Which PPC Search Engines Should You Advertise On?
September 17th, 2007 by 
Amit
I know a lot of affiliates are frustrated with Google, with the stringent quality score and all, and have gone on to smaller ppc search engine in search of friendlier and, hopfully, more profitable waters.
However, a word of warning: a lot of smaller ppc search engines don’t produce a lot of traffic and, more often than not, the conversions are horrible.
If you want to make big money in ppc affiliate marketing master : Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and MSN Adcenter.
I learned my lesson with Ask.com :
- Ask does not offer conversion tracking, which is completely insane. Unless you take the time to setup an elaborate third party tracking tool, you have no idea if you’re making sales or not!
- Ask has a weird system where you have to sign a contract every time you want to adjust your monthly budget. So if you set your monthly budget to $10k and you hit $10k of ad spend on the 20th of the month they immediately pause all your campaigns. You have to sign and fax a document to them to have your monthly spending increased before they can resume you ads! NUTS!
- Ask.com charged me $23k on my credit card, all in ONE month. I have a contract with then for a monthly ad spend of no more than $15k. They had forgot to bill me for the past 3 months of ad spend, so they hit me up all at once!
- They claim that they can bring advertisers high converting traffic, but just by tracking the change in my overall ROI, I noticed it went DOWN after I turned Ask on. I was spending $500-600/day at with them one point. I went in and lowered all by bids by over 30%, so now I’m spending between $200-$300, but at least I’m making a profit.
If you ask me (no pun intended!) focus your time on the big three search engines, and nothing else!
There’s a very good reason why smaller search engines are small, because they SUCK (in many ways!)
Posted in Industry News, PPC Marketing | 
1. We currently have a pilot conversion tracking tool program for a limited number of clients. If you are interested in signing up for the pilot program, please contact your sales rep or account manager.
2. We are not allowed to bill an advertiser for any incremental delivery. In your example, you agreed to a maximum billable delivery of $10k. This means that if we over delivered on your account by $2,000 for the month, you are only responsible for $10k of that delivery. Because of this restriction, which protects both parties, we require advertisers to consent to the increase via a simple legal email. If more flexibility is required in managing time sensitive budget changes, we do offer a pay-as-you-go credit card option through our self service program.
3. This is definitely not the norm and we try to enforce strict business rules to prevent this type of incident. I apologize for the inconvenience experienced and if you would like, I am more than happy to take the discussion offline to discuss possible options to minimize the impact.
4. In many instances, we have been able to provide positive ROIs for our customers. Regardless of the search engine, customization is a necessity specific to traffic levels. We focus on providing our advertisers with the best performing traffic based on aggregate CPAs, but one caveat is that conversions may not be equally distributed amongst all advertisers. Our SEM services team is trained to be able to provide solutions to our advertisers by analyzing, proposing, and implementing optimizations to suit the needs and metrics of our clients. If you would like, we can have an account manager reach out to you to assist you to make your program profitable.
Thanks for your feedback.
Regards,
Keith Hong
Director of SEM Services
Ask Sponsored Listings
thanks. i have been looking for a reputable review for ask.com cpc.