Can you really get traffic?

Can you really get traffic from ASK?
How huge it can be?

I still see ASK on TV

Why don't you try to look at googleanalytics
and look for your site's traffic sources in that way
you will know if that search engine do good traffic
for your site.

Too bad that doesn't help me...

Not really

I get very small traffic, does not hurt

ASK is all sponsored listings, meaning if you advertise on google there is no need to advertise on ask.com . I have accounts with both and all my google ads are on ask.com , all ASK is decent for is their content network which I have had SERIOUS problems with in the past, for example, I got about 800clicks and 1 user, which from historical data , even on ASK, is physically impossible, this occured over about 4 days in which i was not monitoring it thus I spent about 10 times my budget in 4 days, called ask and reported click fraud, no refund, no help whatsoever. So i turned off about 85 out of 100 campaigns i was running on ask and now they somewhat convert but at a cpa which is almost not feasible, I would basically call ASK a waste of time and money.

For a #1 Ask position with 8,850,000 results and decent volume....

Of the little over 74,000 visits in Sept. we received 76 hits .2% from Ask.

However, the same #1 position in Google yielded 12,685 or 37.8%.

Mind, you there may be sites that do quite well in Ask. But, I have yet to determine what Ask's search profile may be....

For example, Yahoo is great volume for commerce, while MSN for tech.

I do have another site with several #1 and page 1 positions on Google and Ask...In a totally different niche, and the referral volume is very similar.

Not something worth spending a great deal of effort on, in my opinion. It seems if you are doing well in Google, then the Ask results are just a waiting game....But the volume does not seem to count for much.

--Melanie

You have some really interesting figures here Melanie - do you mind sharing how you got them?

...If you figure out what Ask's search profile is that'll be very valuable information I suspect

They are straight from Awstats....

The other site uses Webalizer + Analytics...and the numbers in both completely different niches are very close.

One is commerce, and the other averaging 250-300 uniques a day (Analytics)...Is a niche orientated free graphics site.

Not the same server, nor IP, or any relationship between the 2.

Ask does not seem to have a "profile", at least none that have been reported (that I found), and none that I can discern.

They index far too few sites, and crawl infrequently .. Even with daily Blog 100% unique content. very small index, compared to others ... I even receive more traffic from Aol, and Lycos than Ask.

Last month Ask's market share in the US, was only 2.2% of searches...and has not shown much is any notable improvement since May.

Like I said, some sites may do well with traffic from Ask...I would be very interested in knowing the platforms, themes, and "freshness" of the content for any site getting "good" traffic from Ask.

Not a good prospect for a great deal of effort from where I sit.

--Melanie

Hi Melanie,

Thanks for the extra info - I'm sure that with all the advertising Ask are doing that they'll become more popular and get more manual submissions (if they have such a thing?). Do they have some targets they have to meet in advertising revenue before investing more heavily in the crawl architecture?

It'll be interesting to see how they move forward...

Cheers, p.

My traffic from ASK is going up steadily... had 663 today. Not a lot but if it keeps climbing that's great!

Ask is used alot by educational institutions -- elementary & secondary... and that translates to student home use.

I have 2 dating sites... lots of 'first date' and 'first time sex' questions hit my logs from Ask.

Ask is really traffic helpful for "advice sites".

Oh... also; there's a pretty good bias towards UK usage as well (likely from the Jeeves brand)