xml feed pay per inclusion optimization

the company president and i are debating an xml feed site and trying to determine if it is worth it or not. they say they crawl our site and generate an xml blueprint where they submit to all the major pay per inclusion sites like overture, fast, etc. they also take the responsibility of optimizing the keywords. the cost is 25 cents a click. is this worth it?

Nobody here can answer that question for you... we don't have the data.

What's your conversion rate? That should give you some idea, but 25 cents sounds pretty high to me. Damn, maybe I should do it for 20 cents.

Can these folks cookie their clicks so you can count the actual conversion rate that they are delivering? Or put tracking on like an affiliate program? For 25 cents per click I think that they should throw this in to prove their worth.

it seems high to me as well and my argument was that we have niche products that we could optimize and get the same results for free. yes we have some that are highly competitive, but my goal was to work on the ones with the least competition first. they do track with cookies and state that they work on optimizing the keywords so get the best ROI. right now our conversion for the shopping portals like MSN, Yahoo, and AOL are hovering between 1.5-2%. occasionally we get upwards of 3%, but these guys charge 30-40 cents a click when averaged. (MSN is CPM, Yahoo is variable per category, AOL is fixed across the board)

i just don't know of a way to test this and make a good argument to the president that this is a bad idea. and who knows, maybe i am wrong in my argument, but i don't know how to test it or get outside feedback other than asking here.

We have been aproached in Jan about xml feed, I am really interested in the results you get when you take it. We decided to sort out our Google rankings first before going that route though. We also needed to up our conversion rates before going for ppc in order to make it worth it.

i will keep you guys/gals posted

It may be worth it. I think that only Yahoo are offering XML trusted feeds at the moment as Ask Jeeves have now dropped their program.