Enhance.com Pay Per Click Review

Formerly known as 'ah-ha', the Pay Per Click Search Engine called Enhance Interactive has provided mixed results. Be aware that Enhance does not offer Geotargeting, so your PPC ads might be running in areas that you cannot service. Our first test with enhance proved to be unfruitful using our Control ad which converts at 35% on Adwords & Overture. To put a finer point on it, we lost money. Quickly.

It is possible the our bid was simply too high. Before we had the opportunity to test our ads at a lower cost per click, we were offered the opportunity to advertise on Enhance's special Pay Per Click network comprised, largely, of acquired domains... parked, and running ads from Enhance advertisers (and possibly others). The pitch here was that now we would experience targeted traffic, so conversions should improve. Given that we didn't have any conversions prior to that, it seemed reasonable that conversion rates couldn't get worse. Ok. we'll bite.

On the proprietary PPC advertising network we did start to see some conversions.

As we continued to track the 'new & improved' traffic, we found that it was converting at just under 7%. This was not enough to turn a profit for the keywords we were advertising. so we lowered our bids to a percentage of revenue per visitor. This move turned a profit. However, the volume on some of the keywords dropped considerably, making our profit in terms of dollars, nominal. That's a bit risky. If the traffic quality changes, our meager profit could easily turn to a loss. If we dropped our bids any further, the traffic would probably drop to the point where there was no point in advertising many of our keywords on Enhance's PPC advertising network.

Since we still had a deposit with Enhance, we tried to change a variable. Our Control Ad had been promoting the services of a company in the finance industry. We took the same ad text & pointed our ads to a competing company in the same industry to see if that converted any better. Nope. Our conversions dropped to 4.6%. (a loss at our current cost per click). There are a few keywords that work for us on Enhance's Pay Per Click Search Engine - but most of our ads went bust in short order.

Enhance's reporting has a glitch which make it difficult to reconcile cost per click by keyword. The overall click charges reconcile with the number clicks , but the click charges by keyword do not. Enhance's live (online) support told us that a new reporting system would be in place at the beginning of the year. Until then advertisers can only subtract A (cost) from B (revenue) to see if they turned a profit. Profits are nice, but better still, is a having a profit and knowing how it happened.

Unlike our experience with some other pay Per Click Search Engines. We did find a way to turn a profit with Enhance's PPC network- but only on their proprietary network &, even then, not enough to continue advertising most of the keywords we originally ran on their PPC advertising network.

Your mileage may vary depending on keywords & industry.

Conclusion: Neutral.