Okay I am on the panel covering other engines... Beyond Google and Overture.

I have a list of engines I use personally etc. but would like to do an informal survey to see what other engines people are using.

So can I get as many people as possible to post 3 other engines they use for PPC - if you use more let's stick to top 3, if less as many as you do.

Also people who only use Google and/or Overture let me know so I can have a few comparisons to make.

Thanks everyone.

for the most part I am Google + Overture

have tried others a small bit, but think often that time spend organizing tracking and managing those accounts would be better spent building linking campaigns.

for the most part I am Google + Overture

have tried others a small bit, but think often that time spend organizing tracking and managing those accounts would be better spent building linking campaigns.
Interesting... how many others I wonder feel the same way... that they are better off spending time doing other optimization etc. things instead of using small engines?

Also is this mostly an opinion of in house people or also the feeling of agencies and SEM firms.

Just to clarify my position I work by myself for only a few people at any given time so my ideas may be a bit biased to support that which I do.

For the most part, I'm Adwords and Overture. But, Kanoodle, Findwhat, and Enhance come to mind before any others.

For the most part, I'm Adwords and Overture. But, Kanoodle, Findwhat, and Enhance come to mind before any others.

Come to mind so they have branding.... but do you use them at all?

I'm running a small campaign on Google Adwords and Overture Precision/Local Match right now, and it's a real time suck. I have no time to even look at how the smaller engines might contribute to my campaign, if at all.

Sometimes I think people may overlook, or forget, that all we are doing with PPC is buying advertising. Or, as we used to say in the media planning business, buying eyeballs. That's all it really is. But consider the problems in PPC compared to traditional advertising. Years ago, before the Dawn of the Internet, I worked as a media planner at a big agency on a big account. We did our homework, studied the media options, the TV, the magazines, the radio, the reach, the frequency, the demographics, blah, blah. But at the end of the day, the client paid their money, they got their eyeballs, and that was that.

Now consider how you have to work to buy the eyeballs with PPC. You have to do your keyword research, create your ad campaign, place your bids, then constantly monitor your campaign, see what's working or not, tweak your keywords, tweak your bids, tweak your ads when your favorite keyword gets disabled, keep monitoring it all, tweak your bids again, waste time switching between screens on Overture, (which interface appears to me to have been designed by a robot with an IQ of 50) worry about fraudulent clicks, tweak your keywords again -- on and on. It's a lot more work, just to buy eyeballs.

Obviously, this is how it is in the new medium. But it's not like the old media planning scenario. It's a whole different game. (And it is a game). So, do I have time to do PPC on the smaller engines? Nah. I'm too busy trying to keep up with the game on the big Kahunas. As time goes by, this stuff needs to be simplified. On the other hand, we'd have less work to do then! So maybe not! :D

There are programs that help you with many of these chores... bid management, conversion measuring, etc.
Old school ads were tweaked to fit the consumer (in a perfect system - mostly what the company ad people liked is really what happened).. polls were taken, demographics were used for placement, and a million other factors were considered (and still are)...
PPC is pure numbers... they do need to be tweaked but as a form of advertising they are far more concrete.
I was hoping for a good number of replies to this.

I primarily use Google and Overture. I have used Findwhat.com, Ah-ha and Industry Brains in the past but found that I didn’t get a comparable ROI even with the bids being traditionally lower. I’m currently using BizRate, NexTag, and Yahoo Shopping to see what kind of ROI I can get but it’s too early to tell if they’re worth it.

FindWhat
Kanoodle
Enhance (formerly ah-ha)
7Search

All ROI positive for me, and don't require as much maintenance time as the big guys.