pulse 360 used to be a part of Kanoodle, but broke away. It is a Content Network only PPC.

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Try the Kanoodle Search Network PPC

Kanoodle broke their PPC ito two distinct companies. Pulse 360 was their content network and became it's own entity. Kanoodle still has the PPC for their search network also. It says it reaches millions of people who use sites like Dogpile, Metacrawler, WebCrawler, CNET, InfoSpace, Galaxy.com, plus 2,500 other smaller search-related sites (all second tier search network sites). We don't know the validity of this statement, but Kanoodle once claimed to deliver over 1 billion monthly searches.

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Search LookSmart
Sign up for LookSmart AdCenter

MORE ADVICE: Is LookSmart for you?

LookSmart AdCenter (previously called LookListings) is a pay-per-clickthrough program whose results are primarily shown on retail and content-driven sites. They once were shown on MSN but were dropped because MSN created their own paid advertising program instead. They were then picked up by a lot of second tier search engines: Lycos, MaMMa, RoadRunner and a few others. MSN was by far their largest client and we do not know if the quality has suffered due to the loss of the MSN market.

Looksmart listings can be made to look like search results (URL and description only) or like ads (designed text, keyword insertion).

If you have $149 to sign up with them (see Hard Costs), and if you can afford to pay them $0.15 for every visitor they send you, then go ahead and pay to list at LookSmart AdCenter. Otherwise, skip them.

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Search "Enhance Interactive"

Enhance Interactive Pay Per Click signup

MORE ADVICE: Why we DO NOT recommend Enhance Interactive.

Enhance Interactive was once known as ah-ha.com, and many of their account management pages still use that domain. It is the third largest pay-per-clickthrough search engine. If you once had an Ah-Ha account, it became an Enhance Interactive account, and your log in should still work here.

They have a $50 minimum deposit on clickthrough traffic. You can pay them $99 for express inclusion if you're in a hurry -- we don't recommend it. You'll pay a minimum of 3 cents per clickthrough. If you plan to use them, we recommend that you set a daily cap at a minimum of $5.00 and set your auto-renew amount at $50.00 or more. But you don't have to auto-renew at first, until you know whether this method of advertising works for you.

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Lycos Insite

Lycos Insite was a pay-per-click program with a limited audience but good click quality until November 2006, when it teamed up with Ask. See Ask PPC section above - or see the Lycos page on Ask which offers a $50.00 credit for the time being. Nice incentive.

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GoClick
Sign up as a GoClick advertiser

According to GoClick, it is a self-service pay-per-click network you can use to extend the reach of your paid search campaigns beyond major search engines. GoClick quite nicely offers a free PPC Beginner's Guide in addition to their $10.00 credit. The user interface may be kind of bare, but the click quality, we hear, is better than average.

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Sign up with Links2Go

Links2Go is a pay-per-click program affiliated with GoGuides (a directory). They charge $39.99 as a deposit, all of which is applied to future clicks. Sign up for Links2Go as part of your GoGuides submission, and GoGuides will double your deposit. This makes it so that $79.98 is applied toward future clicks. Either way, there are continuing click charges for the traffic they send you. Links2Go offers details on how this and other offers work on their page about Links2Go Special Offers.

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ChaCha Ad Agent
Sign up

ChaCha prides itself on human-reviewers. The reviewer will choose your categories, but the rest of the campaign is presumably left up to you.

They say it costs as little as $25.00 to sign up here. We assume that this is to advertise in ChaCha's new search engine. It's still in BETA but has promise.

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Other Pay Per Clickthrough Search Engines

If you are really sold on the whole "pay-per-clickthrough" system, here are more pay-per-clickthrough search engines where you can bid on keywords in the same manner as Google and Yahoo!. If you have the advertising budget to pay these search engines, then go for it.

• 7Search
• Brainfox
• ClickBooth
• Dygo
• FindIt-Quick
• MetaMission
• Roar
• Search123.com
• SearchBoss
• SearchCactus
• Searchfeed
• SearchGalore
• SearchHound
• Searchit
• SearchLane.com
• Seek99
• SmartSeek

Pay Per Clickthrough Search Engine Resources

MORE ADVICE: About Click Fraud - We highly recommend that you arm yourself against it.

There are several websites devoted to the subject of pay-per-click search engines, and here is one of the best: PayPerClickSearchEngines.com

Cindy McMahen has also written a handy resource page with more info on Pay Per Click search engines.

There's also this site that ranks the Pay-per-clickthrough search engines and gives you advice about each of them: PayPerClickAnalyst.com

Click for more info on search engine resources.

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