Espotting & pay per click

I don't know if anybody on here uses Espotting for european pay per click promotions but they've put their minimum bid up to 10p like Overture. How long do we have before Google goes up from 5p?

It's not even like Espotting have an efficient informative system after you submit bulk keywords - you have to keep checking to see if it's done yet. Their in-house optimisation was not good at £75 they set up bids on words like 'training' when the company I was promoting is only a corporate trainer - why would I want an advert on potty training? With poor service providers like this upping their min bid, Google will surely follow suit within months.

djmathu

Had to answer this as a long term user of all 3 UK PPCs.

Did you realise Espotting use "exact matching" (unlike Adwords)? This means if you bid on "training", you only appear when people search for "training" and not for "potty training" on Espotting.

On Google, when you will appear for "anything + training" or "training + anything" unless you enclose the word in [ ] (which turns on exact matching for the word) or use negative words to stop your ad appearing for certain variatons.

On Overture, matchdriver groups variations of searches with the same meaning together under one term that you bid on (some would disagree with the meanings being the same at times). And you only bid on the singular (so results for cars are from people bidding on car)

With the right title, stating you offer corporate training, you should get ok traffic from "training" on Espotting (I do something similar in another area for ahigh CPC word and it works across all 3 PPCs). So I'd say this was not a bad word to bid on.

The 3 UK ppcs aren't the same system under different names. The diversity between how they do things, to my mind, is good for us and our cleints - it stimulates competition and innovation.

As for Google raising their min bid, many of the good words are above it anyway. Like Espotting did to stay competitive with Overture, I suspect they will eventually raise it so they can give more to their partners per click for words currently between 5 and 10p.

My 2ps worth, anyway

Thanks for the response, very interesting to know about the different systems in place on those three, I'll keep in mind for future. Do you have any experience of the Lycos adbuyer scheme which operates in a similar way to Google adwords. I've just trialled it this month but don't have high expectations really.

Matt

I've not actually used it, as I focus on Uk traffic
(side point: Lycos UK uses a combination of Overture for search & Espotting for contextual adverts. Ownership of TerraLycos Americas, Lycso Europe and Lycos Asia differs so they do different deals with PPCs, just to confuse even more!)

However I've read several times on other forums that Lycos Insite produces low traffic for all but the most generic words, but that this has improved slightly over time.

Maybe a new thread here will get some feedback?