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Archive for the ‘2nd & 3rd Tier Search Engines’ Category

If you’re looking for an extra outlet, a little more bang for your buck, maybe you should look into third tier search engines. Although they don’t get as much traffic as the big three (soon-to-be two), they may be more targeted toward your audience and are notorious for converting at a lower cost. That being said, not all search engines are created equal so it’s important to do your research before expanding into uncharted territory.

For exactly that reason, I’ve broken down a few popular third tier engines. Hopefully this will help narrow down your search, no pun intended. . . okay, pun intended.

7search.com

7search.com advertisers will show up with search results as well as partner networks. With over one billion searches per month, 7search claims to have a better ROI than any other PPC network.

Advertisers have campaigns and keywords, but not ad groups. Keywords have three match types: broad, phrase, and exact. The minimum budget is $5 and the budget is considered a guideline; advertisers may receive 5-10% more clicks than the budget allows.

Pros:

• Geo Targeting
• Conversion tracking
• Offers “Smartbid” to show your ranking in search and throughout the content network
• You can use their keyword tool to see the search volume and current bids before opening an account.

Cons:

• There is only one ad per campaign
• You pay what you bid

Business.com

Business.com connects B2B advertisers looking for products or services, boasting 8 million business “buyers” a month. PPC ads, called featured listings, run on the Business.com site and partner sites. Instead of creating campaigns, users select categories that they would like to appear for and then add keywords to narrow down their targeted audience.

Pros:

• Conversion tracking
• You can view the top five CPC’s and bids

Cons:

• You pay exactly what you bid
• Bidding starts at $.40 and increases by increments of ten cents

Looksmart.com

Users are able to bid whatever they’d like for each keyword. Ads will show up in search engines, content networks, and also in-text. Like Business.com, Looksmart also allows users to narrow their search by category but advertisers also have campaigns, ad groups, and keywords. Keywords are either broad or smart match – similar to Google’s broad and exact.

Pros:

• Optimal bidding (CPC depends on traffic type and volume)
• Conversion tracking
• Dayparting/Ad Scheduling
• Can import existing Google accounts
• Geotargeting

Cons:

• The only payment type is automatic prepay

Ask.com

As the fourth largest search engine, Ask.com reaches 73 million unique users. Ask also claims to give advertisers more for their money, boasting that bids average 30% less than Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Accounts are very similar to that of Google and ads show on search on content networks.

Pros:

• Conversion tracking
• Monthly forecasting estimates expenses for each campaign
• Optimal Bidding
• Provides its own analytics (but also works with Google Analytics)

eZanga.com

eZanga is a metasearch engine that covers about 98% of searches, compiling results from 20 major search engines including Google, Yahoo, Ask, and AOL. If you so choose, their SEM will implement and optimize your campaign across all the major search engines, including the big three.

Pros:

• Good mix of large and mid-sized channel sources
• Geo Targeting
• Dayparting
• Can see the bids for top positions
• Conversion Tracking

Cons:

• Only 3 ads show, so you have to bid high enough
• Largest age segment is 18-24 year-olds with ~$25k annual income

AdKnowledge

AdKnowledge targets users based on category and demographics. Advertisers choose content categories, which become their campaigns and ad groups. It will specify a minimum bid for the category; from there, the advertiser can set budget limits. There are three networks from which advertisers can choose:

Premium: Ads appear across email to opted in customers and top-tier search engines.

Standard: Ads appear across multiple search engines, user-to-user emails, social networking alerts. No KW bid management- bids set at category level, uses predictive targeting to deliver ads across search properties and optimize ROI

Social: Ads appear on social networks and websites (Facebook, MySpace, Bebo).

Pros:

• Wide variety of options and audiences
• Geo targeting
• CPA Bidding
• Conversion tracking

AdBrite

AdBrite allows advertisers to target audiences based on content categories, demographics, and keywords. The text ads will show across their partner network with a position based on bid and click-through-rate.

Pros:

• Geo Targeting
• Conversion Tracking
• Day Parting

Cons

• Limited to 100 ads

	Optimal Bidding	Conversion Tracking	Day Parting	Geo Targeting	View Top 5 Bids
7search.com		X		X
Ask.com	X	X	X	X
Business.com		X			X
Looksmart.com	X	X	X	X
eZanga.com		X	X	X	X
AdKnowledge		X		X
AdBrite	X	X		X

Hopefully, this has helped shed light on your path. If you’ve used any of these search engines in the past, I’d love to hear about your experiences!

Pictures courtesy of pixdaus.com.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2010 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

While the top three search engines account for over 90% of search traffic, there are hidden deals to be found on price per click hiding among the second tier search networks.

One such network is 7Search. 7Search provides advertising for a network of small websites and search engines like Mamma.com (the “Mother” of all search engines!).

The quality of clicks are often lower, but the discrepancy in cost per click on 7Search is usually greater than the discrepancy in click quality. From personal experience, I saw a 3% conversion rate from 7Search on a page that typically had a 10% conversion rate. However, the CPC, for keywords such as “las vegas,” on 7Search is only 9 cents for the top bid, while SpyFu puts that top bid at $3.81 on Google.

The keyword bids on 7Search are very transparent. When searching for keywords to add, 7Search lists the top three bids for each keyword.

It is these features that set 7Search around from other second tier networks (and first tier networks, for that matter). 7Search does have more customization options than even Google. You can customize specific landing pages and ad descriptions all within the same campaign, rather than creating multiple campaigns. (Which, I guess, wouldn’t work very well on Google, because they have so much more traffic, but it is easily manageable on 7Search and more efficient than creating multiple campaigns, if you only want to make small changes on certain keywords.)

Some other networks to consider are:

• AOL – They are the #4 search engine with 3% of search traffic, according to Nielsen’s August 2009 rankings.

• Ask.com – The #5 search engine.

• Business.com – It’s a good network for business-to-business products.

• AdBrite

• Lycos

• Looksmart

• Excite

• All The Web

• Altavista

And one to watch out for:

• Kanoodle – You can’t find Kanoodle on the first page of Google for it’s own name search, but you can find many reports of click fraud.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2010 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

Yesterday, I had a call with a company that has only been around for about 9 months. I walked through a demo on how to use their search engine, in which they claim MSN stole their algorithm. I was surprisingly impressed with this search engine that I honestly had never used before. It’s called LeapFish. And no, they’re not paying me to blog about them.

I feel LeapFish is an up-and-coming search engine that may truly find itself competing with the big dogs. What’s cool about them is that you can search for a keyword in Google, and with a click of a mouse you can search in Yahoo and MSN for the same keyword. It’s fast, really fast and very user friendly.

If you type in a city name with a space, then the state, sometimes in the right hand navigation they’ll give you local results for real estate, or restaurants if you type in ‘pizza san Francisco CA’.

You can also click to see different kinds of results for your keyword search like information on the web, news, answers which are powered by Yahoo, videos, images, shopping and even blogs.

One other thing the rep told me, was that if you type in your company url into their search, again off to the right hand side it will give you domain information for that company including how much their domain is appraised at, how many unique visitors, traffic ranking and a graph that shows peaks and valleys of traffic. Very cool.

A different kind of PPC advertising:

Now, about their paid search program which I found to be of most important and very useful for advertisers. When the internet began to get popular, people started buying popular domain names of companies who could later sell those domains to the companies and make a large profit. The same thing could and is going on here at LeapFish. People are buying keywords off Leapfish now, and plan to sell them later when Leapfish gets bigger. As Leapfish gets bigger, and as the keywords become more competitive, the keywords will increase in value, and can sell for a much higher price than what you’ll be paying for now.

Their PPC advertising program is not like Google, Yahoo or MSN. You don’t pay for each click or pay any monthly fees. You buy keywords permanently. LeapFish offers 3 paid positions for each keyword search result. You can buy to be in position 1, 2 or 3 and each have a different price for that particular keyword. When you buy these keywords, they’re yours for life, at least until you sell them off to another company willing to pay you premium cash for them. You also maintain your number 1, 2 or 3 positions in the SERPs for that keyword for life. This will never go away until you sell your keyword. The paid ads are located at the top of each SERP and at the very bottom of each page.

I will say that some competitive keywords are not cheap. Looking up some keywords for a client of mine I found position 1 to charge around $5,000. But if you think about it, this is really all you have to pay for a paid ad in that keywords SERP. Sort of. In addition to the one-time purchase of the keyword, you are also charged a yearly 5% fee of your keyword spend. So if you buy just one keyword and pay $5,000 for it, you’ll be charged $250 annually. Not bad when you think about it long term. Just to give you an idea of their pricing structure I’ve typed in a few keywords to get estimates on. See screen shot below on the range you could be paying to have permanent placement on Leapfish.com

This brings me to my next point. This is a long-term strategy. This is not for small business’s wanting to teach themselves PPC advertising for a month to see how it works. As far as reporting, you can add in add tracking to your destination URLs and \ track Leapfish visits and leads via Google Analytics.

Another good thing LeapFish is doing to get the word out about themselves is sponsoring many national search engine strategy conferences. They’ve been featured in several high profile websites. Their CEO, who is only 29, by the way, and has been recognized as one in the top 40 Silicon Valley innovators.

I think this is something every company big or small should be looking into right now. Leapfish is still in Beta, but I believe it will be officially live in October 2009.

Is anyone currently buying keywords from Leapfish? If so, is it working for you? What are the positives and negatives?

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

With all the talk about Google, Yahoo and MSN all the time, the little guys tend to get left out. By little guys, I mean second tier search engines like business.com, 7search.com, ask.com etc.

I’m currently using Business.com for one of my clients and I’m getting decent results. It’s important for PPC advertisers to realize there is more to this world other than Google, Yahoo and MSN. If you’ve exhausted all of your options and really need to generate additional leads, do yourself a favor and check out some of the more popular second tier search engines.

In this post I’ll go over the one I’m working in right now, Business.com.

Business.com is a search engine and a B2B directory. The search engine aspect of business.com works closely to how the top three work with Paid listings and organic listings. Business.com allows you to add ‘listings’ instead of campaigns. And within each listing are the keywords and ads. You have the same flexibility within Business.com as you have within Google and Yahoo; you can add keywords to your listing, edit your keywords, change their bids, write new ad texts, and pause under performing ad texts.

You can also set up conversion tracking within Business.com as well as Google Analytics. You can even set up destination URL’s for each keyword if needed. Reporting provided is more than necessary with status of your listing, CPC, position or rank as they call it, clicks, cost, total conversions, conversion rates, cost-per-conversion and conversion revenue. The one thing they don’t give you however is the impression count.

Your ad text or the actual listing in Business.com is slightly different from Google and Yahoo. Your listing title can include up to 60 characters and the description can contain up to 150 characters. You have your typical destination URL and a display URL. But then there is a multilink area where you can fill in separate page names and their URL’s. What this does is allow for more links to page of your site that you have listed directly under your main listing. This gives the user more flexibility and more of a chance that you’ll get a click to your site.

When it comes to reporting you can generate a traffic and lead report for any date range. You can view the report immediately and even export the data into Excel.

Last month for one of my clients I was able to generate a total of 19 leads at a cost of $26 per lead. My CPL goal was $55. The extra 19 leads helped me reach my monthly goal for total paid search leads at a super cheap cost. I could probably increase my keyword bids and get even more traffic which I plan to do here in August.

The point is as a PPC advertiser, we should be looking into all opportunities to increase leads and sales for our clients. If we’re only ever work in Google, Yahoo and MSN we’ll never know what kind of results we can receive from other search engines. If your client has it in their budget I would recommend giving Business.com a try!

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.