Other PPC options

[bulsworth]

My company is currnently running keywords campaigns on Overture, FindWhat.com and Kandoodle. We turned off our campaign on Google because it was not hitting our target ROI. Does anyone have any suggestions on other search engines that might be of use to work with?

We are a travel website.

[haimnahraf]

Google Adwords

Return for any sort of PPC campaign is low to start with. It is important that you start with an exhaustive list of keywords. Set the match type to broad match. Some of these keywords will prove to be more costly than they're worth. To identify keywords that get you traffic that dont convert very well some sort of tracking is advisable. Ensure that content match is enabled. Due to Google 'smart pricing' content match is worth having.

Ensure that your keywords are grouped into multiple adgroups, and tailor your creatives to suit your keywords - use keyword insertion in your creatives if possible. Ensure that you have multiple creatives per adgroup. Adwords will serve the creative that has the most CTR more often. This is a good way to work out which creative is working for you. This way you can try out different creatives and work out which ones work best.

As you maybe aware, Adwords ranking is based on CTR and CPC (CTR X CPC = RANK). To ensure that a new campaign has the best possible ranking, start with a relatively high MAX CPC (as CTR will be zero).

Over time with conversion anaysis will arrive to a group of keywords that work really well for you.


Overture

With overture (unlike Adwords) any changes in creatives would send your listings to editorial (and offline for atleast 2days). So it is very important to get Overture campaigns right from day one. Ensure your creatives are relevant avaoiding superlatives with a call for action to the user. Avoid using Overture's content match. This is enabled by default and it does not adhere to the same max CPC as with precision match. Your cost could go sky high if you get this wrong. Unlike Adwords there is no such smart pricing involved. The pricing of content match works in the same way as Precision match.

Espotting

Unlike the above two Engines, Espotting CPC that you submit is the CPC you pay (true CPC). Ensure to enable the Espotting Auto Bidmanagement. This will ensure that you pay only a penny more than the next bidder. I have found that Espotting works well for the finance sector, but not so well for others.

Mirago

www.mirago.com

In conclusion, ensure that you have the right landing pages. Make it easy for the user to find what they want. Take them to where they want to go. Try harder with Adwords - works better than others.

[Chris Boggs]

Google Adwords

Ensure that content match is enabled. Due to Google 'smart pricing' content match is worth having.



haimnaraf I agree with a lot that's in your post but disagree with the content match comment. After tracking visitors that came from content match versus standard for a variety of keywords and industries, the content match hits yeilded almost universally lower ROI.

we do have a tutorial (http://www.instantposition.com/website-promotion/PPC/PPC-search-engines.html) on this subject that will lead you to more info. Also somewhere in here there is a more thorough list as well as a thread on this topic. Sorry too lazy to find and post it today...I'll let a mod do it :D

[Peter]

I agree that content targeting should probably be disabled if a campaign is underperforming. While "Smart Pricing" may be effective in certain instances, I don't think the publisher (i.e. Google) should determine the value of a click for the advertiser -- particularly if they're not even willing to offer transparency into those decisions.

That aside, if you're looking to test incremental engines, there are a number of "vertical" engines that are worth exploring. They include:

Quigo Adsonar (www.quigo.com)
SideStep (www.sidestep.com)
Kayak (www.kayak.com)
TripAdvisor (www.tripadvisor.com)

Each of these engines probably represent more targeted opportunities for you than the "general" Tier II engines do.

[haimnahraf]

Contextual advertising, whether through AdSense, Content Match, or any other program, is usually of far lower value than Search Advertising.

The two should ideally never be run from the same campaign, but instead should be given different campaigns with different bids and price-capping settings, otherwise you'll always pay far too much for contextual ads.

So, where possible, run two campaigns, one to run only on search, the other to run only on contextual, and never mix the two. Where such distinctions are not possible, stick with search only, and find alternate advertising partners for contextual advertising.