Pay Per Click Search Engine Reviews

Experienced Search Engine Advertisers already know one of the truisms of Online Marketing & Pay Per Click Advertising. The cost of a click is only meaningful in relationship to revenue per visitor.

Many Pay Per Click Search Engines which advertise low starting bids are actually more expensive as it may take hundreds of clicks to generate a conversion (if any conversions are generated at all).

When we first started advertising by Pay Per Click for some of our various sites, we were astonished at the 'high' bid prices at the larger Pay Per Click advertising solutions, Overture & Adwords. By comparison, the bid prices on some of the smaller Pay Per Click Search Engines seemed like a bargain. However, we quickly learned that not all PPC search traffic is created equal. Imagine our surprise when one well known Pay Per Click Search Engine drained a fifty dollar deposit at 5 cents per click in a matter of hours. Our tracking indicated that only 3 or 4 out of the 1000 "visitors" did anything at all when they got to the page. None converted. While that experiment was a failure, we did learn that "cheap traffic" can actually be much more expensive. As an educated guess, were we to let our campaign run until we had a conversion, our cost would have been $100 per conversion or a $90 loss per conversion for that particular site we were promoting in the ad. While this example is dramatic - it is not the only example of poor quality traffic that we have experienced.

To be fair, some of the smaller Pay Per Click Search Engines are not too bad at all. The important number to measure is revenue per visitor. On the smaller Pay Per Click Search Engines that we still use, we first used a control ad which has been successful on Adwords & Overture to determine conversion rates & revenue per visitor over time (300-500 visitors on the smaller Pay Per Click Search Engines). Our bids, then, gravitated to a percentage of revenue per visitor. We also track each keyword independently because of the way that Pay Per Click Advertisements are syndicated. If one of your keywords receives a lot of traffic from poor quality sites or is subject to Click-fraud from dishonest affiliates this inefficiency should be reflected in the bid prices for each individual keyword. This strategy has been returning consistent returns with only a few (passing) exceptions.

The best values, despite the, seemingly high, bid prices remain Overture (Yahoo) and Adwords (Google). Both have high conversion rates for our Control Ad & provide consistently high Return on Investment. Among the smaller PPC Search Engines we have reviewed, we were impressed with 7Search.