Posted on: October 2, 2007 by Syzlak
I work with some horrible search engines.
After running a campaign on ABCSearch for months (reader remembers when I first wrote about 3rd Tier engines) I saw traffic for the first time last week. Anxious to build a report for my client, I went to their reporting center and this was a link on their reporting page:
Download Report In XL sheet
XL!!!! XL!!!! A gigantic sheet will deliver your report!!! Not an MS Licensed product. Do you know what happens when you click it? It takes you to a new screen where you have to re-enter the dates you want the report to cover. Then you click a button that says:
Upload Report
Really? Could this be more amateur? At this point, not only do I have no idea where these ads are being displayed, but I also have no reporting to study. Fantastic work! I know that some of you out there will suggest calling support…this may be more inept than their site. One day I called support at the behest of my client (he was concerned that we hadn’t seen traffic, I was sure that we may never) asking if there was anything we should try to increase our presence. The response?
Increase your bids on the keywords
Really? That’s it? Did you not look at my campaign? Do you not realize that increasing bids does nothing for you if you’re already ranked #1? Moments like these I’m glad I’m not the SEOHack, I’m glad that I have a calm button on my person. However, it still infuriates me that search engines exist with this level of ineptitude. Have a UI that makes sense! Hire and train your employees! Don’t recruit businesses to advertise on your search “network” if they won’t have traction.
Funny, just now current future ex-Mrs. Syzlak texted me:
why cant people just admit it when they don’t know how to do something. i work with such bozos i swear
So do I.
Posted on: October 1, 2007 by Syzlak
Hey Reader!
Remember that post on 3rd Tier Search i did a while back? Well, here’s a short writeup on the results! Nothing unexpected happened, as the search engines were held well in check.
3rd Tier Search Review
The Players: Enhance, Miva and ABCSearch.
Metrics: Cost Efficiency, Traffic and ROI.
From our test we have been able to gather some interesting teachings on cost efficiency and traffic. When properly controlled, 3rd tier search engines are a relatively cheap source of traffic. Their limited scope helps to keep costs down, while providing an alternative to the mainstream online audience (Google, Yahoo).
After examining the traffic, we see some encouraging trends. The 3rd tier engines performed as we wanted. They delivered low volume of traffic and we incurred no spikes in traffic. Although we cannot analyze the traffic with 100% accuracy, we can make some assumptions as to its quality. Since we did not see any spikes in traffic, we can assume that the engines delivered the results to qualified sites. We can also assume that the traffic was legitimate, as we saw what appeared to be quality website referrals.
While none of the campaigns resulted in conversions, we can see the potential of employing a properly managed campaign on 3rd tier engines. With such little traffic being delivered and little cost incurred, a strong ROI would be easily achieved with just a few sales.
3rd tier search engines offer a distinct opportunity for branding campaigns. Due to their alternate audience, 3rd tier search offers the ability to expand the online market. Instead of competing for position on Google and Yahoo, one can be a top advertiser in 3rd tier engines.
While we only received nominal amounts of traffic from Enhance, our campaigns in Miva were rather successful from a traffic standpoint. Miva slowly increased its traffic share over the course of 13 weeks, and has recently performed at a consistent level of roughly 4 visits/day. As we will not continue to advertise on the 3rd tier engines after this test has run its course ($150 budget depletion), we have raised our bids in Miva and Enhance for further testing.
Posted on: August 16, 2007 by Syzlak
Since i’m too busy to post new content, here’s a throwback from the blogger days…
Understanding Search Engines
Many people will tell you that a 2nd or 3rd tier SE is just as good as a 1st tier engine, except it’s missing the “big name advertisers,” has cheaper traffic, fewer visits, etc. In reality, the idea behind the tiers is more directly related to the distribution networks and partners, than it is their revenue, advertisers or efficiency. To some degree, many people will tell you that MSN & ASK are in reality 2nd tier engines, due to their limited distribution networks (ASK only delivers results to Lycos, HotBot and iwon Search, whereas MSN delivers to HotBot only). Google delivers search results and paid results to 6 major 2nd tier engines, including ASK.com. Yahoo delivers to 2 major 2nd tier engines (alltheweb and AltaVista).
Common Concerns
So why does this matter? Well, after all these well known SEs we have the 3rd tier. Here lies everyone else, from LookSmart to Miva, Enhance to ABCSearch. These SEs are the ones that make audacious claims such as:
>Our search engine will increase your traffic by 200%
>Our conversion rate is 20% higher than Google Adwords
>Our cost-per-click across the board is 25% lower than Adwords
While, some of these engines do offer a cheaper source of traffic than Google or Yahoo, often times the traffic is not as relevant as the 1st tier engines. This concept is what makes these engines truly 3rd tier – they don’t have the same network as Google or Yahoo. As Google and Yahoo (even MSN) have taken the main distribution sites away from other SEs, 3rd tier engines are left with affiliate sites, poorly organized local search and an odd collection of SEs that don’t even qualify for 3rd tier. Those who have been maintaining high traffic quality are definitely not providing high traffic volume and great reach in search network distribution.
The final issue of concern that I’d like to bring into the conversation is that of click fraud (or if we’d like a happier term click abundance). Many times these 3rd tier engines do offer a cheaper CPC, do increase traffic by 200% and do provide results right away. The problem is, that sometimes all 3 of these things happen in a short amount of time, as a SEW member found out when attempting to run ads on Kanoodle.
Recently, 3rd tier engines have been trying desparately to clean up possible click fraud. For example, Enhance recently beefed up their ability to protect the advertiser from false clicks. Hopefully, we’ll see more engines expanding their technology to achieve similar goals.
Personal Experience
From my own experiences, I have a rather mixed perception on 3rd tier engine effectiveness. I have had campaigns nearly destroyed by unqualified (spam) traffic that was directly traced back to 3rd tier engines (the most frequent offenders were LookSmart and Mamma). However, I’ve also had some limited low-impact success from up and coming SEs, Miva and Enhance.
Recommendation
When kept at a low volume, 3rd tier engines offer a great source for supplemental traffic, if one is trying to grow a campaign or brand. However, if a campaign is focused on specific metrics, 3rd tier engines carry the adept ability to disrupt progress for a campaign. In light of all of these concerns, I don’t think one should avoid 3rd tier engines, but remain skeptical.
More References:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum85/537.htm
Posted on: July 30, 2007 by Syzlak
<disclaimer> This post, and the 2 previous posts also exist over at my old home : Syzlak’s Sizzlin’ SEM on blogger. i’m not sure how kosher it is to have two blogs with the same data (i understand duplicate content… i’m just not sure this counts). After this post, the two blogs will have different posts, with similar themes. <end of disclaimer>
i broke my toe this weekend…at least i think that’s all i did to it.
Anyhow, check out a new site i’ve been playing with. The idea is to generate leads based on something we found out from a former insurance PPC campaign that received substantial amounts of impressions from searches on “no test insurance.”
We setup an insurance reference site that provides general information about insurance, health conditions, etc. i’ve never setup a campaign based on one search term’s number of impressions before, and i’m a bit skeptical of how it will work. Anyone else ever done this: gone from PPC to SEO based on a single term?
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