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

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 their minimum required bid for your keywords. This is never less than ten cents. Even at the bottom of the bidding barrel, there are ways to make an Adwords campaign drive traffic. (See our page on Google Adwords. However, no Google Adwords campaign should be running if it doesn't convert into sales or prospects or signups to a newsletter.

[SHAMELESS PLUG: We offer a service of repairing an existing Google Adwords campaign, optimizing it for better performance. We have a Google Certified Agent on staff performing our reviews, with many thousands of hours of managing Google AdWords campaigns under her belt. We manage over a million dollars a year in Google AdWords spending for our clients. Call us at 541-572-2569 for a free consultation.]

Getting into the top three at Google for any competitive keyword is likely to cost big bucks - especially if you're reaching for keywords you really aren't the best match for. But good results can still be gotten here without being in the top 3 ads.

Google Adwords offers demographic targeting (male/female, age groups, etc), as does Bing. We don't recommend depending too much on the demographic information being completely accurate, it generally isn't. People don't give up their information to search engines very often, and the rest is extrapolated data and is often incorrect. So it is better to not depend solely on demographic targeting to define the audience you want.

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. We also recommend that you don't run a campaign until you've optimized it and you have at least one a dedicated landing page to send the clicks to - and you need to make sure that landing page specifically addresses the keywords you're targeting. Google spend is nearly limitless. Don't waste it—it can be a money pit if you don't carefully lay out a buying path and ensure that your ads line up nicely with your website content.

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Yahoo! Search Marketing

This is Yahoo!'s PPC program. Your ads will display within their search results, as "Sponsored Listings".

Yahoo's Sponsored Search appears to be merging into Bing's AdCenter, so if you'd like to cover your bases, create an account at Bing as well.

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Search Bing (previously Windows Live/MSN/Microsoft)
Bing Advertising Signup
Microsoft Bing Advertising Information

This is Microsoft Advertising (previously Microsoft AdCenter, and before that MSN AdCenter), the PPC for Bing (previously Windows Live/MSN).

Microsoft Advertising 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 Advertising encourages you to choose a target audience age and gender (pump up your demographics) to boost them and additional bid money into each bid. This sounds great, but don't depend on the information being completely accurate. Shared computers and inaccurate user settings can make this data quite skewed. It usually is not accurate enough to depend on completely—much of it is extrapolated data and therefore not foolproof.

Bing's Advertiser system 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, 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 decent and it has consistently been a good place to avoid click fraud. We recommend it 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.)

As of 2010, Bing started providing Yahoo's search traffic and Yahoo got out of the search engine business and focused on doing what it does well, being a portal.

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Facebook Marketing
Facebook Advertiser Signup
Facebook Advertiser Guidelines (must be signed in)

You CAN sign up to pay for impressions or pay for clicks here. Why ANYONE would sign up to pay for impressions, we don't know. We only recommend the PPC option.

Facebook can send at least as much traffic as Google Adwords can. And that is the first time we've been able to say that in years. The downside? It's not as focused on buying as the traffic from search engines. You need to entertain the visitors you get from facebook, and provide an immediate payoff. Otherwise, you are wasting your time. We don't recommend trying to funnel people into high ticket price sales funnels here, instead collect information, provide a nifty online gadget, or otherwise have them sign up for something free or very very cheap. And if you promise info, you must provide it RIGHT THERE on that first click away from facebook.

Facebook's demographic targeting is as close to perfect as any out there. Trust it, and make sure you really use the demographics data you've got for starters, and you follow the clues available by researching the information on the traffic facebook DOES send you. It's a continuing system, allowing you to collect better market research data than you've ever gotten before if you use it right.

There are very specific rules for facebook ads. Don't give up, because the payoff is terrific as long as you're willing to play by the new social advertising rules. We're available for facebook marketing advice if you want to consult - call 541-572-2569 to shedule a free phone consultation.

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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). We 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, now it is just Ask.com. 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 Ask.com partner network, which includes Excite, Ask.com, iWon.com, maMMa.com and Search123.com.

Find out more about the services Ask.com offers here. Here is where to go to log in to your Ask.com account. You can use your LinkedIn or Facebook account to sign in.

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Search About.com | Info about Advertising with About.com

This is a very expensive system. They only do CPM banner ad campaigns, and you have to contact them directly. The minimal credit card budget there is presently $20,000 dollars. No small to medium sized businesses for them. About.com is the "Boardwalk" of banner advertising spots, though, and has previously shown pretty impressive conversion rates. Unknown if that is still the case.

However, since the price puts them beyond most of our means, and not all of us want to stray from the PPC advertising model, there is a way to show up on about.com at PPC prices. Most of the ads on their pages are actually Google AdWords ads. If you're advertising in Google AdWords, you may be able to bid enough to show up on specific pages in About.com - check into your "placements" at Google for more info.

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About 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.

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 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, etc, 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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ChaCha Partners
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. Note that ChaCha is primarily set up to deliver advertising to cell phones and SMS.

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 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
• ClickBooth
• Dygo
• FindIt-Quick
• Roar
• Search123.com - UK
• SearchCactus
• Searchfeed
• SearchGalore
• 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

Click for more info on search engine resources.

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