I am so sick of these damn PPC's!

The question on the mind of current and upcoming PPC engines and click-camps around the world???

How many more days until the "tap' of advertisers-with-money-to -throw-away runs out??

Here's a rundown of the PPC companies and similar sites I have dealt with and their results*
*Author is responsible for every comment and wants it dually noted that if expletives were allowed this copy would read much differently!

YOverture - I've spent several thousand with YOverture so far and cancelled my campaigns last week. I could figure out why things were awry with their conversion rate, any more than I could Google. So I call a rep and explain that I would like them to look at my campaigns and tell me any areas of improvement. The rep said he needed to get with his boss and he would get back with me. A week later he called and said they had no suggestions.

WHAT?!?!

I mentioned he should look at a similar campaign, to which he replied,"I couldn't divulge that information". No kidding?? You mean you can't drop the ball on my competitors and give away any secrets??? Nooooo.

How about looking at their campaign in order to see what your missing and make some suggestions? Me and my 2 million dollar budget are still waiting Yahoo!

How about refunding me the $199 I paid for your "expert opinion" that wasa big flop???

I turned in over $1000 worth of verified click frauds and they gave me a $33.52 credit after about 10 days or so. They seem to think if they bury your claim you'll forget about it.

Google - Pretty disappointing. My conversions are barely 1%. I've tried dozens of campaigns and campaign settings and nothing is working. I've created different creatives, and associated them with different keyword lists and further categorized them as broad, exact and phrase campaigns.

Getting them to admit click fraud is like a cat trying to cover his crap on a tile floor. You can show them proof, and ask them to justify their position, but they claim they never charged you for those clicks. What a bunch of bs.

EnHance - These are a good bunch of people. You need to contact them by phone to work on the networks they place you in, and if you find fraud they will reimburse your account. You need to monitor your conversion to be successful here.

7Search - My #1 pick. After spending some time with 7Search and adjusting the traffic sources, I can say we have never lost money with them. If I could take their results and multiply it by 10,000 I certainly would. I guess good traffic that produces these results are limited.

LookSmart - I tried and tried to work with these people.

At first their network ate up $1200+ overnight. They issued me credit and it happened again. They setup non-US traffic filters (which were supposed to be in place already) and the traffic went from 1,000's of clicks to dozens, but the conversion was great. I spoke with a rep and he said we could rev-up the traffic conservatively and 12 hrs. and $1000+ later I left messages and emails and the jerk would never call back
CPC = $20+ CPA = $50 Conversion Value to me = $12

Need I say more? Be cautious if you give these guys a try.

Miva/FindWhat - Click Fraud no US filters

Kanoodle - non-US Click Fraud even with filters

BrainFox - Chinese Click Fraud

Search123 - Click Fraud

SearchFead - Click Fraud

411Web - Click Fraud and apparently run by robots because no ones home!

Turbo10 - English Click Fraud

Lycos - For my business (US only), they sent 90% non-US traffic and had no available filters.

AdBright - Chinese click fraud. The jury is still out on these guys. We'll have to see.

ABCSearch - Some conversions, but just not alot of traffic good or bad.

ExactSeek - Worthless click-throughs

Ask-Ask Jeeves - Not sure. I've tried to open accounts with them many times. They must have a terrible CC processing company, and no one who knows how to resolve this problem, or answer emails for that matter.

So the question is, I have millions to spend for the right traffic, but most of these guys are doing business like a "Buy-Here-Pay-Here" car lot 'Throw as much crap on the wall as you can and see what sticks'

It seems like there would be a meeting of the minds on this abuse and someone with alot of money to spend, could find a company with good converting traffic to spend their money with, and not have to spend over half their time monitoring and keeping the PPC companies in check.

All I can say to newbies in this field, watch your back and your front. They'll see you coming AND stab you in the back as you go by.

PPC is definately a dangerous venture for newbies.

Like you say if your not careful you can drop a grand over night! Its good to put budgeting to start with.

I have had mixed experiences with Overture.
I don't rate thier own copy writting people, its very generic, no where near like how sales copy should read and they don't understand your market despite their insistance that they put speicalists on. Are they realy going to pay a specialist £60 to write out a whole campaign? I think not. Do it your self.

I do think you get much better conversions, all be it much less traffic, with 4 word phrases rather than generic one of two word phrases.
I always target the long but very specific phrases. It doesn't generate lots of click throughs but the ones it does generate a decent conversion. Themore specific you go, the less the bid is and the more qualified the prospect is, thus making the campaign more efficient.

I would probably offend a lot of people if I aired my views on lycrap.

I do think PPC is still a avaluable medium despite all the things that can happena nd it can help to prepare for and fine tune an SEO campaign.

Good post,

I can't complain about Yahoo or Google at all. We are aiming for UK traffic and they both seem to filter fairly well. Google does go through great lengths to avoid click fraud, and does credit its clients when the fraudster is caught. If the fraud is done through the contextual (partner sites) then I know the partner does not get paid, and runs a very high risk of being banned. Dont know abot Yahoo as our spend is relativly small.

Lycos - I could expand on what you said, but I had better refrain!!

Excite - well, I didnt quite try PPC, but something tells me not to. I bought some banner space triggered by keywords back in January - now we are at the end of April and the banner hasnt shown up. Lets hope I dont need to wait for another 5 months for my refund.

I have no experience with the other companies mentioned, but I would definatly reccommend to newbies to stay well away of the less know, small PPC sites. Even if their minimum bid rate is 0.01p per click 10,000 fraudulent clicks a day will set you back £100 a day!!! I know two people who got badly bitten by that!!

We were paying about £50,000 a year on google ad words 2 years ago.

Our conversion rates were high, until one day a competitor had a bot click our ads over and over and our conversions become zero, for the first few weeks we had no clue what was going on, I finally realised and informed google, google did NOTHING!

They wrote back time and time again saying they cannot find a problem and that their system was set up to prevent fraud!!!!! WHAT?!!!!!!! They know darn well it's possible to easily fool their system using proxies etc.

So we wrote to the Financial times who wrote a story on it, bad publicity for them, but it didn't get us anywhere, we still lost a lot of money and google didn't give 2 ****s.

When in Rome...

Search "hitbot", spend $20, and ride the wild pony.

2 can play that game.

Kudos for trying to do it the right way 1st.

very informative post - thanks for sharing your experiences

Gary,

I hope you'll revisit this thread and respond.

I also have tried a number of PPC with little luck. Right now my main site is doing very well in the engines but we all know how vulnerable I am to any change in Algorithms.

Besides we can all do with more business, well positioned in the natural SERPs or not.

I was about to start getting into it and as a first step started reading here.... You can only imagine my disappointment when I read this thread.

My question is: If things are so bad then what do you do? After all you have PPC management in your sig! Surly you are not managing 7 Search only?

raz

Hey Raz,

No I manage about 500 campaigns across 30+ PPC's and 20+ contextual sites, and dozens of seperate accounts. I'm just having these issues with my primary moneymakers; credit cards, cash advances, auto loans and health insurance quotes.

My advice to you if your just starting is to go to search ppc 101 and ppc 102 in seochat search and review my suggestions.

You being a senior member I'll give you all I got.

GLuck

Thanks Gary,

Will starting with 7Search and Enhance be a good idea for testing landing pages, conversions etc?

raz

I'd try Google - despite all the problems that exist.
You can stop your campaign quickly if your conversions are not what you expect. Choose you keywords carefully - do not try and be general as you will get irrelevant traffic that will cost you.

Dont get over excited about conversion - if you achieve 5% you've done very well. The reality is more like 2%.

If you have a large budget like someone who posted earlier - standard media is often more effective - radio/TV etc..

Read about SEO first and try that if you havent already. Get an understanding of page ranking properly. New sites can still acheive top rankings with a little thought but it is very difficult and time consuming.

Understand your competitors - rip their sites apart to understand what they have done. Look at who links to them.
Be weary of link building - some sites will push you up the rank - some will drag you down !

KD

Thought I'd bring this up again. Excite have actually refunded the cheque after we waited 8 months, called their office 21 times, sent them over 50 emails and almost sent them a letter through the solicitor.

Apart from the full refund of £3,000 plus VAT we also received a £500 credit to spend with them in 2007 as compensastion for time wasting

Now that's what I'd call a "Prompt Service".

raz